Anglo-American Life Insurance, 1800-1914 Volume 1

Timothy Alborn

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138750197
• eBook ISBN: 9781351576543
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

By the eve of the Great Depression, there existed in America the equivalent of a policy for every man, woman and child, and in Britain it grew from its narrow aristocratic base to cover all social classes. This primary resource collection is the first comparative history of British and American life insurance industries.

PROPOSALS AND RATES OF THE STANDARD LIFE ASSURANCE COMPANY (1833)

Proposals and Rates of the Standard Life Assurance Company, Established in 1825, and Constituted by Act of Parliament 2& 3 Gul. IV C. XXXII. For Assurance on Lives and Survivorships, Endowments for Children, Immediate, Deferred, and Survivorship Annuities, and for the Purchase of Reversions and Annuities (Edinburgh: Privately printed, 1833).

Like the Rock in the shadow of the Equitable, Standard Life needed to combine its obligation to shareholders with the need to satisfy policyholders who were accustomed to sharing in their office’s surplus; and like the Rock, it presented its combination of share capital and profit-sharing as the best of both worlds. The looming presence in Standard Life’s case was the Scottish Widows Fund, which had formed in 1815 in close imitation of the Equitable; additionally, professional men in Scotland had long pooled their resources to provide pensions. Although most other major Scottish life insurers would form as mutuals, Standard Life retained its share capital until 1925, but divided 80 per cent of its surplus with policyholders starting in 1836.

Into the 1880s Standard Life and the Scottish Widows Fund traded places as the top two life insurers in Great Britain. This dominance owed mainly to their innovative and aggressive marketing, some of which is on display in this prospectus. Also, like most of its fellow Scottish insurers, Standard Life catered to a much wider class of policyholders than was the norm in England, where market segmentation was the usual business strategy. Although Standard Life had not yet departed from basing its premiums on the Northampton table of mortal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• General Introduction
• Introduction
• Bibliography
• British Life Insurance in the 1840s
• The Emergence of American Life Insurance
• Early Prospectuses
• Proposals and Rates of the Standard Life Assurance Company (1833)
• New American Prospectuses
• John Freestone, Where to Insure: An Impartial and Independent Guide (1890), excerpt
• Religion and Life Insurance in America
• ‘Prospectus of the Dissenters’ and General Life and Fire Assurance Company’, Eclectic Review (1839), excerpt
• Life Insurance as a Domestic Duty
• Benefit Societies versus Saving Banks and Insurance Companies: An Address to the Members of Benefit Societies and the Public in General (1822)
• Life Insurance and Savings Banks in America
• Insurance and Self-Help in Britain
• Insurance and Self-Help in America
• Josiah C. Nott, ‘Statistics of Southern Slave Population, with Especial Reference to Life Insurance’, DeBow’s Commercial Review (1847)
• W. E. Burghardt Du Bois (ed.), Some Efforts of American Negroes for their Own Social Betterment (1898), excerpt
• Arthur Wyndham Tarn, ‘Some Notes on Life Assurance in Greater Britain’, Journal of the Institute of Actuaries (1899), excerpt
• Industrial Insurance in Britain
• Industrial Insurance in America
• [Pelican Life Insurance Company], ‘Life Insurance. To Parents, Guardians, and Others, Desirous of Securing a Provision against Sudden Death’, New-York Evening Post (1808)
• The ‘American Invasion’
• Editorial Notes
• List of Sources