I argue that life insurance and imperial meaning making are deeply implicated in each other. As life insurance expanded internationally in the nineteenth century, and as insurers became advocates of White settlement, they grappled with what actuarial science meant in the context of their orientalist conceptions of colonial populations. In particular, actuaries were concerned with tropical markets and the racialized/exceptionalized differences they perceived in those markets. To address these tensions, insurers attempted two strategies: (1) incorporating tropical rates as additional premiums designed to cover the “extra mortality” of tropical markets; and (2) advocating for social practices of “sanitary progress” related to public health and sanitation. These practices, framed in orientalist terms, were not adopted in any smooth manner but in fumbling and meandering ways as insurers tried to understand what kinds of lives tropical settlers might be and how those lives might be priced. They eventually liberalized life insurance rates for White settlers in tropical settings, but insurers then confronted questions on how newly socialized “native” lives might be rendered calculable. This story of tropical exposure in globalizing actuarial discourse reinforces the ways in which race and racialized/exceptionalized differences were at the core of life insurance and the calculative devices it assembled between 1852 and 1947.

我认为人寿保险和帝国的意义建构是相互深深关联的。随着十九世纪人寿保险在国际上的扩张，以及保险公司成为白人定居的倡导者，他们在东方主义殖民人口概念的背景下努力理解精算科学的含义。精算师尤其关注热带市场以及他们在这些市场中感受到的种族化/例外性差异。为了解决这些紧张局势，保险公司尝试了两种策略：（1）将热带费率纳入额外保费，旨在弥补热带市场的“额外死亡率”； (2) 倡导与公共卫生和卫生相关的“卫生进步”的社会实践。这些以东方主义术语为框架的做法并没有以任何顺利的方式被采用，而是以摸索和曲折的方式被采用，因为保险公司试图了解热带定居者可能过着什么样的生活以及如何为这些生活定价。他们最终放宽了热带地区白人定居者的人寿保险费率，但保险公司随后面临着如何使新社会化的“原住民”生活变得可计算的问题。这个在全球化精算话语中暴露于热带的故事强化了种族和种族化/特殊化差异是人寿保险及其在 1852 年至 1947 年间组装的计算工具的核心的方式。