The Appeal of Insurance (review)

The editors of The Appeal of Insurance explain that its constituent essays hold together around the conceit that “appeal” can mean both attraction and argument. The book’s first case study, of eighteenth-century German widow-pension schemes by Eve Rosenhaft, analyzes changing arguments and draws satisfying conclusions. Early in the century, widows dependent on pensions relied on talk of Christian duty to shame the scheme’s wavering supporters, but seven decades later women in similarly dire straights talked sanctity of contract, even for gambling contracts. Rosenhaft’s comparisons confirm the declining power of providential thinking in the eighteenth century, but they also show that God’s recession left space for more than science. In modern insurance discourse, older legal conceptions of insurance as aleatory coexisted with newer probability theory.

In the book’s final case study, Jerònia Pons Pons shifts the focus forward two centuries to insurers courting customers. Pons shows skeptical Spanish employers warming to mutual insurers providing cheap accident insurance that doubles as a medical, paternalist system for managing workers. Insurance appealed to these employers as a way to satisfy stricter labor regulations while accommodating their own interests. Pons Pons treads lightly on larger historiographical implications, but her essay suggests the political malleability of insurance.

As these two examples reveal, the Appeal of Insurance goes well beyond its title ploy. Interrogating “appeal” provides an excuse for more important efforts to dislodge any sense that insurance has a “nature” and instead show that insurance has “history.” The editors invite readers to “examine the history of insurance as a process of negotiation between the embedded social, legal, and cultural norms out of which the practice of insurance grew, and the new arrangements and sensibilities that insurance itself helped bring into being” (3–4). They imply two lessons we can draw from the necessarily messy results, which I will make starker here.

First, while insurance is a crucial institution of modernity, it defies the constraints of modernizing narratives. Insurance history cannot be told as the triumph of science or the domestication of speculation. Take, for instance, the contribution by J.-Matthias Graf von der Schulenburg and Christian Thomann. It catalogs Leibniz’s insurance writings and evaluates one of his papers using modern “expected utility theory” (48). The anachronistic juxtaposition jars, but the paper still conveys the authors’ primary insight: Leibniz avoided new-fangled probability theory and proposed a simple, public insurance scheme to improve the general welfare. Geoffrey Clark’s essay argues that two apparently progressive projects—late eighteenth-century British insurance reforms and abolitionism—also served conservative ends. Slavery and insurance destabilized status hierarchies. Abolition and the Gambling Act, according to Clark, were both attempts to prevent new market relations from bringing social upheaval. In another contribution, Timothy Alborn further historicizes the Gambling Act. Insurers, their customers, and the courts used, abused, and remade the act over the course of the next century and a half. And as Alborn convincingly shows, the drama has little to do with whether insurance partook in speculative thrills—it did. Rather, the action turned on how insurers convinced their policyholders, the courts, and the legislature to embrace a cross-class institution that dealt simultaneously in prudence and chance. Robin Pearson’s delightful, engaging essay also gives us a sense of the thrill that people took in risk even after the advent of insurance. His subject is fire insurance, but his contribution brings to life the mess of emotions that fire could evoke in eighteenth-century England. Filled with fear, excitement, and awe, the English bought a lot of insurance. Yet they did not become risk-averse moderns so easily. The essay ends with the striking image of Parliament legislating fire safety while sitting in a veritable tinderbox.

Second, insurance does not have a politics—at least, not a single politics. Liz McFall’s analysis of nineteenth-century life assurers’ advertisements makes plain the political flexibility...