ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief overview of the growth of modern insurance. It reviews the emergence of statistical knowledge, which over a considerable time period became central to insurance, as well as to a number of other commercial and social practices. This chapter shows how two institutional practices, statistics and insurance have become over time ways of governing lives, using similar forms of rationality. It argues that insurance, contrary to its textbook definitions, must be viewed as an politico-economic technology of control that has, over time, come to represent the triumph of reliable knowledge - a particular form of knowledge that is inseparable from the Enlightenment goals of 'progress' and 'objectivity'. Political Arithmetic, although remaining of great interest to states, took on new meaning in the nineteenth century. Mercantilism proper, or modernist, statist mercantilism is most commonly associated with Western European states. The logic of mercantilism was also the business of 'protecting' the state.
