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Date: | Sat, 23 Jun 2007 01:00:43 -0400 |
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Absolutely fascinating insight, Henry, about which I knew nothing.
Thank you.
-- Stephan
On 23 Jun 2007, at 00:15, Henry Wiencek wrote:
> Re: Anita's post about slaves buying their freedom --
> I met a business historian at UVA several years ago who was doing her
> dissertation on the development of the life insurance business. To
> her
> surprise she found that in the 1850s insurance companies were
> writing more
> and more policies for slaves. Most of these were taken out by
> masters who
> were hiring out their slaves to work in factories, but some
> policies were
> taken out by slaves with the masters as the beneficiaries. She
> found that
> this was a manumission strategy. A slave who wanted to buy himself
> on, say,
> a ten-year plan, would naturally meet resistance from the master --
> what
> happens if the slave makes two years of payments and then gets
> killed on a
> dangerous job? The master loses 80% of the slave's value. But if
> the slave
> has a policy, the master gets the full death benefit. So life
> insurance
> eased the path to freedom. On the larger scale, the entry of the big
> insurance companies into the slavery business showed how slavery was
> evolving in the 1850s into something more modern, flexible, and
> robust,
> adapting to industrialization and becoming woven into the national
> financial
> markets.
>
> Henry Wiencek
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