Abstract

"Measuring and Building Risk: The Labor of Fire Insurance in the Early United States"

Bryan Norwood, University of Texas at Austin (bryan.norwood@utexas.edu)

This paper will investigate two ways fire insurance depended on craft labor to construct risk in the early nineteenth-century United States. While historians such as Sarah Wermiel and Jonah Rowen have explored architectural histories of fire-resistant construction and urban histories of various fires have been told, the architectural history of fire insurance remains unwritten. Fire insurance, because it models the future by moving from what is to what losses could be, provides a unique way to think about the relationship of the built world to the quantification, documentation, and legal liability that shaped the rapidly intensifying capitalism of the early nineteenth century. This paper puts labor at the center of that story.

The first case is one of measurement. Drawing on the substantial archive of fire insurance surveys done for one of the largest insurers in the early US, the Philadelphia Contributionship, I show how the systems of quantifying risk actually turned on an inversion of systems developed for calculating the pay of craft labor. Carpenters in Philadelphia who played crucial roles in the development of labor pricing were hired by the Contributionship to survey completed buildings to determine their insurable value. Insurers thus flipped the system of valuing labor not to measure what had been done but rather to measure what might be lost.

The second case is one of the construction site. Fire insurance was not just focused on post-construction valuation. Construction contracts in the early nineteenth century began to write in requirements for contractors to hold fire insurance while building. Drawing on the massive database of construction contracts available in Boston and surrounding towns from the 1820s on (a result of filing requirement for mechanic lien laws), I consider how and when housewrights and carpenters were forced into the system of actuarial valuation on the job site.