Abstract

Estimating future costs is a difficult task for life insurers. Liabilities are largely tied to future events in the lives of the insured; they are contingent. Since the eighteenth century, insurance offices have used mortality tables to deal with this problem. Insurance scholars’ description of a smooth alliance between mathematics and insurance offices, however, stands in stark contrast to the fundamental mid-nineteenth century disputes about how to align general mortality tables with insurance organizations’ accounts and practices. For a time, the stability and legitimacy that mortality tables initially brought to insurance offices seemed to be undone by doubts about their applicability. Was this tool instrumental or detrimental to insurance pricing and selection? And in what way did mortality tables, then, promote, impede or alter organizational practices and the development of the insurance sector as a whole?

To answer these questions, I conducted a qualitative discourse analysis of nineteenth-century British actuarial and statistical journals, as well as select committee hearings transcripts. Drawing on pragmatist theory, this contribution reconstructs the ambiguity that surrounded organizational accounts of future costs and the decisions associated with them. Frequent moments of irritation show that by the mid-nineteenth century, premises of established insurance practices were being challenged and that insurance professionals were reinventing the conception of insurers’ environments through mortality tables. This new perspective affected organizational decision-making regarding the selection of policyholders and thereby the development of the field as a whole. This paper’s focus on moments of ambiguity and dissonance supplements previous explanations of the relationship between calculative tools and insurance organizations in the history and sociology of science, as well as in accounting history. It aims to demonstrate the role of instruments in initiating and mediating organizational and field-level transformations.