| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Eric Wertheimer. Underwriting: The Poetics of Insurance in America, 1722–1872. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press. 2006. Pp. xviii, 187. $50.00.
Eric Wertheimer explores how capitalism, via understandings of insurance, was written into American literature in the period from 1722 through 1872. Grounded in literary theory, his book challenges readers to rethink the relation between art and commerce in America before the Civil War.	1
Wertheimer begins with a provocative question: can the world be underwritten? To get at this question, Wertheimer does not explore the history of the insurance industry or business practice. Rather, he examines how several major writers of the period—Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Noah Webster, Herman Melville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson—wrote insurance and commerce into their literature. Focusing on each writer in succession, Wertheimer connects each to insurance, risk, and loss, with the book becoming a series of intellectual meditations that are roughly chronological and place-based.	2
Wertheimer argues that insurance is a "writing business" that "colonized" economic life. He further asserts that the insurance business "may be viewed as essential to a material, ideological, and aesthetic reckoning with the emergence of American literature" (pp. xii-xiii). Connecting these forms of writing, Wertheimer seeks to reconcile property, text, and cultural discourse. Inventive, as well as sometimes insightful and tendentious, Wertheimer reveals both the importance of insurance to capitalism (and insurance is certainly understudied) and the ways that the language of loss and risk were embedded in the literature and writing of eighteenth and nineteenth-century America.	. . .

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