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Sharon Ann Murphy

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 adapt slavery to an urban, industrialized setting; the rise of statistical thinking; and efforts to regulate the business environment. Her research directly challenges the conclusions of previous scholars who have dismissed the importance of the earliest industry innovators while exaggerating clerical opposition to life insurance.

Murphy examines insurance as both a business and a social phenomenon. She looks at how insurance companies positioned themselves within the marketplace, calculated risks associated with disease, intemperance, occupational hazard, and war, and battled fraud, murder, and suicide. She also discusses the role of consumers?their reasons for purchasing life insurance, their perceptions of the industry, and how their desires and demands shaped the ultimate product.

Winner, Hagley Prize in Business History, Hagley Museum and Library and the Business History Conference

Praise for Investing in Life

“A well-written, well-argued book that makes a number of important contributions to the history of business and capitalism in antebellum America.” —Sean H. Vanatta, Common Place

“An intriguing, instructive history of the establishment and development of the life insurance industry that reveals a good deal about changing social and commercial conditions in antebellum America . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice

Johns Hopkins University Press

Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia

Investing in Life: Insurance in Antebellum America

Sean Patrick Adams

A look at the role of state policies in North-South economic divergence and in American industrial development leading up to the Civil War.

In 1796, famed engineer and architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe toured the coal fields outside Richmond, Virginia, declaring enthusiastically, “Such a mine of Wealth exists, I believe, nowhere else!” With its abundant and accessible deposits, growing industries, and network of rivers and ports, Virginia stood poised to serve as the center of the young nation’s coal trade. By the middle of the nineteenth century, however, Virginia’s leadership in the American coal industry had completely unraveled while Pennsylvania, at first slow to exploit its vast reserves of anthracite and bituminous coal, had become the country’s leading producer.

Sean Patrick Adams compares the political economies of coal in Virginia and Pennsylvania from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War, examining the divergent paths these two states took in developing their ample coal reserves during a critical period of American industrialization. In both cases, Adams finds, state economic policies played a major role. Virginia’s failure to exploit the rich coal fields in the western part of the state can be traced to the legislature’s overriding concern to protect and promote the interests of the agrarian, slaveholding elite of eastern Virginia. Pennsylvania’s more factious legislature enthusiastically embraced a policy of economic growth that resulted in the construction of an extensive transportation network, a statewide geological survey, and support for private investment in its coal fields.

Using coal as a barometer of economic change, Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth addresses longstanding questions about North-South economic divergence and the role of state government in American industrial development.

Old Dominion Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America

Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia - The book series

Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia - The book series

Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia books in order

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