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