Insurance today is a global economic colossus and a fixture in the developed countries of the world. Dependant upon a considerable dose of moral exhortation and enlightened appeal, the insurance industry has become a pervasive agent of social and economic control through its delineation of acceptable (compensated) and unacceptable (uncompensated) risk.The Appeal of Insurance traces the ways in which insurance, over the past three centuries, has grown in concert with a clientele largely of its own making. Drawing on the fields of history, sociology, criminology and economics, these essays break new ground in insurance studies by illuminating the dialectical relationship between the expansion of the insurance business and the public demand for economic and social security.
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction 3
1 How to Tame Chance: Evolving Languages of Risk, Trust, and Expertise in Eighteenth-Century German Proto-Insurances by Gregory Anderson 16
2 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Work on Insurance by Eve Rosenhaft 43
3 The Slave's Appeal: Insurance and the Rise of Commercial Property by Christian Thomann 52
4 Fire, Property Insurance, and Perceptions of Risk in Eighteenth-Century Britain by Geoffrey Clark 75
5 A Licence to Bet: Life Insurance and the Gambling Act in the British Courts by Robin Pearson 107
6 'The Rules of Prudence': Political Liberalism and Life Assurance in the Nineteenth Century by Timothy Alborn 127
7 Honesty, Fidelity, and Insurance in Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-Century England by Liz Mcfall 151
8 Competing Appeals: The Rise of Mixed Welfare Economies in Europe, 1850-1945 by Gregory Anderson 173
9 Employers and Industrial Accident Insurance in Spain, 1900-1963 by Martin Lengwiler 201
10 Five Ironies of Insurance by Jerínia Pons Pons 226
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