A survey of the development of collective risk theory

Although risk theory originated in the late 1700's, the idea of collective risk theory did not come about until the early 1900's. Still, in less than a century, a vast amount of literature has been published in the area of collective risk theory. Because these papers have been written in various languages and in many different forms of notation, it is very difficult for the average person to become familiar with, much less gain an understanding of, collective risk theory. In this paper, a survey of the development of collective risk theory is performed in an attempt to provide the average person with a means to acquire an understanding of and perhaps gain an interest in this area of mathematical statistics.