Life from the Napoleonic Wars to the Second World War

Craig Turnbull
Additional contact information
Craig Turnbull: Actuary

Chapter 3 in A History of British Actuarial Thought, 2017, pp 71-143 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract So said Samuel George Warner in his 1917 presidential address to the Institute of Actuaries. And yet, with the benefit of 200 years of hindsight, this statement might be more applicable to the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Warner’s era, actuarial thought and practice was largely reactive in the context of a series of unprecedented events and circumstances: global war, high inflation, interminable economic depression, low interest rates, more global war, government-induced ultra-low interest rates. At the start of the nineteenth century, life assurance practices still had to navigate the political and economic challenges of their time, but the actuaries of the nascent life assurance industry were arguably freer to plot the course of their profession and its practices. The trail had been blazed in the final half of the eighteenth century and a revolutionary vision of life assurance as a long-term savings vehicle for the middle classes had been realised with the remarkable success of the Equitable in the final two decades of the century. Many new life offices would follow in Equitable’s wake. The pioneering work of Dodson, Price and Morgan now had to be systematically developed into robust best practices for an embryonic profession that was invested with substantial powers and discretion in a fast-growing and increasingly significant element of the financial sector.

Keywords: Interest Rate; Asset Allocation; Asset Class; Interest Rate Risk; Mortality Table (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-319-33183-6_3

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783319331836

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-33183-6_3

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Springer Books from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().