Why it matters

By the 1780s, insurance and gambling were not clearly separate things under English law, and that ambiguity had real consequences — people were taking out "insurance" policies on the lives of strangers, on the outcomes of wars, even on whether a particular ship would return, essentially placing bets dressed in legal language. Weskett's Complete Digest was one of the first serious attempts to systematically sort out what insurance actually was, as a matter of law, and what it wasn't. The book opens with an 80-page critical essay proposing reforms to correct what Weskett calls the "very great disorders" in how insurance was practiced, before moving into an alphabetically organized digest of the field as it then stood — citing, by name, the leading theorists of risk and probability of the age: Richard Cantillon, Malachy Postlethwayt, Abraham de Moivre, and Richard Price. That last name is worth sitting with for a second: Price was the actuary who, working from Bayesian principles, helped found the mathematical basis of modern life insurance. A book that puts Weskett's practical legal reforms in direct conversation with De Moivre and Price is a book standing exactly at the hinge between two histories that don't usually get told together — the history of probability as mathematics, and the history of insurance as law.

Why we're looking

At $450 this sits roughly $800 below the same dealer's contemporary-calf copy of the identical Dublin 1783 issue, listed at $1,250 — the gap is plainly explained by the rebound library binding and detached front board, so read it as a defect-adjusted price rather than a mispricing. This is genuinely scarce: OCLC locates only ten copies of this specific Dublin printing anywhere in North America. It also carries a real, if complicated, piece of American provenance — the early ownership signature of Jabez Bowen (1739–1815), a Rhode Island judge, militia colonel, deputy governor, and chancellor of Brown University. We think it's worth being direct about the rest of that sentence too: Bowen was also a slave trader. We're not in the business of laundering a book's provenance, and a name that significant, attached to a book about risk, insurance, and the pricing of human misfortune, deserves to be named honestly.

Watch out for

The seller documents real structural problems — front board detached, rear joints and hinge starting — so this is a copy needing rebinding or a box, and the later library cloth plus library stamp permanently cap its appeal against a contemporary-calf copy. Foxing and faint dampstaining are disclosed but not quantified, and the description doesn't say whether the Bowen signature is on a flyleaf or title. Reassuringly, the stated collation ([vi], lxxxiv, 612, [4] pp.) matches the collation the same dealer records for their other copy of this issue, which is a useful check on completeness.