in the bubble and invested the proceeds in silent cinemas or guest houses atBlackpool. The chapter by Parsons and Rose shows that even when the industry as awhole was in decline there was scope for highly specialised firms, producinginnovative new products, to survive and prosper.

Two of the chapters that speak most eloquently of the lost world of Lancashireare the final ones. In chapter 15, Fowler and Wyke refer to the ‘fabulous landscapeof Textile Lancashire’ (p. 306). One of Farnie’s later books was a study of the cottonmills of Greater Manchester. Fowler and Wyke complement this work by examiningthe forgotten history of trade union buildings. One wonders what they mean byfabulous? Industrial Lancashire was certainly a hideously surreal world of factorychimneys, ominous mills, railway viaducts, grim rows of blackened terraces, andbelching pollution. Many textile workers were at serious risk of respiratory diseasefrom the fluff that pervaded some working spaces. Mule spinners were in danger ofsuccumbing to cancer of the scrotum because of the oil used to lubricate themachines. As Tweedale explains, the government and employers did their best tocover up these problems for many years.

Farnie was only too aware that Lancashire’s dominance of the world cottontextile industry could never have been more than transitory. The subsequent pre-eminence of Osaka was no less ephemeral. Lancashire’s demise as an industrialregion, and its cultural and political marginalisation, are the consequences of itsinability to find a successor to cotton.

The spinning world and King Cotton provide contrasting insights into themultifaceted history of a global industry. Neither book falls into the category ofmainstream business history. The spinning world deals with a lengthy sweep ofhistory that preceded the establishment of modern business structures and practices.Most contributors rely on qualitative economic history, informed by thinking onmaterial culture. Viewed from another perspective, however, they provide theelements for a business history of the pre-industrial, non-western world. King Cottonspans a range of historical sub-disciplines from traditional business history tocliometrics, intellectual history, urban history, and the history of public health. Itssweep is not as broad as that of The spinning world, but it does continue the story ofcotton into the second half of the twentieth century. Is the key problem in the historyof the global cotton industry really how Britain overtook Asia in the nineteenthcentury? Considering that the balance of power shifted back to Asia after the GreatWar, we may need to start asking other questions.

John SingletonVictoria University of Wellington

john.singleton@vuw.ac.nz� 2010, John Singleton

Regulated lives: life insurance and British society, 1800–1914, by Timothy Alborn,Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2009, xi þ 439 pp., £50.00, US$80.00(hardback), ISBN 978-1-4426-3996-6

This book was eagerly anticipated, not least by this reviewer. It was worth waitingfor. In his unassuming way, Tim Alborn is one of the most innovative and interesting

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of contemporary historians, working in the rich territory between economic, businessand cultural history. His previous book, Conceiving companies (London: Routledge,1998), was influential in helping historians understand the Victorian businesscompany as a political, not just an economic, institution. The insurance industry wasone of the case studies in that book. Since then, he has continued to explore differentaspects of insurance in a series of articles, sometimes in conjunction with another ofhis interests, the contemporary meanings attached to science and medicine. Thisbook brings these interests together in what is the first major study of this importantfinancial service.

His opening three chapters provide what Alborn rather disparagingly calls a‘conventional narrative’ of the development of the UK life insurance industry. Itmay be conventional in structure, but his history provides the best account to date ofthe diffusion of life offices from London to the English provinces, Scotland andabroad; the growth of different markets for professional, lower-middle and workingclass groups; the cyclical merger movements; the impact of the Life AssuranceCompanies Act of 1870, the first serious attempt to regulate any branch of Britishinsurance. One intriguing point to emerge is the distinctiveness of the Scottish lifeoffices, which remained more specialised and in some ways more innovative thantheir rivals in England. The reasons for this, however, are not fully explored, nor isthe profitability of the industry north or south of the border. Notwithstanding themany failures among new start-ups, especially before 1870, Alborn takes it as giventhat life insurance was largely a financial success and, in his own words, leaves it toothers to quantify that success.

His principal interest, and the focus of the remainder of the book, lies inidentifying the ways that life insurance drew from, and in turn created, culture inVictorian Britain. UK life offices faced numerous problems in trying to place a priceon lives. These included calculating the life expectancy of insured populationsfrom general mortality tables, resolving the disproportionate lapsing of policies onhealthy lives, finding ways of capturing the marginal populations of the less healthy,and adjusting premium schedules for occupation-specific mortality. One result ofactuarial efforts was that by the 1890s claims about a ‘natural law’ of mortality hadbecome dominant in the industry, claims that were readily taken up by its salesmen.For the purpose of selling insurance, the latter also divided lives into two basiccategories, breadwinners and debtors, presenting their companies as surrogates ofthe insured, who would provide for dependants and creditors in case of death. Astheir chief marketing tools, insurance salesmen, like evangelists and novelists, usedtheir ‘endless creativity’ to reinforce the Victorian cults of death and domesticity.

An important means of selling life insurance to ever greater numbers of peoplewas the spectacle of the periodic distribution by life offices of surpluses as ‘bonuses’,which were added to the value of ‘with-profits’ policies. The importance of the bonuspolicy has been noticed before by insurance historians – it is rather unfair to suggestthat it has not (p. 168) – but this book is certainly the first to explore its sociologicalmeaning. Alborn provides an extensive analysis of the ‘moral economy’ of the bonus,the methods by which it was calculated and the internal debates within life insuranceabout the ‘fairness’ of its distribution among different groups of policyholders.The marketing of bonuses ‘taught the Victorians a tangible form of distributivejustice’, and helped shore up the claim of life offices that they represented a socially‘equitable’, and in that sense, a more ‘modern’, form of business that facilitatedconsumer choice.

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The book also examines the rapid growth of endowment insurance during thelater nineteenth century, and the investment yields upon which it, and the bonuspolicy, largely depended. Claims of altruism, the preaching of thrift and thedisciplinary function of insurance all retreated before the popularity of endowmentinsurance with its promise of an annuity payment after a term of years. The small-scale endowment policy tempted UK policyholders to abandon the older lifetimesavings approach to insurance or to reduce insurance cover for their dependants infavour of more immediate returns. This occurred because more people weresurviving into old age and there was a shift in focus from death to retirement. Lifeoffices learned to adjust their marketing strategies to the more selfish motives thatunderpinned the purchase of endowment insurance.

The extension of the market to lower income groups, and the changing characterof life insurance, however, created new problems for the industry. The Victorianrhetoric of a ‘natural’ mortality law was based almost exclusively on the experienceof ‘select lives’, above all healthy males. After 1900, as the industry expanded toother sectors of the population, such ‘scientific’ certainties began to wane. Theproblem of rating deviations from ‘normal’ lives, and of adverse selection at thepoint of sale, became ever more acute. In his final chapters Alborn describesthe evolving role of medical professionals as gatekeepers for the life offices and thechanging technologies employed by them to assess the health of customers. In sum,life offices became adept at juggling ‘multiple modernities’ – new narrative genres,new statistical and medical thinking, and a newly abundant commodity culture. Theindustry encapsulated the essence of modernity because its own fractiousness anduncertainties existed through, and because of, the contradictions in society as awhole – between prudence and speculation, between the pathologies of risk andnormality. The paradox at the heart of life insurance was that, while its profitsdepended upon regulating lives, its continued existence depended upon theincompleteness of this regulation.

This may not be the definitive business history of British life insurance, but it wasnot intended to be. It is, however, an important book, richly documented, full ofinsights and ideas, which anyone interested in the interface between culture, businessand society will profit greatly from reading.

Robin PearsonUniversity of Hull

r.pearson@hull.ac.uk� 2010, Robin Pearson

Oceans of wine: Madeira and the emergence of American trade and taste, by DavidHancock, New Haven, CT and London, Yale University Press, 2009, xxix þ 632 pp.,illus., maps, £40.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-0-300-13605-0

In the last few decades, historical research has paid growing attention to wine, notonly in terms of agro-industrial production, which early on acquired significant tradeappeal, but also as a product of consumption, an element of socialisation anddistinction. In this vast historiography, the new book by David Hancock, dedicatedto Madeira wine, is exemplary both in terms of the themes covered and the

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