│By Eleanor Leese, Acquisitions Editor, Gale Primary Sources│
As we approached a significant milestone in the life of Eighteenth Century Collections Online – the launch of Part III in March 2026 – I found myself minded to go looking for significant milestones inside the archive itself. And what more significant milestones are there than births, marriages, and deaths? But what I found in ECCO Part III weren’t emotional tracts about these major life events. Instead, I found tables of mortality data, and an eighteenth-century specialty: the insurance of births, marriages, and deaths. Turns out, there’s little that you couldn’t insure in the 1700s.
In the first decades of the eighteenth century, insurance policies developed into a thriving financial marketplace, where policies could be taken out on homes, fire damage, on the birth of a baby, the length of a marriage or apprenticeship, or the length of a life.
