A study of the early years of the life insurance industry in 19th century America.Investing in Life considers the creation and expansion of the American life insurance industry from its early origins in the 1810s through the 1860s and examines how its growth paralleled and influenced the emergence of the middle class.Using the economic instability of the period as her backdrop, Sharon Ann Murphy also analyzes changing roles for women; the attempts to...

A sobering excavation of how deeply nineteenth-century American banks were entwined with the institution of slavery.It’s now widely understood that the fullest expression of nineteenth-century American capitalism was found in the structures of chattel slavery. It’s also understood that almost every other institution and aspect of life then was at least entangled with—and often profited from—slavery’s perpetuation. Yet as Sharon Ann Murphy shows in her powerful and ...

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.