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(More customer reviews)When a friend of mine recently earned his PhD (in systematic theology), a party feting his achievement called for oral excerpting from his colleagues' works whose knowledge, from many disciplines, was likewise piled higher and deeper. Geoffrey Clark's Betting on Lives: The Culture of Life Insurance in England, 1695-1775, particularly caught my ear, and the author was kind enough to provide me a copy of the Manchester University Press monograph. What an interesting study! Clark manages both to describe the factual development of life insurance societies and companies and - I believe more interestingly - to present the social and literary context that both described and led to this development. Clark writes very well, and his broad eye takes him beyond narrative fact by including several eighteenth-century illustrations - playing cards, advertisements for "Lottery Insurance" for both the "Elite" and "Laboring Classes" - as well as quotes from contemporary literature. Although primarily aimed at professional historians like himself, Clark's work both educated and entertained this general reader. Even were Geoffrey not a personal friend, I would recommend this insightful work.
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Betting on Lives uses the early history of life insurance to examine the economic, social, cultural and intellectual history of eighteenth-century England. Illegal almost everywhere else in Europe, life insurance in England was vigorously promoted in the three decades following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. While serving as a means of prudential risk-avoidance, life insurance also appealed strongly to the gambling instincts of England's burgeoning middling sort. Life insurance consequently provided a vehicle for gambling until 1774, when parliament forbade the making of wagers on people's deaths. In these formative years, life insurance embodied the practical aspirations of Newtonian science, the improving spirit of moral reform and the zeal of a vibrant commercial society intent on protecting against loss as it created new opportunities for investment. Betting on Lives challenges conventional accounts of the sober growth of the insurance industry and reveals the troublesome philosophical issues surrounding a business that gambled on providential outcomes.
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