Thomas More was the first to question the application of the death penalty to a particular offence. Theft had long been classified as a capital crime in the penal codes and practices of Britain and elsewhere. In More’s Utopia, a range of arguments is marshalled against the execution of thieves, echoed by later progressive thinkers. More’s critique brings to bear a whole armoury of arguments, including proportionality, deterrence, the public good, the law of God, and the causal relationship between poverty and petty crime. His argumentation was picked up by radical thinkers in Britain in the seventeenth century and gave impetus to a movement to formulate and promote alternative punishments for trivial offences. The principal candidates were hard labour and exile, the latter involving, in Britain, transportation to America and later Australia. Transportation had obvious disadvantages, and in any case it began to be asked, ‘How can the criminal be made maximally economically useful to the mother country?’ The contribution of Sir William Petty in the first decade of the Restoration (1760s) was crucial in this, and the idea finally finds articulation in the philosophy of Jeremy Bentham.