Well, the tone of the article makes it sound like NYL (in its original incarnation named the Nautilus Insurance Company) did something terrible by insuring slaves. As you have pointed out, it was quite the norm to view slaves as property. What I find odd is that a company in the life insurance business (and not in the property and casualty business) would engage in this type of insurance.
Not exactly. It's a totally different types of mortality risk. Would you say that insuring cattle against death is also life insurance? As horrible as it sounds, slaves were actually viewed as property.
Except it's not. Slave mortality would certainly have been more similar (even in those times when they were viewed as property) to that of free people than that of cattle. That would be born out both from a statistical perspective too, and to a lesser extent, from the fact that a life insurance company engaged in insuring slaves
I'm not an insurance person but it seems fundamentally different than life. Life needs to cover support for X years. Slave insurance should just cover replacement cost. P&C.
It's funny you mention that, because in this way they're often more similar than you'd think - just not in a way that necessarily excludes cattle. The first reason for buying life insurance IMO is income replacement. Same is with the slave - replace the income/productivity lost. Either way, this doesn't change the categorization from an actuarial perspective. Like I said before, it's about the nature of the underlying risk.