Abstract

Histories of Habit: British Life Insurance and the Imagined Future, ca.1870-1930

This paper explores “habit” as a chapter in the history of risk. It is grounded in the archive of the Prudential Assurance Company, which by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had captured three-quarters of the insurance market for working-class lives in Britain; thirty percent of these policyholders were children under ten, whose lives were insured for only a few pounds. Premium receipt books, the standardized books in which life insurance agents noted the data of weekly payment, visually represented an ordered future, even if that future was the moment of a child’s funeral. Histories of risk have long argued for an eighteenth-century shift from providential thinking to statistical thinking: the belief in a divine determination gradually gave way to the science of prediction. The success of life insurance in nineteenth-century Britain is a good example, both as an industry that profited from ever-more precise calibrations of mortality, and as a vehicle for consumers themselves to plan for that mortality. But the premium receipt books also served to visualize a past relationship with one’s collecting agent and with the company itself. For those who survived to adulthood, the books reveal that this relationship was remarkably durable, with a surprising degree of customer loyalty. Those insured as children paid up their term policies into their twentieth-century adulthood, sometimes adding equally small ones, long after the real value of the payout had declined. What can this tell us about the imagined future? At what point does “habit” – in this case, a familiar institutional arrangement – become itself an approach to mitigating uncertainty? This panel is concerned with the way visual representations of data have created economic legibility: in the case of premium receipt books, they also worked to construct a particular temporality.