Timothy Alborn's approach to the history of life insurance in Regulated Lives is nothing short of extraordinary and exemplary. Not only does he explicate the cultural and economic underpinnings and sociological framework of this complex institution, he convincingly demonstrates how and why life insurance was itself a creator of modern culture in the nineteenth century by inventing new ways to tell stories, count people, and examine bodies (13). Moreover, this study is a social history that reveals how life insurance, in helping to commodify and objectify lives, set a price on human life more directly “than any other enterprise apart from slavery.” For nineteenth-century consumers, life insurance helped to establish, as Alborn convincingly demonstrates, “an equivalence between mortality and monetary value—a death nexus that precisely and morbidly expressed the cash nexus that Thomas Carlyle derided as the moral failing of British society” (12).

Life insurance taught people about the intimate connections between life and property and between the growth of capital and the contingencies of living. Alborn's study of this process reveals a great deal about how the Victorians imagined and reduced financial risks and how risks became increasingly domesticated and democratic and, not surprisingly, affected women and men differently. Indeed, it is owed in large part to life insurance that many women from the middle classes became so well acquainted with investment income and the attendant instabilities embedded in financial capitalism as well as the vagaries of the market. We learn much about how ideas about dependency and gender norms and roles within marriage and in financial settlements stemmed from the life insurance industry itself, how one of the most popular ways of marketing life insurance was that it promised to safeguard a woman's financial solvency in the event of her husband's death, which, in turn, safeguarded her virtue and gentility. Protecting married women and dependent children from the contingencies of the death of their husbands and fathers thus became one of the most persuasive ways to sell life insurance to the middle classes.

In its use of numbers and statistics, the life insurance industry perhaps most directly and persuasively “regulated lives.” Alborn shows us how a variety of different kinds of modern facts and especially numbers mattered a great deal for actuaries and for the industry in general. The life insurance contract was a form of savings, an investment, and an effective way to make money for shareholders as well as policyholders in general. The kind of statistical thinking that insurance popularized centered on the development of risk groups, individuals and groups that became tied to monetary values. A related group of professionals and institutions that aided in the growth and expansion of the life insurance industry, apart from the salesmen, were doctors and medical science, as a result of the insurance exams needed to assess “normal” or deviant classifications for the body. Medical examiners thus played a very significant role as experts; insurance medical exams became the way that risk was assessed on the body of the consumer himself (most of the time it was a male consumer), and a kind of pathology was born in the process.

Alborn's study makes use of prodigious and exceedingly wide-ranging primary research conducted in many different archives. It is also comprehensive in its synthesis of the scholarly literature in a number of different fields. The result personifies the merits and advantages gained by being interdisciplinary. It also shows us how demanding and exacting such work can be. Regulated Lives is a cultural history of business and economics as well as a history of life insurance itself. At times along the way, the sheer erudition and complexities of Alborn's methodological approach might intimidate even the most informed of readers if it were not for the beautiful way in which this book is written. Apart from being persuasive in argument and contributing substantially to the historiography, this book is masterful in its narrative and analysis and really quite brilliant and original in its extensive use of literary texts. Alborn brings us inside those texts, as he does with so many of his primary sources, as if we were the nineteenth-century reader. Alborn shows us the seamless way in which stories and novels serialized in periodicals often had plots that turned on the untimely deaths of husbands juxtaposed to advertisements by life insurance companies marketing their widows funds in the adjacent pages of the same periodicals. In this way, the market was humanized. To be sure, the market could also be a villain, but the use of melodrama, for example, by the life insurance industry could capitalize on fears and desires and what literary scholar Elaine Hadley has called, Alborn reminds us, “sympathetic exchange” (156).

Alborn's conclusion explains that the development and history of life insurance in the nineteenth century is not possible without considering life insurance as “a site of interdisciplinarity” that drew on and contributed to new narrative genres, new statistical thinking, and “new medical thinking that defined boundaries between normal and pathological bodies” (297). These are/were crosscurrents of modernity that need to be examined together, he insists, for us to appreciate how the establishment of institutions is and was itself a process of modernity in the making, and that process always involved many intersecting components. His other compelling and original argument considers how insurance helped to manage and contain risk at the same time that it could also be the subject of fraud and financial chicanery. In its domesticating of risk, however, it provided safety in ways that few other economic institutions could or did. In the end, Alborn's book does a wonderful job of showing us what kinds of experiences went into the buying and selling of a life insurance policy for the average Victorian policyholder. Alborn also shows us how the institution became established and expanded. In between, he introduces us to the social history of an array of professionals and consumers who made it happen. Along the way, he gives us the most exacting business history, while he also deals with issues and topics as diverse as mathematics, literature, religion, medicine, and economics. Alborn's mastery of the material and the scholarship, his exceptional historical insight, and the imaginative and original way in which this study is conceived and written are truly impressive.