Recent scholarship has begun to explore the connections between histories of science and histories of insurance, most notably with regard to medicine, and suggests that these encounters were highly productive, influencing theories of disease transmission, assessments of safe levels of drinking, and the medical examination itself. However there has been relatively little consideration of the extent to which insurantial practice engaged with meteorology and climatology, or the consequences of this dialogue. In this paper, we examine the way in which insurers in the late 19th and early 20th century drew on, extended and created their own forms of science to enable them to turn weather and climate into an auditable risk for the purposes of establishing insurance contracts.

In particular, this will be explored through examination of two cases between about 1840 and 1920: histories of storm insurance and their relationship with meteorological science networks; and histories of life insurance and the evaluation of travel or residence in particular climates, literally mapping out different zones of risk. This draws from research on U.K. and U.S. based insurers and rather than being focused on a particular company tracks the emergence of what might be termed an insurance approach to weather and climate. Key questions include: to what extent did insurers draw on meteorological expertise or create their own? How did insurers monitor weather claims and payouts? How were claims adjudicated in the absence of meteorological records? What kinds of knowledge did insurers produce and in what ways was this different to contemporary scientific debates at the time? And did actuarial prudence outweigh science when it came down to assessing risk?