Invisible atmospheric knowledges in British insurance companies, 1830-1914

If insurance is considered to mean any attempt to guard against the consequences of disaster or loss, then it has a very long history. Its principle of pooling resources in a collectivity – a local benevolent society, an international insurance company, or a nation state – against future possible disaster represents a way of coping with uncertainty and is a key part of what we think of as government or civil society. Recognisable insurance contracts date from the fifteenth century, and life, fire and shipping insurance all become established in Britain in the late seventeenth century, though life assurance really only came into its own in the last decades of the eighteenth century and would undergo great changes and expansion in the nineteenth. Modern insurance, however, is thought to be characterised by its use of actuarial calculation, which came about after the ‘probabilistic revolution’ of the seventeenth century. In the case of life assurance, for example, in the late eighteenth century the Equitable’s actuary calculated premium tables that were based upon earlier statistical investigations of mortality. A better sense of ‘normal’ life expectancy should mean that firms could ensure that the premiums received from policyholders would cover likely costs from death claims. The use of more accurate estimates of mortality and the professionalization of actuarial science in the nineteenth century meant that firms became more secure, and life policies became increasingly viewed as a form of protection against the future.