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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2009
This article examines the rise of co-operative life insurance societies and the market for life insurance in the early eighteenth century. Life insurance offered the middling sort in particular an opportunity to associate together for mutual economic protection and also provided them with a means to advance a set of reforming ideals. Until 1774, however, the lack of any legal restrictions on who might insure whom meant that prudential insuring existed alongside gambling on other people's lives, leading to a clash of property interests among the societies' members. Ultimately, a new moral technology was developed that segregated licit from illicit motives for insuring and also curtailed the proprietary rights insurance society members had previously exercised over their own policies, subjecting them instead to an impersonal financial bureaucracy.
I would like to thank James Van Horn Melton, Sharon Strocchia and two anonymous commentators for reviewing drafts of this article, as well as Jeff Young and Susan Socolow for help in converting Figure 1 into an electronic format.
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