Making climate risks work: Governmentality and “foreign residence” in British life assurance, 1840–1940

Abstract

Genealogies of life assurance have tended to focus on the governmental possibilities of actuarial calculations of mortality, but the case of foreign residence assurance draws attention to other ways in which British companies calculated climate risk between 1840 and 1940. Drawing on archival research, this paper demonstrates that the extra charges imposed on life assurance policies for foreign residence invited conversations about the risks of climate and mortality in countries beyond Britain, drawing on both contemporary climate science and other arguments about climate pathology. Climate risks, however, had to be made to work for both life assurers and policyholders through far-reaching social-material networks, and firms frequently tinkered with arrangements of people, ideas, and artefacts in ways that enabled a mapping and governing of such risks. Whether ideas of climate circulating in life assurance were believed or not, they had effects and policyholders submitted to them. Drawing on archival material from several British life assurance companies, including some detailed cases of assured migrant lives, the paper explores how companies made risk calculations in ways that had consequences for ordinary decisions and practices. In so doing, the paper contributes to debates about life assurance and governmentality, showing that foreign residence policies enabled businesses to secure their risks in an era of imperial expansion. But this is no simple story of power and imperialism. Businesses constantly tinkered with their policies, drawing on climate science and medical understandings, but only as part of an always messy, changing assemblage.

Ecologies of co-production in the Anthropocene

“…Rather than only providing accounts of the most ‘central’, powerful or significant moments of analytical co-production and relevant actors – as is often the case in existing studies – a relational and systemic ecologies perspective simultaneously seeks out ‘decentred’ co-productions on the margins or peripheries (Holt et al 2019; Medina 2013) or those associated with the mundane and every day (Michael 2016). This may involve moving away from co-production associated with a central institutional site like the IPCC (Miller 2004) or the spaces of specialised UN agencies (Selcer 2018), and instead attending to more local or particular collectives, both historical and contemporary, to examine their role in defining, understanding and governing things like climate: from nineteenth-century life assurance firms (Kneale and Randalls 2020) to colonised peoples (Whyte 2018); from ‘amateur’ scientists (Endfield and Morris 2012) to local government planners (Knox 2020) and smallholder farmers (Pauline and Grab 2018).…”