The Price of a Life: Toward a History of the Valuation of Human Life, ca. 1600-ca.1800

Lecture | November 23 | 4-5:30 p.m. | 201 Moses Hall

Speaker/Performer: Edward Gray, Professor of History, Florida State University

Sponsors: European Studies, Institute of, British Studies, Center of

This paper is a very early foray into a moral and legal history of the monetization of human life from roughly the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. What I hope to do with the paper is gain a little clarity about what exactly the pricing of a person, in this case a C Efree¹ person, meant to 17th and 18th century jurists and moral philosophers. To that end, the paper focuses on two things. The first, the definitional matter of just what C Eprice¹ meant with respect to person. And the second, legal and moral debates associated with life insurance and ransom insurance. One of the questions I hope to address is, why was life insurance outlawed in Europe but tolerated in England? That question is, I think, central to a question that animates the larger study, namely, what explains the correspondence between abolitionism and the humanitarian embrace of life insurance.


Edward Gray is professor of early American history at Florida State University and was, until January of 2009, editor of Common-place, the interactive journal of early American life. He is the author and editor of several books including, New World Babel: Languages and Nations in Early America (1999), and The Making of John Ledyard: Empire and Ambition in the Life of an Early American Traveler (2007).

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