John Weskett

John Weskett was an English underwriter and merchant who contributed to the understanding of insurance law in the eighteenth century.

[1] Weskett was probably born in Leeds.

It is believed to have lived between 1730 and 1800.

Weskett offered a definition of the term average in A Complete Digest of the Theory, Laws, and Practice of Insurance, (1781):[2] Weskett has been criticised for normalising the dehumanisation and commodification of enslaved Africans, for example Robin Pearson and David Richardson (2019) in "Insuring the Transatlantic Slave Trade"[3] or Saidiya Hartman in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007)[4]