From the last decades of the seventeenth century until the beginning of the twentieth, the tontine, in one form or another, was a ubiquitous financial instrument. As a revenue-raising tool of governments it supported the cost of war, and as a private capital-raising instrument it provided funding for civic improvement and urban development projects. While the tontine is known today mainly through fictional works (Robert Louis Stevenson, Agatha Christie, and The Simpsons among others), this book tells the history of how it evolved from a public revenue-raising scheme into a popular private investment and infrastructure financing tool, before it was displaced by cheaper forms of borrowing. Focusing on the early development of the tontine, and with European and North American case studies, the narrative brings to life the story of a little-understood financial innovation. This concise and engaging book is an ideal introduction to the history of the tontine for all readers interested in financial history.

A London con man creates a tontine wherein the surviving members receive interest on their investment, while the capital, after some years, is to go to the care of veterans.

The book reviews the finance, economics, and history of tontines, and argues that they should be resurrected in the twenty-first century.

The tontine, with its underlying premise that the living participants benefit from the death of their fellows, does not deserve its shadowy reputation. It had some success in its original purpose, as a means of government fund raising. It was most successful as a means of private development and investment from around 1780 through the 1850's. However, it was used as a gimmick in the selling of life insurance and as a cover for outright fraud in the latter part of the 19th Century. It was also subject to attack from writers who found the notion of gambling on other people's deaths unseemly. The tontine developed an aura of shadiness, and was eventually abandoned. If re-developed as a form of insurance for the long-lived, it may be worth rehabilitation as an investment tool.

Spanning 60+ years, beginning on the day Waterloo was won, it is a multigenerational story of 3 families during the Industrial Revolution. Lots of detailed descriptions of life among the varied social classes, it has been likened to stories by Dickens. It’s a very good historical fiction. A tontine is a life insurance scheme, stratified by age. Enrollees received payouts after an initial growth period, the amounts determined by the number of living recipients. Over time, as participants died, the payouts became more and more substantial. Towards the end, when the recipients became a mere handful, all sorts of betting occurred in the general populace on who would be the last survivor.

A black comic novel about the last remaining survivors of a tontine - a group life-insurance policy in which the last surviving member stands to receive a fortune. It is a farcical, eccentric and brilliantly written piece of work.