Introduction and Research Background

It is commonly said that the Old Equitable of England (established 1762) was the first life assurance company that sold a modern life assurance product. However, if we examine life assurance from the demand side, we may reconsider this. It cannot in fact be claimed that the Old Equitable was a typical modern life assurance company, because its customers were richer than those of modern life assurance companies.

Victorian ideology that emphasized the responsibility of the master of the house for his surviving family had a great impact on the modernization of life assurance products in that it helped to popularize life assurance. Life assurance companies revised their sales channels, sales techniques and life products in the face of the demand for death indemnity from family breadwinners. In this context, therefore, not the Old Equitable but the Prudential (1848) best resembles a modern assurance company.

Most current studies of life assurance history have been written from the perspective of the insurers. By contrast, only a small number of studies examine the demands of the assured. This is unsurprising. The explanation lies in the fact that, while there is a comparatively large quantity of historical documents in insurance business archives, it remains difficult for historians to obtain information about policyholders.

In 1997 the organizers of the insurance history session at the World Economic History Congress in Madrid, Alain Plessis and André Straus, asked the participants ‘who bought insurance and for what?’