Champions of the Common Good: Insurances and the Process of Shaping Community Interests

Business interacts with the public interest in multiple ways, not least in the context of insurances that have a direct effect on people’s lives. In this panel, we compare and contrast different types of insurances that are rooted in various interpretations of “public interest”. The papers study burial insurance in twentieth century Germany, social security via provident funds for workers in colonial and post-colonial India, slavery insurance in the United States, and industrial life insurance agents in early twentieth-century Britain. We ask how these different types of insurances mobilized the idea of public and societal interests to become legitimized. Is it possible for private companies and entrepreneurs to provide for basic needs of a community? How ambitious were these different insurances in defining the public interest? And how effective were they in dealing with the challenges of the community they targeted, in defining standards and harmonizing the common good with business interests?