Regulated Lives: Life Insurance and British Society, 1800–1914 (review)

In this elegantly conceived and deeply researched book, Timothy Alborn provides the definitive study of British life insurance in the nineteenth century. Up to now, our picture of the nature and development of Victorian life insurance has been based largely on older narrative histories, such as Harold E. Raynes’s A History of British Insurance (1948), on individual company histories like Barry Supple’s The Royal Exchange Assurance (1970) and Clive Trebilcock’s Phoenix Assurance (1985), and on studies of the rise of probabilistic thinking and the actuarial profession, notably Ian Hacking’s The Taming of Chance (1990) and Theodore M. Porter’s Trust in Numbers (1995). Regulated Lives marks a major advance over this literature by supplying a much more detailed account of how the life insurance industry grew into an economic and social mainstay, by describing the surprisingly modest extent to which statistics were actually deployed in rating lives, and by moving beyond the conventional “view from the boardroom” to tell a story about insurance from the varied and sometimes competing perspectives and strategies of salesmen, actuaries, medical examiners, and customers (13). As a consequence, Alborn rejects the idea that insurance constituted an effective form of governmentality since “the regulated lives who bought insurance policies always resisted complete commodification, enumeration, or medicalization, by holding life insurance offices to their initial promise of sympathy and by playing these different manifestations of modernity against one another” (7).

While Alborn explores these crosscurrents with respect to the distinctive patterns of growth in the English and the (initially sounder) Scottish insurance industries as well as to the marketing and consumption of insurance, a major argument of Regulated Lives is that nineteenth-century firms—and their customers—relied remarkably little on the actuarial data that supposedly conferred a solid mathematical foundation to what was, in essence, a demographic lottery. Historians have assumed that after the introduction of age-based premium insurance by the Equitable Assurance and its imitators in the last decades of the eighteenth century, actuarial calculations assumed a central role in the operation of the life insurance business. Alborn shows, however, that insurers’ reluctance to rely upon demographic statistics, so evident in the eighteenth century, persisted into the Victorian era despite a steady stream of updated mortality tables that successively confirmed previous valuations of the average expectation of life at different ages among healthy middle-class men. Having created this reference population, insurance companies paid scant attention to how mortality might vary with occupation, region, class, or sex. Insurers did eventually identify the much higher risk of death among soldiers and publicans (“those who served their country and those who served their country drinks” [118], as Alborn nicely puts it), but used their intuition rather than statistics to set higher premium rates. The ad hoc nature of this approach is revealed in Alborn’s conclusion that “to the extent that these statistics made any difference, they set a limit below which competition failed to drive prices. Above that limit, insurance offices charged what they could get away with, for as long as they could get away with it” (121). Consumers for their part seem to have accepted the expertise of actuaries and acquiesced to numerical authority generally without exhibiting much interest in or understanding of the actuarial mathematics securing their long-term contracts of indemnity. In any case, prospective customers were swayed much more when salesmen plucked at their heartstrings by calling to mind the care and protection they could bestow upon their wives and children even from the grave.

Life insurers not only had to cope with the actuarial uncertainties arising from the sectional variations in the risk of death in a more general population that, as a whole, was experiencing secular changes in the incidence of mortality; they also had to contend with an incessant struggle to preserve market share in the face of sometimes reckless price competition. These challenges led life insurers to contain...