Bentham and colonization

Bentham engaged with colonization throughout his career. Famously, he advocated reformative incarceration in his panopticon in preference to transportation, and among his arguments against colonization was that it would constitute a drain upon the capital of the mother country—as I explore further. Nonetheless, his political thought shaped a wide range of democratic reforms, in part through colonial constitutions.Footnote ¹¹ By the early 1830s, Bentham’s following included parliamentarians William Molesworth and Charles Buller in a group later termed the “philosophic radicals,” who had a particular interest in the Australian colonies and in the application of Wakefield’s scheme for “systematic colonization.”Footnote ¹²

Recently attention has returned to Bentham’s longer intellectual trajectory to account for the seeming discrepancy between his well-known criticism of imperialism and his support for colonization as indicated by his 1831 “Colonization Company Proposal.” Philip Schofield and Peter Cain have both argued that Bentham was never opposed to colonization per se, but rather opposed aspects, or iterations, of it: colonies would constitute a burden upon the mother country, their government would be corrupt and favor the elite, transportation was ineffective as a means of criminal punishment and should be replaced by his own penitentiary. As Schofield concludes, Bentham’s “Colonization Company Proposal” offered a constitutional code of Bentham’s own devising which would guard against corruption, ensure representative democracy, and offer financial benefits to Britain.Footnote ¹³ Similarly, Barbara Arneil has argued that where the former entailed conquest and domination from above, the latter entailed local governance and improvement of people and land.Footnote ¹⁴

Arneil suggests that already in 1797, Bentham’s scheme for pauper “industry-houses” constituted a form of domestic colony characterized by the productive use of waste land, and the removal and employment of paupers: she argues that “a colonial lens brings to the forefront of panopticism the centrality of waste land and agrarian labor as well as the economic and profit-making dimensions of Bentham’s proposal.”Footnote ¹⁵ Bentham began his ambitious project to reform the Poor Laws in early 1797, and at the invitation of John Sinclair, president of the Board of Agriculture, and Arthur Young, the board’s secretary as well as editor of the Annals of Agriculture—both promoters of domestic colonization and “improvement”—published the first four books (of six) in instalments as Outline of a Work Entitled Pauper Management Improved. The Outline proposed the formation of a joint-stock company on the model of the East India Company, to be called the National Charity Company, which would support 500,000 people in 250 “industry-houses” distributed across England and Wales. Published seven years after his Panopticon, this proposal applied its central architectural and management principles, including self-interest, or profit, as a reward for efficiency.Footnote ¹⁶

Bentham’s references to colonization appear in Book V of this project (which remained unpublished during his lifetime), addressing “Financial Grounds,” and the financial projections of the company, in turn dependent upon population estimates for its potential residents. Bentham had great trouble securing population data, and abandoned this part of his analysis in late 1797.Footnote ¹⁷ A short section at the end of Chapter 2, with a marginal subheading, “Advantage of This Domestic Colony over Foreign Ones,” begins “Colonize at home—this is advice I have seen somewhere given in print” (as Michael Quinn notes, domestic colonization was a “consistent theme in Arthur Young’s work”) and commented, “To adopt the plan in question would really be—to colonize at home. This domestic colony has circumstances to distinguish it at least—I don’t know whether public opinion will bear me out in saying to recommend it—which do not take place in the instance of foreign Colonies.” Bentham then explicitly rejected the cost and dangers of foreign settlement, and advocated for increasing national population.Footnote ¹⁸ Gertrude Himmelfarb suggested that this argument for unlimited fecundity is why Bentham silently dropped it from subsequent editions, not to be published until 2010, given the publication of Thomas Malthus’s bombshell Essay on Population at just this time—which sharply contradicted Bentham’s position.Footnote ¹⁹

Notably, in an undated “related fragment” Bentham looked to the future, “the very end of earthly time,” when Britain’s “still vacant lands” would be filled: at that point, Bentham’s company would provide a suitable basis for colonization; ultimately, when the world itself was replete, “then will the policy of the statesman be directed to the arrestment of population, as now to its increase: and what is now stigmatized under the name of vice will then receive the treatment, if not the name, of virtue.”Footnote ²⁰ In speaking back to Malthus, this fragment explicitly links the industry-house scheme with colonization, praising its capacity to structure both. However, when, in 1812, Bentham himself published the scheme as Pauper Management Improved (omitting Books V and VI) he aligned it with his panopticon prison proposals, all laid before the 1811 House of Commons inquiry on penitentiaries.Footnote ²¹ Bentham’s support for foreign colonization thus remained dormant until the late 1820s.Footnote ²²

By that time, many had begun to grasp the emerging possibilities for colonization by free settlers. From 1824 changing imperial policy had seen charters granted to several joint-stock companies seeking to attract private capital investment in Australasia and Canada.Footnote ²³ Bentham was impressed by Admiralty Secretary John Barrow’s April 1829 article on the forthcoming Swan River colony in Western Australia, which argued for its strategic military siting, and proposed an agricultural settlement funded by wealthy capitalists. Barrow expressed a sanguine vision for the venture, to be the first free settlement funded by capitalists, generously awarded land in proportion to their investment.Footnote ²⁴ It would be free of the convict stain, and so become an extension of British civilization rather than receiving its refuse; it would cost nothing. These elements addressed some of Bentham’s long-standing objections to colonization. In June 1829 Bentham inserted a postscript to his essay Emancipate Your Colonies!, noting that he had reversed his opinion that colonization in Australia is useless “if Barrow’s account was correct.”Footnote ²⁵

By early 1830 Bentham himself alluded to the idea of funding emigration to relieve domestic poverty in connection with his work on transportation. Following an inquiry received through his bookseller, as to “whether I ever published any work on transportation,” on 28 March 1830 Bentham wrote directly to Home Secretary Robert Peel, suggesting that he should read his “Panopticon; or the Inspection House.” In echo of his 1790s pauper management scheme, Bentham suggested,

Here Bentham also invoked the proposal of Robert Wilmot Horton, undersecretary of state for war and the colonies, to fund emigration from domestic sources, as argued by the 1826–7 Parliamentary Committee on Emigration. Wilmot Horton came into office shortly after the Select Committee on the Poor Laws of 1817–19 had recommended support for emigration to British colonies, and he urged emigration as a means of relief throughout the 1820s. However, he proposed sending whole families, including children, rather than restricting emigrants to young couples; he opposed Wakefield’s central principle of restricting landownership to capitalists in favor of a vision of peasant proprietorship. Controversially, Wilmot Horton proposed that the poor rates should be mortgaged by parishes to secure loans from the government—rather than Wakefield’s key principle of using the proceeds of colonial land sales.Footnote ²⁷ Although Wilmot Horton supported the new National Colonization Society when it was founded in early 1830, these differences, and especially Wakefield’s principle of concentrated settlement, prompted their split by the middle of the year.

Wakefield and colonization

By August 1831, when Bentham wrote his “Colonization Company Proposal,” there had been ample opportunity for him to become familiar with Wakefield’s new principles. Wakefield had become obsessed with colonization while imprisoned in Newgate between 1828 and 1831 for the crime of abduction. He first published his new theory in June 1829 as the pamphlet Sketch of a Proposal for Colonizing Australasia, and sent a copy to Bentham. This is now held by the British Library, inscribed in Bentham’s handwriting: “Jeremy Bentham / 13 July 1829 / Received From the unknown author / without accompanying Note.”Footnote ²⁸ Sketch proposed ten articles: first, all land already granted in the colonies would be subject to a tax upon its rent; second, all future grants would require a payment of two shillings per acre. The proceeds would be applied to an emigration fund to convey English laborers to the colony, with the supply of laborers to be “exactly proportioned” to the demand for labor. Emigrants were to comprise equal numbers of men and women aged eighteen to twenty-four.

Critically, in Sketch Wakefield attacked Adam Smith’s argument that access to free or “thinly inhabited” land encouraged the growth of population, high wages, and therefore “real wealth and greatness,” as exemplified by ancient Greek colonies. Instead Wakefield argued that Smith had overlooked the role of enslaved labor for the Greeks, and he suggested that other factors led to their success: distinguished and capable leadership, limited land, and, as a result, cheap labor, therefore providing the basis of “all the arts of refinement.” From the very first, Wakefield argued that native tribes closely confined the territory of the Greek colonists so that “the narrow limits of territory in proportion to people, together with the institution of slavery rendered labour cheap instead of dear.”Footnote ²⁹ These principles, including the importance of cheap (“free”) labor, remained the kernel of his program of systematic colonization through subsequent elaborations and revisions.Footnote ³⁰

Bentham may also have read the series of “Letters from Sydney,” appearing anonymously in the Morning Chronicle between 21 August and 6 October 1829, and their compilation as a book, Letter from Sydney, the Principal Town of Australasia. Together with the Outline of a System of Colonization, appearing at the end of 1829.Footnote ³¹ Certainly Wakefield’s was just one voice within a dynamic popular debate: for example, Letter from Sydney was prefaced by a quotation from Robert Southey urging emigration published in the Quarterly Review, drawing in turn on Malthus’s ideas about population.Footnote ³² In April 1830 the Spectator published Wakefield’s “Cure and Prevention of Pauperism, by Means of Systematic Colonisation,” also published as a pamphlet by the National Colonization Society.Footnote ³³

In 1830 Charles Tennant published under his name (although actually authored by Wakefield) A Letter to the Right Honourable Sir George Murray, on Systematic Colonization. This Letter referred to the pamphlet Cure and Prevention of Pauperism and reported on its principles, “the adoption of some sound practical measure, whereby the redundant labour of Britain and the unoccupied land of the Colonies maybe so employed, as to remedy pauperism in Britain, and supply the demand for labour in the Colonies.” Central to its report was the importance of regulating the appropriation of land, and it

The authors also reviewed the schism which had taken place in June 1830 when “two of its most eminent members, Mr. Wilmot Horton and Colonel Torrens,” had objected to population “concentration” because it would be “injurious to drive capital from a more to a less profitable employment, by forcing the cultivation of inferior land, whilst superior land remained uncultivated.” They refuted Torrens’s definition of valuable land in terms of “soil only,” instead defining “superior” land in terms of social factors such as the proximity of markets and labor; that is, they insisted on the centrality of the principle of concentrated settlement.Footnote ³⁴ When Viscount Howick (Henry George Grey, later third Earl Grey) became undersecretary of state for war and the colonies in November 1830, Wakefield addressed him directly (if still anonymously) in a series of letters published in The Spectator between December 1830 and June 1831.Footnote ³⁵ All of these published works elaborated the theory first advanced in mid-1829.

Between January and May 1831 the National Colonization Society pitched its ideas for a new colony at Gulf St Vincent (South Australia) to the Colonial Office, stressing the advantages awaiting early land buyers. In January 1831 Robert Gouger submitted a proposal edited by Wakefield, now known as the “First Paper Relative to the Formation of a Colony at Gulf St Vincent c1830–1831.” This brief document, less than a thousand words in length, alluded to the recent change in colonial policy now termed the “Ripon Regulations” which required the sale of colonial land. The paper predicted the impact the policy would have upon a new settlement to be sited in South Australia, in providing for “plentiful and cheap labour” funded by land sales. It pointed to the great increase in value acquired by land as population increased around it, giving the example of Mr Wentworth’s allotment in Sydney.Footnote ³⁶

In May, also in the name of the Society, Robert Gouger and Anthony Bacon produced a lengthier plan for settling South Australia by a joint-stock company, titled “Proposal for Establishing a New Colony in Southern Australia and for Enabling a Company to Purchase and Sell Colonial Lands.”Footnote ³⁷ Like its predecessors, this unpublished proposal, much annotated by different hands, was premised upon the sale of Indigenous land, and advanced the principles of sale at the minimum price and the direction of proceeds toward emigrant labor. Until the population reached five thousand the colony would be governed by a person appointed by His Majesty, so that “the heaviest responsibility will be thrown on an accountable person deeply interested in the performance of his duty”; subsequently a colonial legislative assembly would be created. Citing James Mill’s Elements of Political Economy, no taxes would be levied upon colonists or capitalists, except for a tax upon rent to defray the costs of government. In describing the proposed site’s “situation,” it was considered to resemble the eastern and western coasts, “being equally bare of Indigenous timber and population.”Footnote ³⁸ Howick was shown this proposal, and responded that it was merely a draft of “a set of regulations,” and he would not submit it to Goderich until “in a shape in which it may lead to a practical result,” specifically in showing how the whole cost of the scheme would be met from private sources.Footnote ³⁹

Presumably this expanded version “as prepared by the Sub-Committee” was the one which the National Colonization Society approved for publication on 3 August 1831, at the chambers of William Tooke. This “authorized” version was printed as Proposal to His Majesty’s Government for Founding a Colony on the Southern Coast of Australia and submitted to the Colonial Office on 25 August.Footnote ⁴⁰ In the meantime, Bentham drafted his own, unpublished, “Colonization Company Proposal,” between 4 and 14 August, with Wakefield’s appendix, dated 23 August.Footnote ⁴¹ What is the relationship between the Society’s previous drafts, Bentham’s “Colonization Company Proposal,” and the printed Proposal to His Majesty’s Government?

Bentham’s “Colonization Company Proposal”

Bentham’s seven-chapter “Colonization Company Proposal” provided broad support for the Society’s agenda and the Proposal, examined below, but gave it a distinctively utilitarian flavor. He began by identifying those concerned in a proposed colony: the colonists, the founders, and the constituted authorities. In order to maximize the happiness of these interested persons, Bentham sought to define their “inducements,” and the means of accomplishing their aim. Chapter 1 examined the “ends” or benefits of the project: transferring people from indigence to affluence, therefore offering relief from pressure on the mother country, which would be available for the foreseeable future; giving colonists the means of well-being and permanent employment for labor; providing an increased market for the mother country, a permanent existence, and returns to stockholders. Notably, Bentham now agreed that colonization, rather than draining capital from Britain, would by “Giving, in that Colony, in a correspondent degree, encrease [sic] to the market for the produce of the Mother Country: thereby, in this same Mother Country, over and above prevention of substraction [sic] from, making positive addition to, the existing stock of the matter of wealth.”Footnote ⁴²

Chapter 2 considered the primary “means of effectuation”: the “Vicinity-maximising or Dispersion-preventing principle.” Here Bentham elaborates Wakefield’s argument, in listing the numerous disadvantages of dispersion, from insecurity due to attacks from Indigenous people, disorderly settlers, distance from resources, exchange of produce, news, social intercourse, cooperation, medical assistance, return, instruction, amusement, and loans. Unlike Wakefield, Bentham was concerned with the social and moral implications of these economic theories. Chapter 3 addressed pecuniary arrangements, recommending formation of a joint-stock company, to be granted a charter, with capital raised of £500,000, of which £125,000 to be disbursed to government, £125,000 to small capitalists, and £250,000 to be spent on roads, bridges and other means of creating communication to give land value. In Chapter 4 Bentham then moved to consider the inducements to all involved; he reviewed possible outlay through examples; he estimated costs and calculated the profits to be made from land sale. Chapter 4, part 2, addressed “Settlers without Capital—Their Inducements,” and noted their “assurance of being able to purchase land” once they had saved up its price.Footnote ⁴³

What inducements might the government require? As well as maximizing human happiness Bentham outlined what inducements should not be offered: “in one word—patronage”! Patronage, or corruption, was of course one of his long-standing, primary objections to colonization—a concern also prominent in the Society’s and Wakefield’s schemes. Bentham noted, “On this occasion, a single word Liberia speaks Volumes.” Here he refers to the existing, private, colony established by the American Colonization Society (ACS) on the west coast of Africa from 1821.Footnote ⁴⁴ Bentham’s point (repeated over subsequent pages) was that the proposed Australia venture would, like Liberia, cost the government nothing—but the proposed independence of the new colony would serve as a test of official good faith, because if the government was impartial and honest, it would support such a “free” or independent colony. However if “his Britannic Majesty’s advisers” insisted on governing the colony themselves this would reveal their aim to “extract from it the sweets of patronage.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In Chapters 5, 6, and 7, as Philip Schofield has explored in some detail, Bentham presented his own proposal for the system of government to be employed in South Australia—a republic administered under a constitutional code of Bentham’s own devising. The code would guard against corruption and ensure representative democracy; it would also offer financial benefits to Britain.Footnote ⁴⁶

Wakefield wrote a six-page appendix to Bentham’s “Colonization Company Proposal,” titled and dated 23 August in Bentham’s hand, which reiterated his key principle, that the value of land is created by competition, determined by the proportion of people to land—and that “everything depends on the State price for waste land.” Wakefield’s only reference to the social or public benefits of concentrating settlement was that first choice of grants would permit the placement of “the seat of government, the principal sea-port and the centre of Commerce,” thus creating competition for land.Footnote ⁴⁷ Although Bentham certainly supported the profit-making aspects of the venture, to be owned by a joint-stock company, his recommendation for spending on roads, bridges, and other means of creating communication in order to give land collective value, and his thorough attention to motives and benefits, according to utilitarian principles of public benefit, stand at odds with Wakefield’s great emphasis on individual economic competition.

To modern readers, as Zoë Laidlaw has pointed out, the lack of consideration of Indigenous people within Bentham’s writing is startling. Bentham focused on British jurisdiction over people, rather than territory, distinguishing between those colonies in which people of European descent dominated, and those with a majority Indigenous population—with the effect of overlooking the Indigenous peoples of settler colonies. His references to First Nations Australians—whom he termed “native savages”—excluded them from colonial society, and even from full humanity; they lacked government and civilization, and therefore any claim to sovereignty.Footnote ⁴⁸ Crucially, Lockean notions of land use, which regarded productive exploitation as the basis for lawful possession and dismissed non-European use of land, underpinned Bentham’s views.Footnote ⁴⁹ Indigenous people had constituted an external threat to the colony within Bentham’s earlier writing on Australia, such as his 1803 essay A Plea for the Constitution, in which he argued that New South Wales had been illegally founded.Footnote ⁵⁰ In precisely this way, they feature in Chapter 3 of his “Colonization Company Proposal” as the primary threat to dispersed settlement, listed as “1. Insecurity against damage to person and property from the hostility of the uncivilized aborigines.” Here a marginal note stated, “In Van Diemen’s land it has been determined absolutely to extirpate the natives.”Footnote ⁵¹ This matter-of-fact comment referred to the contemporary Black War of 1824–31, in which bitter conflict between colonists and the First Nations people of Tasmania ended in removal of the survivors to Flinders Island in Bass Strait—a process now considered to have constituted genocide.Footnote ⁵²

Through this lens of colonial violence, Bentham’s other references to race assume a greater significance, evoking an implicit racial hierarchy embedded within imperial politics.Footnote ⁵³ They remind us that Liberia’s purpose for the ACS was to prevent racial tension by removing free black people from the United States; it was opposed by the African American community as a form of racial cleansing. Restoring Indigenous peoples to Bentham’s views on empire qualifies evaluations of his attempts to create a “universal jurisprudence,” which would apply the greatest-happiness principle to encompass all nations: Bentham argued that the legislator’s duty to promote the welfare of his own people was not to be prosecuted at the expense of the well-being of all others. But David Armitage also notes the limits of this view, for example in Bentham’s 1827 plan for “International Law” entailing a legislative alliance among “all civilized Nations,” of which he admitted—“at present is as much as to say, all Nations professing the Christian Religion.”Footnote ⁵⁴ As Laidlaw concludes, “Bentham deployed and elaborated existing understandings of sovereignty, civilization, and possession to become an advocate of settler colonialism.”Footnote ⁵⁵

The uses of Bentham

After Bentham’s death in 1832, Wakefield made explicit use of their relationship to support his own program. His 1833 two-volume manifesto England and America explored the condition of England and current and future reforms, and included an expanded “art of colonization” with appendices detailing the negotiations with the Colonial Office—all intended to support the realization of his vision of a trade empire and colonies. England and America aimed to explain the social state and political economy of England and America to each other, asking, “What relation can there be between the political prospects of the English, and the origin, progress and prospects of slavery in America?”Footnote ⁶⁴ Volume 2 of England and America’s lengthy “The Art of Colonization” repeated and extended the argument first made in Sketch.Footnote ⁶⁵ There are clear echoes of Bentham’s “Colonization Company Proposal” in Wakefield’s discussion—especially evocative is his discussion of the “Ends” of colonization for the mother country, which echoes Bentham’s Chapter 4, “Means of Effectuation, Incitative,” specifying various “inducements” for all actors and seeking to identify the motives and benefits for each.Footnote ⁶⁶ Also in Benthamite terms, Wakefield quoted Mill in pointing out that “the ruling Few” saw colonies as a means to augment their power and riches, as well as “governorships and judgeships and a long train of etceteras.”Footnote ⁶⁷ In sum, affection toward colonies stemmed from governments, “for the sake of patronage; the nations, for the sake of markets.”Footnote ⁶⁸ He picked this theme up again, as I examine further.

Significantly, Wakefield claimed that Bentham had suggested his book project, and that it was his own reasoning that had turned Bentham in favor of colonization: abandoning his earlier position, Bentham had been persuaded by Wakefield’s argument that colonization did not drain capital from the mother country but instead resolved social and economic tensions by extending the field for English production and employment. In arguing against trading monopolies Wakefield first took issue with Bentham’s earlier argument against colonization: “‘There is no necessity’, says Mr. Bentham, ‘for governing or possessing any island in order that we may sell merchandize there’. But in order to sell merchandize in a colony, it is necessary that the colony should exist.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Wakefield explained this as separating the “question of dominion from the question of existence,” which he claimed would have prevented Bentham (“and his disciple, Mill”) undervaluing the benefits of colonial trade—and blaming bad government for jobs, monopolies, and wars, rather than the colonies: “The uses and abuses of colonization are very different things.”Footnote ⁷⁰

Turning to the view of those who “worshipped capital”—that is, those who believed that capital determined the employment of labor—and that colonization diminished Britain’s capital and therefore the labor market, Wakefield quoted Mill and Bentham in arguing that although his own scheme would be funded by the colonists, he sought to remove this “prejudice”:

His long footnote claimed that he had changed Bentham’s mind regarding this principle by pointing out that production and trade were limited by capital “for which there is employment. The words which I have added, in italics, make all the difference. It does not follow that, because labour is employed by capital, capital always finds a field in which to employ labour.”Footnote ⁷² Helping explain the many Benthamite echoes throughout the work, Wakefield claimed to possess a copy of “Colonization Company Proposal.” In a well-known passage, Wakefield claimed Bentham’s endorsement for his theory, and his own powers of persuasion, recalling,

Wakefield’s version of Bentham’s “conversion” to colonization on the ground of the relationship between capital and labor was debated by an earlier generation of historians, Bernard Semmel, for example, concurring that “the view long associated with Bentham, and the Ricardians generally, was that it was the quantity of capital rather than the extent of the market which determined the size of the trade in which a nation could engage.”Footnote ⁷⁴ In this view colonization was a burden, but Wakefield undertook to show that capital required a field for labor not always available domestically, but which would be provided by the colonies. Edward Kittrell, however, argued that “the wages-fund doctrine” could be used both by opponents and by proponents of emigration and colonization, so therefore “the drain on the capital fund from the expenses of colonization had to be evaluated in the light of the subsequent effects on the labor market.” For Kittrell, what impressed Bentham in Sketch of a Proposal was the principles to make colonization free of cost to the government, and to introduce a better class of colonist. Kittrell argued that there was nothing in Wakefield’s Sketch of a Proposal which addressed “the role of colonization in alleviating a superabundance of capital in the mother country” and suggested that it was not mentioned in Bentham’s fifty-page commentary. But, as I have noted, Bentham’s Chapter 1 stated that colonization would “encrease to the market for the produce of the Mother Country,” therefore “making positive addition to … wealth,” which sounds rather like the capital-surplus argument.Footnote ⁷⁵ Indeed, an insistence on the self-funding basis for colonization was common to all these schemes, premised upon the principle of constant enlargement of the imperial fields of production and employment.Footnote ⁷⁶

In Volume 2 Wakefield again urged the primacy of a cheap labor force, making the point that even with (convict) “slave labour in Van Diemen’s Land,” there was insufficient labor—but also it was not “constant and combined” as with enslaved labor, because it was subject to various managerial whims: “In a word, from whatever point of view we look at this subject, it appears that the great want of colonies is Labour, the original purchase-money of all things.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Wakefield’s principles would produce a cheap and reliable form of “free” labor, now become a central principle of post-emancipation imperial policy.

Finally, Wakefield examined “The Government of Colonies,” in which he made a very Benthamite argument for colonial independence. He again quoted Bentham’s Rationale of Reward, this time approvingly, in arguing,

Wakefield elaborated the “grievances” of colonists governed from a distance, where influential representatives were elected by the governor and shared in perquisites such as “undue supplies of convict labour,” contracts, and huge land grants. The colony proposed at Spencer’s Gulph (South Australia) would not suffer such evils—and so Wakefield suggested that the “ruling class of an old country” looking only to “immediate and selfish” ends would wish to prevent “systematic colonization” both because it would forgo such benefits and because self-government would spread to all colonies. Transportation, he claimed, remained a good excuse for withholding self-government from New Holland’s free settlers. He compared the expensive but unsuccessful colony of Swan River—actually listing the salaries of all officials, from governor downward—with the proposed self-funding venture. This argument was closely linked to the case for free trade, and he declared monopolies a tool of subjection—the costs of (mis)governing colonies could be saved by providing an equivalent sum under “the honest name of a fund for Corruption.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Perhaps Wakefield’s most powerful attack on patronage was embodied by his third appendix, in which he documented the 1831–2 negotiations between the South Australian Land Company and the Colonial Office with extreme venom. Here, his denunciation of the aristocratic corruption inherent in imperialism, shared with Bentham, took a very personal tone. He cited one skeptical observer who sounds very much like Bentham himself:

Wakefield’s increasingly outraged commentary on the correspondence provided detailed, step-by-step rebuttals to undersecretary Hay’s rejection letter, rising to a crescendo with his brief final footnote, “Fudge!”Footnote ⁸¹

Death punishment and transportation

The second major strand of Bentham’s theories which Wakefield took up was penal reform and specifically the abolition of transportation and death punishment (execution). The same day as Bentham began his draft of his “Colonization Company Proposal,” 4 August 1831, he also praised Wakefield’s Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis (1831)—and initiated translation into French of his own recently published essay on this topic.Footnote ⁸² Bentham had begun drafting his reasons for opposing capital punishment in late October 1830 at the request of his French correspondent, the Marquis de La Fayette, prompted by the July Revolution. Writing to La Fayette on 2 November, Bentham advised him that he had written a two-part text on the topic: one part addressed “the general question,” the other “the special question” of the fate of Charles X’s final ministry.Footnote ⁸³ In December he revised the text, omitting the second part, as the ex-ministers’ trial for treason was already in progress.Footnote ⁸⁴ Finally, Bentham revised the text around May 1831, appending a “masterly” article on the subject which had just appeared in The Spectator, and it was published as a thirteen-page pamphlet, Jeremy Bentham to His Fellow Citizens of France on Death Punishment.Footnote ⁸⁵

In this pamphlet Bentham’s argument famously departed from the “vengeance of the state” approach in arguing for principles of certainty but also proportionality of punishment, the possibilities offered by imprisonment as a means of reform and example, and legal protection and fair treatment of the entire citizen body. As Tony Draper notes, he denounced capital punishment for its “inefficiency, irremissibility, positive maleficence (i.e. tending to produce crimes), and for the enhancement of evils produced by ill-applied pardons.”Footnote ⁸⁶ While Bentham had long worked for penal reform, by early 1831 it had become the subject of considerable public debate.Footnote ⁸⁷ In March, a Select Committee on Secondary Punishments was appointed (to which Wakefield gave evidence). Its September report concurred with Bentham’s critique, concluding that crime was related both to the uncertain enforcement of the law, and to the inadequacy of secondary punishments. The Utilitarian Westminster Review also traced the growing opposition to harsh penalties and their inefficacy as a deterrent, giving the example of New South Wales, “the great scene of English vindictive jurisprudence,” where the “frightful amount” of executions had risen concurrently with crime, and pointed toward the need for reformatory prisons which would send forth the punished “able and willing to lead new lives.”Footnote ⁸⁸

Although prompted by events in France, initial publication of this text targeted a British readership at that time concerned with penal reform, with Bentham subsequently turning to his Continental networks to expand its impact. Significantly, the decision to produce a French translation also coincided with Wakefield’s 4 August visit. That evening Bentham wrote to his Brussels publisher Hauman that his friend Jean-Sylvain van de Weyer, the Belgian minister to the Court of King James, had also visited him that day, and “undertakes for the translation of the pamphlet on Death punishment.”Footnote ⁸⁹ While we cannot know whether Wakefield’s visit prompted Bentham to initiate translation, or whether both Wakefield and Van de Weyer were summoned to help promote Bentham’s work, Wakefield’s testimony to the March inquiry and his own publication, based on firsthand experience, made him a worthy interlocutor. It is significant that Bentham’s pamphlet of around June 1831 was closely followed by Wakefield’s publication of Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis by July.

In writing his own critique, Punishment, Wakefield had used his three-year gaol term as a kind of ethnographic fieldwork. In this work Wakefield had declared himself converted to “the doctrine of Romilly, Buxton, and Bentham”—that is, he had entered Newgate prison believing in the efficacy of capital punishment but his observations led him to believe “just the contrary.”Footnote ⁹⁰ During his imprisonment Wakefield had ample opportunity to read Bentham’s work, especially through the good offices of his cousin Elizabeth Fry, assisted in her charitable work by Wakefield’s sister Catherine Torlesse. Other prominent texts of this period included Fry’s brother-in-law Thomas Buxton’s 1818 Inquiry into Prison Discipline; Buxton too became involved in the campaign to abolish capital punishment.Footnote ⁹¹ Wakefield’s analysis supported key principles of Bentham’s theories of legal punishment, from an insider perspective. He was especially critical of the system of capital punishment, giving graphic examples he had witnessed himself of its uncertainty, unjustness, and susceptibility to abuse. He argued that transportation was far from a terror to felons, and implied that transportation had become an impediment to systematic colonization by free settlers.Footnote ⁹² Punishment—following upon his Letter from Sydney—contributed to Wakefield’s own rehabilitation within his reformist family and began to establish his credentials as a political thinker.Footnote ⁹³ These two books represent twin themes, both of which drew from Bentham’s theories—but also worked together to drive subsequent implementation of Wakefield’s “systematic colonization.”

In 1833 the abolition of slavery—among a series of momentous reforms enacted during the early 1830s—focused long-standing concerns regarding Britain’s imperial labor supply. Wakefield’s principles offered a means to ensure reliable but “free” labor after emancipation.Footnote ⁹⁴ At this moment, the moral capital and tactics of the antislavery cause constituted powerful tools for reformers seeking to end transportation, protect and discipline Indigenous peoples, and develop the settler colonies.Footnote ⁹⁵ Many anti-transportation reformers, such as Bishop Richard Whateley, were also keen advocates for systematic colonization.Footnote ⁹⁶ As the systematic colonizers gained ground, the value of the convict workforce came under challenge by proponents of free labor, seeking to expand investment in the colonies. The inquiry led by William Molesworth between 1837 and 1838 was a turning point in the critique of transportation. Molesworth’s investigation was highly stage-managed, and it produced a sensationalized picture of transportation as a slave system, defined by torture, physical abjection, and sexual deviance.Footnote ⁹⁷ The inquiry also constituted a forum for Wakefield’s theories, and its recommendations explicitly promoted his proposal for systematic colonization. Subsequently, Van Diemen’s Land received all Australian-bound convicts, and the assignment system was replaced by probation. Transportation to New South Wales ended by 1840.Footnote ⁹⁸ The stage was set for the growth of the new settler colonies.