The Science of Difference: Developing Tools for Discrimination in the American Life Insurance Industry, 1830–1930

Abstract

The Science of Difference examines life insurance companies' significant impact on the development of systems of human classification and discrimination in modern America. It pays closest attention to the tools employed by life insurance companies to enable and justify their discriminatory practices, tracing their evolution over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Companies used life tables to think about sectional difference prior to the civil war; they collected statistics to defend the propriety of racial discrimination; and they revolutionized risk by inventing the medical “impairment.” Drawing on company archives and personal papers, as well as a wide range of publications, the dissertation describes corporate research in the financial industry, argues for the importance of cultural factors in tracing business history, and shows how the industry built a national statistical community with tools designed to measure and price human difference.