¹ Richardson, J., Some Remarks and Considerations on the Original and Supplemental Charters, which Incorporate the Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance-Office (London, 1732), 24–5.Google Scholar

² Information on the people insuring with and those insured by early insurance firms is contained in several printed and manuscript sources. Names of subscribers, their occupations and residences may be found in A List of the Subscribers to the First Society of Assurance for Widows and Orphans (1705 & 1707)Google Scholar, London Guildhall Library, Broadsides 11.88 and 11.89, as well as in The Articles of the Second Society of Assurance, for the Support of Widows and Orphans (Dublin, 1709).Google Scholar Some participants in Charles Povey's Traders' Exchange House Office are listed in his newspaper, The General Remark on Trade, for 9–11 July 1707, British Library Burney 140.BB, incompletely reproduced in Relton, F.B., An Account of the Fire Insurance Companies (London, 1892), 511–13.Google Scholar More comprehensive are three manuscript collections: the Amicable Society, Policy Register and Rewritten Register, Norwich Union Archives; the London Assurance Corporation, Assurance on Lives Books, 6 vols (1733–1809), London Guildhall MS 8740; and the Mercers' Company, Acts of Court, 8 vols (1693–1749), Mercers' Hall, London.

³ The only previous estimate of life insurance policyholding in the early eighteenth century places an upper limit on the total number of policies issued before 1720 at three or four thousand. Supple, B., The Royal Exchange Assurance (Cambridge, 1970), 10–11.Google Scholar Although a complete enumeration is impossible, enough evidence exists to prove that the number of life policies issued in this period was in fact much higher.

⁴ Dickson, P.G.M., The Financial Revolution in England (Aldershot, 1993), 32–5, 486–520.Google Scholar

⁵ Melis, F., Origini e sviluppi delle assicurazioni in Italia (secoli XJV–XVI) (Rome, 1975), vol. 1, Le fonti, 210, 214–17Google Scholar; Bensa, E., Histoire du contrat d'assurance au moyen age (Paris, 1897), 90Google Scholar; Stefani, G., Insurance in Venice From the Origins to the End of the Serenissima, 2 vols (Trieste, 1958), 1, 81, 118–19.Google Scholar

⁶ Ibid., 88, 237.

⁷ Magens, Nicholas, An Essay on Insurances, 2 vols (London, 1755), II, 67.Google Scholar

⁸ Alauzet, I., Traité général des assurances (Paris, 1843), 108, 455, 464–5Google Scholar; Magens, , Essay on Insurances, II, 67–8, 70, 170, 189, 213Google Scholar; Huizinga, J., Homo Ludens (London, 1949), 53 n.Google Scholar; Stefani, , Insurance in Venice, I, 64, 88, 237Google Scholar; Bensa, , Histoire du contrat d'assurance, 50–1, 86Google Scholar; Guidon Stile et Usance des Marchands qui mettent à la Mer (Rouen, 1619), 64Google Scholar; Goris, J.A., Etude sur les colonies marchandes méridionale (portugais, espagnols, italiens) à Anvers de 1488 à 1567 (Louvain, 1925), 385–92.Google Scholar

⁹ The earliest surviving English life insurance policy dates from 1583 and covered a citizen and salter of London named William Gibbons: Raynes, H.E., A History of British Insurance, 2nd ed. (London, 1964), 113.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Ibid., 74–91, 107–11, 186–90; Gibb, D.E.W., Lloyd's of London (London, 1957), 35Google Scholar; Cockerell, H.A.L. and Green, E., The British Insurance Business 1547–1970 (London, 1976), 4–5, 18–20Google Scholar; Dickson, P.G.M., The Sun Fire Office (London, 1960), 1–16Google Scholar; Supple, Royal Exchange Assurance, 6–12.Google Scholar

¹¹ Thomas, K., Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971), 651–6.Google Scholar

¹² Daston, L.J., ‘The domestication of risk: mathematical probability and insurance 1650–1830’, in Kruger, L., Daston, L.J. and Heidelberger, M. (eds), The Probabilistic Revolution, vol. 1, Ideas in History (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 244–8Google Scholar; Daston, L., Classical Probability in the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1988), 122, 163.Google Scholar For other discussions linking insurance to wider cultural and social themes, see Delumeau, J., Rassurer et protéger: Le sentiment de securité dans l'Occident d'autrefois (Paris, 1989)Google Scholar; Halpérin, J., Les assurances en Suisse et dans le monde (Neuchatel, 1946)Google Scholar; Ewald, F., ‘Insurance and risk’, in Burchell, G., Gordon, C. and Miller, P. (eds), The Foucault Effect (Chicago, 1991).Google Scholar

¹³ Defoe, D., An Essay Upon Projects (London, 1697), 142.Google Scholar

¹⁴ Adams, W., The Company of London Insurers on the Lives of Men, Women, and Children (?London, 1714)Google Scholar; The Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office, A Letter from a Member of the Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance; giving his Friend an Account of That Society, as it now stands Incorporated by Her Majesty's Letters Patent (London, 1706), 7.Google Scholar

¹⁵ The New Assurance Office, Advertisement From the New Assurance-Office upon the Lives of Men, Women and Children (1704).Google Scholar

¹⁶ Amicable Society, Letter from a Member, 7.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Borsay, P., The English Urban Renaissance (Oxford, 1989), 265–6, 284, 296.Google Scholar

¹⁸ Petition of the Amicable Corporation for the benefit of Seamen taken or lost at Sea & for relief of their widows & familys (1711), State Papers Domestic, Petition Entry Book, PROSP44/245, ff. 284–5.

¹⁹ Bahlman, D., The Moral Revolution of 1688 (New Haven, 1957)Google Scholar; Andrew, D.T., Philanthropy and Police (Princeton, 1988)Google Scholar; Shoemaker, R.B., ‘Reforming the city: the reformation of manners campaign in London, 1690–1738’Google Scholar, Fissell, M., ‘Charity universal? Institutions and moral reform in eighteenth-century Bristol’Google Scholar and Hitchcock, T., ‘Paupers and preachers: the SPCK and the parochial workhouse movement’, in Davison, L., Hitchcock, T., Keirn, T. and Shoemaker, R.B. (eds), Stilling the Grumbling Hive (New York, 1992), 99–166.Google Scholar

²⁰ The Mercers' Company, An Account of Dr. Assheton's Proposal (as improved and managed by the Worshipful company of mercers, London) for the benefit of widows of clergymen and others; by settling joyntures and annuities at the rate of thirty per cent (London, 1699), 1.Google Scholar

²¹ Andrew, , Philanthropy and Police, 16Google Scholar; Macauley, J.S. and Greaves, R.W. (eds), The Autobiography of Thomas Secker (Lawrence, 1988), 26.Google Scholar

²² Mercers' Company, An Account of Dr. Assheton's Proposal, 19.Google Scholar

²³ Dubois, A.B., The English Business Company after the Bubble Act 1720–1800 (New York, 1938), 230.Google Scholar

²⁴ The Perpetual Assurance Office, Proposals for Establishing a Perpetual Assurance Office (?1709).Google Scholar

²⁵ Andrew, , Philanthropy and Police, 48–9Google Scholar; Wilson, C., England's Apprenticeship (London, 1965), 172–3Google Scholar; Scott, W.R., The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1912), I, 329.Google Scholar

²⁶ Whiston, W., An Account of the Past and Present State of the Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office; With the Occasions of the law Condition it is now in; and Proposals in Order to recover its former Prosperity (London, 1732), 5Google Scholar; Neal, L., The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1990), 44–61.Google Scholar

²⁷ Amicable Society, Letter from a Member, 5.Google Scholar

²⁸ Pocock, J.G.A., The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975), 463Google Scholar; Buck, P., ‘People who counted: political arithmetic in the eighteenth century’, Isis, 73 (1982), 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Barry, J., ‘Bourgeois collectivism? Urban association and the middling sort’, in Barry, J. and Brooks, C. (eds), The Middling Sort of People (Basingstoke, 1994), 96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁹ Clark, G.W., ‘Betting on lives: life insurance in English society and culture, 1695–1775’ (unpublished Princeton University Ph.D. thesis, 1993), 538–9.Google Scholar Metropolitan London is defined here as that region lying within a 15–mile radius of Charing Cross, that is, within a half-day's ride of the capital.

³⁰ Clark, , ‘Betting on lives’, 452–84.Google Scholar Clearly distinguishing between dealers and manufacturers here is admittedly somewhat artificial since manufacturing and retailing in the eighteenth century often took place under one roof, but this does not affect the point that professionals dominated the Amicable's membership.

³¹ Mercers' Company, An Account of Dr. Assheton's Proposal, 4.Google Scholar

³² Details of policyholdings are taken from the Amicable Society's Policy Register and Rewritten Register, Norwich Union Archives.

³³ G. Holmes has pointed out that moneylending numbered among the expanding range of services provided by lawyers at this time: The Professions and Social Change in England 1680–1730 (Oxford, 1981), 326–7.Google Scholar

³⁴ Muldrew, C., ‘Interpreting the market: the ethics of credit and community relations in early modern England’, Social History, 182 (1993), 169, 171, 177Google Scholar; idem, ‘Credit and the courts: debt litigation in a seventeenth-century urban community’, Economic History Review, 42 (1993), 30–6Google Scholar; Barry, , ‘Bourgeois collectivism?’, 95.Google Scholar

³⁵ Boulton, W.B., The History of Whites, vol. 2, The Betting Book of Whites (London, 1892)Google Scholar; Brooks‘s Betting Book, Greater London Record Office Acc 2371/325 BC; Weskett, John, A Complete Digest of the Theory, Laws and Practice of Insurance (London, 1781), 582Google Scholar; Dictionary of National Biography, s.n. ‘Piggott, Robert’.

³⁶ Whiston, , An Account of the Past and Present State of the Amicable Society, 6.Google Scholar

³⁷ Richardson, , Some Remarks and Considerations, 5–9.Google Scholar

³⁸ Whiston, , An Account of the Past and Present State of the Amicable Society, 9.Google Scholar

³⁹ The Amicable Society, General Summary of Accounts, Norwich Union Archives.

⁴⁰ Dublin, L.I. and Lotka, A.J., The Money Value of a Man (New York, 1930), 12Google Scholar; Hunt, M.R., ‘English urban families in trade 1660–1800: the culture of early modern capitalism’ (unpublished New York University Ph.D. thesis, 1986), 15.Google Scholar

⁴¹ The London Assurance Corporation, Court of Directors Minutes, 30 November 1737, London Guildhall MS 8728, vol. 4.

⁴² The rules of the Amicable Society, for example, required that prospective members living within 15 miles of London present themselves at the office: The Amicable Society, An Abstract of the Original and Supplemental Charters of the Corporation of the Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office (1733), 10.Google Scholar

⁴³ Hilton, G., The Rake's Diary: The Journal of George Hilton (Berwick-upon-Tweed, 1994), xxi, 13.Google Scholar

⁴⁴ Ibid., v, xxxiii, 5,24–5.

⁴⁵ D'Cruze, S., ‘The middling sort in eighteenth-century Colchester: independence, social relations and the community broker’Google Scholar, in Barry, and Brooks, , The Middling Sort, 181–207.Google Scholar It is noteworthy that the records of insurance societies disclose the importance of female community brokering in private affairs, a role denied to women within the public/political sphere investigated by D'Cruze.

⁴⁶ Hilton, , Rake's Diary, 75–7Google Scholar, passim.

⁴⁷ Clark, P., ‘Introduction’Google Scholar, in idem (ed.), The Transformation of English Provincial Towns 1600–1800 (London, 1984), 32–3Google Scholar; Borsay, , English Urban Renaissance, 267–83Google Scholar; Barry, , ‘Bourgeois collectivism?’, 84Google Scholar; Corfield, P., The Impact of English Towns 1700–1800 (Oxford, 1982), 143Google Scholar; Earle, P., The Making of the English Middle Class (London, 1989), 241–2.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ Hirschman, A.O., The Passions and the Interests (Princeton, 1977), 31–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar