Life from the Napoleonic Wars to the Second World War

So said Samuel George Warner in his 1917 presidential address to the Institute of Actuaries. And yet, with the benefit of 200 years of hindsight, this statement might be more applicable to the beginning of the nineteenth century. In Warner’s era, actuarial thought and practice was largely reactive in the context of a series of unprecedented events and circumstances: global war, high inflation, interminable economic depression, low interest rates, more global war, government-induced ultra-low interest rates. At the start of the nineteenth century, life assurance practices still had to navigate the political and economic challenges of their time, but the actuaries of the nascent life assurance industry were arguably freer to plot the course of their profession and its practices. The trail had been blazed in the final half of the eighteenth century and a revolutionary vision of life assurance as a long-term savings vehicle for the middle classes had been realised with the remarkable success of the Equitable in the final two decades of the century. Many new life offices would follow in Equitable’s wake. The pioneering work of Dodson, Price and Morgan now had to be systematically developed into robust best practices for an embryonic profession that was invested with substantial powers and discretion in a fast-growing and increasingly significant element of the financial sector.