Personal wealth in late eighteenth-century Britain

Abstract

James based his paper on personal wealth in eighteenth-century Britain on machine-readable data from the E.S.R.C. project to index the policy registers of two fire insurance companies between I776 and I786.1 This was his only source, which is surprising as the data extracted relate only to the total value of the property insured and not to its nature, though this information is available in the original records. James made very little reference to the range of information which was excluded from his analysis. To rectify this, and to show the effect of his use of only a part of the data, I have used the results of analysing and indexing the contents of just over 500 policy register entries relating to the town of Warrington over the period