Hartford is the insurance capital of the world, with 150 different companies centered here. Perhaps insurance seems like a rather mundane claim to fame. It may draw to mind a picture of a tired, grey man droning on about rates. However, it turns out the history of insurance is anything but dull.

Historian Geoffrey Clark argued that the development of insurance was “an important hallmark of modernity, demarcating the high-risk environment of a prescientific age from our low-risk world in which forces of nature are controlled or at least managed rationally.” Up through the Renaissance, if your cottage caught fire, if there was a flood, a pillaging army, or just a flimsy tree, then that was it. Everything you’d managed to stash away over the years was gone. 

One particularly devastating event was the death of a family’s primary breadwinner, historically the husband (although wives helped with farmwork, financials, and domestic labor). The widow would be left with little money and limited options for supporting her family. Often, the family would desperately seek help from the community/local church or sink into poverty. Today, however, 51% of American adults have life insurance, a cushion in case of tragedy. 

The first system remotely resembling modern life insurance was Roman burial clubs. While there was no money for surviving relatives, members of a club were given the assurance that the club would see to their cremation after death.

Jumping forward, in 1706, the Amicable Society was founded in England. Members paid a small fee that went into a pot, which, if any one of the members died, would be used to support the family. Unlike life insurance companies today, the Amicable Society was a charitable organization. In fact, it had even planned to end member dues once it built up a sufficient pot. However, life insurance soon evolved past simply helping people pay for funerals. The Amicable Society, for instance, became a joint-stock company, meaning people became invested in others’ policies as well.

In the early 18th century, you could take out life insurance on anyone—a neighbor, the butcher, or your local lord. You didn’t need to be related or at all affected by their death. By this time, many countries had outlawed gambling. However, life insurance provided a macabre loophole, and a new form of gambling, betting on death, emerged.

Things quickly got out of control. For instance, in Italy, so many people took out life insurance policies on the Pope that officials worried it might incentivize an assassination. And in England, whole clubs of people would pool money, with those still alive raking in interest after each death. In 1774, the situation was finally addressed with the Gambling Act, which forbade life insurance policies on anyone but close loved ones or those with whom you are financially connected.

However, that was not the end of death gambling. While you couldn’t take out policies on strangers, in the 1980s, the insurance industry started allowing viatical life insurance settlements, which let people with terminal illnesses name a stranger as a beneficiary of their life insurance in exchange for immediate cash. Ads for viatical settlements mostly populated gay magazines, targeting men with AIDS during the peak of the epidemic and spurring much controversy. For lots, it seemed macabre and manipulative, stealing money that should be going to families. However, others viewed viatical settlements as a humanitarian investment—often, AIDS weakened victims too much to work, with many becoming impoverished or homeless, unable to pay medical bills. Viatical settlements, investors argued, provided desperately needed cash and even, for some AIDS patients, extended their lives long enough for life-saving medicine to be developed.

Life insurance has a complex history, originating as both a charity and a gambling loophole. Today, life insurance actuaries create mortality tables, calculating the probability that a client will die at each age. They factor in gender, wealth, smoking, jobs, and more to create a policy that brings in more money than it risks. As Geoffrey Clark says, “This, of course, [raises] questions about the extent to which people's lives [can] be made property and subject to a capitalist market.” But life insurance is also an acknowledgement by holders that our lives and goals extend past our death.