How societies organize uncertainty is often seen as one of their defining features. Contemporary capitalist societies, for instance, are held together by extensive welfare arrangements that define, measure and redistribute the costs and risks associated with (un-)employment, illness and death. While most scholarly attention tends to be devoted to public insurance arrangements of this kind, private insurance is an almost equally pervasive phenomenon that is present in many spheres of social life, even if just in the background. Apart from the various state-organized social insurance arrangements, including disability, accident, old age and unemployment insurance, private insurers provide protection against a large variety of risks, including liability, flood, cyber, trade and credit risk.

The societal importance of insurance is also reflected by the economic weight of the insurance industry. In the UK, for instance, annual insurance premiums amounted to nearly 12 per cent of GDP in 2019. Insurers, moreover, are sizable investors, owning a large stake in both domestic and foreign economies (in 2017, British insurers had nearly ￡2 trillion assets under management).1 And to the extent that the economic risks associated with climate change, pandemics and cyber threats are unlikely to subside any time soon, private insurance will continue to play an important role in organizing uncertainty in contemporary capitalist societies going into the future. Insurance is also a moral technology that exudes the liberal virtues of individual responsibility and entrepreneurial risk taking. By allowing individuals to pool resources to gain compensation in the case of some pre-specified adverse event, it provides a mechanism through which individuals may gain economic independence and enables entrepreneurs or large businesses to take risks they might otherwise not take (Knights and Vurdubakis, 1993; O’Malley, 2000; Baker and Simon, 2002). It is therefore not too much of an exaggeration to say that we live in an insurance society.

Despite the centrality of insurance in contemporary capitalist societies, few scholars have investigated how the institution of private insurance fared in the age of financial capitalism.