Jeremy Bentham engaged with virtually every aspect of political and social life in his written works, producing so many essays on such a variety of subjects that his unpublished papers continue to be transcribed and published in edited volumes by the Bentham Project at University College London. A central interest throughout his life was in British paupers and pauperism.”Footnote 1 Using two recently published folios, I draw out a fundamental and little-analyzed connection between pauperism and colonialism in Bentham’s thought. In the first folio, Book 5—written in 1797 (Quinn Reference Michael2010, lxviii) but published in 2010—of the Outline for a Work Entitled Pauper Management Improved,Footnote 2 later revised and published as Pauper Management Improved (PMI), Bentham explicitly describes his massive scheme of pauper panopticons as domestic colonies. In the second folio, Colonization Company Proposal (Proposal), written in 1831 and published in Panopticon versus New South Wales and Other Writings on Australia edited by Tim Causer and Phillip Schofield in Reference Causer, Schofield, Causer and Schofield2021, he champions a settler colony in Australia.Footnote 3 These two folios disclose both the explicitly domestic dimension of Bentham’s colonialism and the significant conceptual links between his domestic and settler colony proposals, with both designed to solve pauperism rooted in “waste” land and agrarian labor to create, he argues, economic benefits (profits for investors) and ethical benefits (“improve” the pauper through labor).Footnote 4
Using these folios, the core theoretical contribution of this article will be to draw a theoretical distinction between a colonial, internal, and productive form of power that seeks to transform or improve people and land from within, which Bentham champions, and an imperial, external, and repressive form of power that dominates or rules over people from above and afar, which he rejects. While colonialism and imperialism overlap and intersect historically and conceptually, I argue the specific form of power unleashed by colonialism has specific, profoundly negative implications—in practice—for both indigenous peoples subject to settler colonialism and the poor and disabled of Europe subject to domestic colonialism.
Within this overarching argument, I advance three subsidiary claims. First, Bentham is the original defender of domestic colonialism, for which the first folio provides definitive evidence. While Bentham explicitly calls his pauper panopticon domestic colonization in Book 5, I will also argue his pauper panopticon proposal is substantively rooted in the principles of domestic colonialism, which I have identified previously as segregation, agrarian labor on waste land to improve people and land (Arneil Reference Arneil2017). He thus champions the first farm colony for the disabled and first labor colony for the idle poor, claiming paupers can be improved rather than maintained in idleness and/or punished (at less cost) than more repressive and/or financially draining policies like destitution, parish relief, imperial colonies, or workhouses.
Second, I will argue that the pauper panopticon, viewed through a colonial lens builds upon but also challenges and expands Michel Foucault’s panopticism (which is largely focused on prisons). While the pauper panopticon engages in the same disciplinary techniques and productive power that Foucault analyzes so well (surveillance, data gathering, daily regiments and normalizing judgement), 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 that Foucault largely overlooks. Like all domestic colonialists, Bentham defends his colony in terms of the revenues created by cultivating cheap land (in his case, the profits for investors in his joint stock company) as much as the ethical benefits of “improving” paupers via labor through disciplinary power. Colonies always have a foundational political economy dimension.
Third, Bentham’s defense of a settler colony for paupers in Australia in the Colonization Company Proposal (1831) is articulated in strikingly similar terms to his domestic colony (solve pauperism, engage in agrarian labor on waste land under the authority of a joint stock company in order to improve paupers’ lives and make profits for investors). In this Proposal, he defends colonial power and continues to critique imperial power in the sense that he rejects any imperial interference with settler colonial self-government. The implications for indigenous peoples are profound. Anchored in waste land and cultivation and a governance model that favors settlers over metropoles, indigenous peoples are rendered invisible or, in a few references, wholly hostile and savage in relation to settlers property. This aspect of his thinking is important to address because his views on indigenous peoples are largely absent from the existing literature on Bentham and colonies and colonized peoples.
Ultimately, Bentham provides an excellent case study for why historians of political thought (and more specifically, Bentham scholars) must distinguish between colonialism and imperialism in the history of political thought.Footnote 5 Thus, contrary to much of the recent scholarship that views Bentham as a critic of colonialism, I argue Bentham is better understood as a pro-colonialist (defending an internal and productive form of power through which idle and irrational paupers can be transformed into industrious and rational citizens and waste land can be transformed into profits at home and overseas) and anti-imperialist (in the specific sense he is against dominance by imperial metropoles over settler colonialists and the costs associated with imperial defense from afar).
Jeremy Bentham’s Domestic Colonialism: The Pauper Panopticon Proposal
Bentham proposes his pauper panopticons in an Outline for A Work Entitled Pauper Management Improved (Reference Bentham1798) and Pauper Management Improved (Reference Bentham and Quinn2010)—but they have received little attention in the literature on panopticism initiated by Michel Foucault, which largely focuses on his prison panopticon. Pauper panopticons have been analyzed, however, by scholars of Bentham and/or his National Charity Company: Charles Bahmueller (Reference Bahmueller1981), Gertrude Himmelfarb (Reference Himmelfarb1970), and Michael Quinn (Reference Quinn1994; Reference Michael2010). The first two use his proposal to critique the prevailing academic view at the time that Bentham was a progressive reformer with respect to the poor in England. Himmelfarb argues he exploits “every fragment of ability” (98) and the “plan is justly … characterized as ‘regressive’” (117). Bahmueller concurs, describing his pauper panopticon as an institution of “overwhelming repressiveness” (10).
Quinn (Reference Quinn1994) challenges this wholly repressive characterization of Bentham’s pauper panopticon, claiming historical context matters in understanding his proposal to be at least partially progressive compared with his contemporaries’ alternatives. In particular, Quinn argues, Bentham is responding to Rev. Joseph Townsend’s suggestions for the extreme repression of pauperism—discontinue public relief and leave paupers to starve, anticipating Thomas Malthus by more than a decade. Bentham is clear the poor cannot be “left to perish outright” but “having established the claim of the indigent for relief … Bentham is … concerned to limit it” (Reference Quinn1994, 83). His key limitation is labor: “re-establish … the connection between subsistence and labour with regard to the indigent … and inculcate a prudential and frugal rationality,” with “the greatest benefit … to its recipients … the acquisition of habits which will keep them … out of the workhouse” (96). Thus, Bentham—in opposition to Townsend—rejects a repressive form of dominant power towards the poor and embraces a productive power rooted in segregation, discipline, and labor through which paupers will not starve or remain idle on relief but will change their bodies through daily discipline from idleness to industriousness and their minds through education from irrationality to rationality as far as possible.
Sir John Sinclair and Arthur Young: Domestic Colonialism Introduced
Largely missing from this previous literature on Bentham’s National Charity Company and his pauper panopticon proposal are two central aspects of his plan: waste land and agrarian labor—in short, its colonial dimensions. Both the Outline and PMI were shaped by two key people, one of whom invited Bentham to write on paupers in the first place and both of whom provided him with the language of domestic colonization. The first was Sir John Sinclair, Founding President of the British Board of Agriculture and Internal Improvement (BOA) and leading proponent of domestic colonies in Scotland. Born in 1754, Sir John Sinclair of Ulbster inherited his father’s extensive 100,000 acre estate in Caithness in 1790 (Fussell Reference Fussell1951, 162) that included land in five parishes (Thurso, Halkirk, Reay, Wick, and Latheron). Sinclair created colonies on his own estate and, as the President of the BOA, promoted the idea of improvement of both people and land (MacKinnon Reference MacKinnon2018). Frederik Albritton Jonsson writes, “Through the Board of Agriculture, Sinclair promoted internal improvement as a strategic imperative for the nation” (Reference Jonsson2013, 140). Domestic colonization is synonymous for Sinclair with internal improvement of waste land and people within Britain, in explicit opposition to foreign colonization that drains Britain of people and money.Footnote 6
The second key figure was Arthur Young, Secretary to the Board of Agriculture and Editor of the Annals of Agriculture (the journal where Bentham first publishes his Outline). Young, whom Bentham regularly called on to provide data, defends domestic colonization in Observations on the Present State of the Waste Lands of Great Britain (Reference Young1773), and his first essay in the first volume (Reference Young1784) of the Annals of Agriculture concludes, to “build, inclose and fix men in their farms upon the regular and orderly plan of a new colony … to bring into culture all wastes of every denomination … I consider to be the greatest object of British policy” (51, 53). Young also recommends Industry Houses for “promoting the agriculture and population of Britain” as he recommends paupers “incapable of maintaining themselves … [be] taken perfect care of:—Not, however in the parish by pecuniary gratifications; but in Hundreds of Houses of Industry, which prove ten times as effectual” (Reference Young1771, Vol. 2, 305).
Outline for a Work Entitled Pauper Management Improved
Sinclair sends a letter to Bentham on July 5, 1797, on behalf of the Board of Agriculture asking him to write an essay on managing the poor:
You will see from the inclosed paper, the progress made by the Board of Agriculture during our last Session … and as I am applying to all the intelligent men of my acquaintance for Papers to be inserted in our transactions I cannot think of overlooking so capital a hand as Mr. Bentham. The object to which I wish you would direct your attention is the proper Management of the poor. (Sinclair Reference Sinclair and Milne2017, 369)
Bentham responds enthusiastically eight days later, “your commands in relation to the poor will be fulfilled: to speak the truth … I have been thinking of nothing else but poverty for these seven or eight months” (Reference Bentham and Milne2017a, 370). Quinn argues Sinclair shapes Bentham’s writings in two ways:
Sinclair’s invitation had two direct effects on Bentham’s poor law writings. First, Bentham adapted the title of his Poor Plan from “Pauper Economy Improved” to “Pauper Management Improved [emphasis added] in order to address Sinclair’s focus on the proper management of the poor. Second, Bentham’s promise to make extracts from that Plan was the genesis of “Outline.” (Quinn Reference Michael2010, xliii, emphasis added)
J. R. Poynter concurs that Bentham as planner dominates the pauper panopticon plan:
The Pauper Plan grew into a Utopia, and is not the least interesting of the species. If, in much of his work, Bentham preserved a delicate equilibrium between economic liberalism and public planning, in this scheme the planner ran riot. (Reference Poynter1969, 109)
Bentham indeed describes his plan to Young as a Utopia. (Reference Bentham and Milne2017b, 377). He is the social engineer whose detailed plan will make paupers secure and improve their lives by turning them to industry and, therefore, create greater happiness.
I would argue, however, the most important way Sinclair and Young influenced the Outline/PMI is providing Bentham with the language of domestic colonialism and Industry Houses. In Book 1,Footnote 7 he proposes a comprehensive plan of 250–500 large Industry Houses, each with 2,000 people:
General Scheme of Provision: The whole body of the burdensome poor to be maintained and employed in a system of Industry-Houses upon a large scale distributed over the face of the country as equally as may be with each a portion of land (waste, in preference) at least sufficient for the maintenance of its own population. Utmost number of paupers would remain to be provided for in the proposed order of things, say five hundred thousand—number to a house two thousand:—number of houses two hundred and fifty. (Reference Bentham1798, Vol. 30, 91–92)
Compared with previous poor laws that he argues simply maintained paupers in idleness through local parish relief, his “industry-house system” would teach them habits of industriousness.
Beyond adopting Young’s idea of Industry Houses, the Outline/Pauper Management Improved were manifestos of domestic colonialism in four substantive ways. First, the primary industry is agrarian labor: “The healthiest of all employments, agriculture [is] the principal one” (Reference Bentham1798, Vol. 31, 180). Second, Industry Houses are to be located on waste land (heaths, bogs, moors, and/or common land). He writes of the need for “land, waste in preference” (Reference Bentham1798, Vol. 30, 91), that “waste is the sort of land the purchase of which will cost the least money and be productive of least disturbance to existing interests,” and there is “waste and common land … sufficient enough for the maintenance of the stock of hands” (Bentham Reference Bentham and Quinn2010, 16–17). Third, segregation is introduced in Book 2 under “Separation and Association.” Separation he argues is key for reasons of health, morals, decency, security, and education (Reference Bentham1798, Vol. 30, 105) Paola Rudan argues separation of the indigent in Industry Houses from the poor in society was necessary to ensure submission to moral and social codes (Reference Rudan2016, 53) and prevent sympathy arising between them that creates insecurity (50). Thus, consistent with domestic colonialism, segregation from society is fundamental to beginning to break paupers free from bad habits like idleness.
Bentham goes further to defend segregation between groups within the panopticon, linked to care and education, particularly the disabled/mentally ill “for appropriate care, the insane in an establishment by themselves … the deaf and dumb, in a set of appropriate establishments” (Reference Bentham1798, Vol. 30, 109). Groups of people should be housed in proximity so as to not create “inconvenience,” for example, “raving lunatics” placed next to “deaf and dumb” or “within view of the abodes of the blind, place melancholy and silent lunaticks, or the shockingly deformed” (110). Whether the disability is physical, mental, or sensory, the disabled are housed separately from the nondisabled but near to each other, creating a second layer of internal segregation. Bentham’s discussion of disability is important because segregation of the disabled from society and others is a long standing ableist premise. He is thus the first to defend segregated “farm colonies” for the disabled and mentally ill. His pauper panopticon, like later farm colonies, thus exists at the intersection of colonialism and ableism.
The fourth way in which his pauper panopticon plan is a substantive manifestation of domestic colonialism is his emphasis on economic benefits in the form of profits. Virtually all domestic colonialists defend colonies based on the revenues to be produced via labor as opposed to relief, workhouses, asylums, or foreign colonies, which only drain public money. Bentham argues his pauper panopticons, overseen by a national joint stock company, will be funded by private investors rather than the public purse. The “management of … the poor” must be “vested in one authority” and all “expenses charged upon one fund” (Reference Bentham1798, Vol. 30, 90–91). This must be “a Joint-stock Company under some such name as that of the NATIONAL CHARITY COMPANY” rather than “a branch of Administration such as the Treasury Board.” Wealthy investors buy shares in the NCC and then realize future returns. Bentham argues a joint stock company is better (Adam Smith as his touchstone) because “the burden of raising capital [is] annihilated, the contribution being transferred from the unwilling to the willing” and the “probability of thrifty management in every respect greater” (Vol. 30, 91). The lure for investors is 500,000 paupers including children until 21Footnote 8 will be engaged in unpaid agrarian labor on cheap, enclosed, waste land. Quinn notes, “the option of taking shares in the NCC would allow the owners of the land to share in the productivity gains expected from the intensive agriculture undertaken by the Company on previously unexploited land” (Reference Michael2010, lxvii). Bentham argues the only public body involved in the pauper panopticon is the BOA, who simply reports to Parliament, Cabinet, and King on behalf of the National Charity Company but never directs daily activities:
The Board of Agriculture as a department of Government to operate as a Board of Controul over the agricultural proceedings of the Company, so far as concerns the reporting opinions to the King and Council, and to Parliament, as to the national consequences of any extensive measure, but without the power of directing [activities within the Industry Houses]. (Vol. 31, 58, emphasis added)
Bentham is clear, the BOA is to domestic colonies what the Board of Trade is to foreign ones: “[BOA] being thus to the Company’s agriculture, what the Board of Trade is to trade” (58–59).
Book 5: Bentham’s Explicit Endorsement of Domestic Colonization
While the above analysis demonstrates that Books 1–4 of the Outline/PMI are a substantive defense of domestic colonialism, in Book 5 (first published in 2010), Bentham explicitly calls his own proposal a form of domestic colonization. In Chapter 2, in a section entitled “Advantages of this Domestic Colony over Foreign Ones” he writes, “To colonize at home” is “advice I have seen somewhere given in print” referring to Sinclair’s and Young’s Annals, adding to adopt the plan in question would really be—to colonize at home.” He then lists the ways in which his domestic colonies are better than foreign ones even if public opinion disagrees: “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” (Reference Bentham and Quinn2010, 320). He argues that profits will stay in Britain with domestic colonies, whereas imperial colonies governed from afar are expensive and require “armies for their defense” and “lives and treasure expended in the conquest and defense” of them (Reference Bentham and Quinn2010, 321).
Jeremy Bentham is thus the first to provide a comprehensive defense of domestic colonialism contrary to the literature on colonies that identifies Johannes van den Bosch as its first proponent (Arneil Reference Arneil2017; Schrauwers Reference Schrauwers2001; Stoler Reference Stoler2011; Toth Reference Toth2019). The Belgian and Dutch governments’ submission to UNESCO (in support of van den Bosch’s colonies being designated a World Cultural Heritage Site) is one exception. While the authors claim the “Colonies of Benevolence were the first example in history of a coherent, large scale, longstanding system of agricultural home colonies for poverty relief … [that became] an international archetype … for the concrete implementation of new colonies such as Mettray (France), Arbeiter Colonies (Germany), Salvation Army Colonies” (UNESCO 2017, 48), they also argue Bentham might have been the “source of inspiration” (166–167), as his proposal had so many similarities with the Dutch colonies and his ideas were very well known in Europe.
Bentham may have originated the theory and van den Bosch the practice, but domestic colonies would be important throughout nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Europe and beyond, as leading progressive thinkers embraced them to solve virtually every kind of domestic, social problem in rapidly industrializing societies. As I have shown, (Arneil Reference Arneil2017) labor colonies for the poor, farm colonies for the disabled, and utopian colonies for racial/religious minorities were proposed and/or implemented by Alexis de Tocqueville, William Booth, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Frederick Douglass, Peter Kropotkin, Leo Tolstoy, and Charles Bernstein, among others, using similar justifications originally advanced by John Locke in his seventeenth-century defense of settler colonialism based on his agrarian labor theory of property (Arneil Reference Arneil1996) but applied domestically in eighteenth–twentieth-century Europe, North America, and beyond.Footnote 9 In all cases, colonies were defended in terms of their ethical benefits (improve people) and economic benefits (revenues) by transforming the idle and irrational into the industrious and rational as well as waste land into productive soil via agrarian labor.
Pauper Panopticon as Colonies: Challenging and Expanding Foucault’s Panopticism
Understanding pauper panopticons to be domestic colonies provides a new lens to analyze panopticism.Footnote 10 While the prison panopticon is far more famous in the scholarly literature than pauper panopticons (due to Foucault),Footnote 11 Bentham understands his prison panopticon to be a pilot project for his larger pauper plan. In a 1797 brouillon Footnote 12 he writes,
Penitentiary Panopticon Experiment to be tried for a year. J.B. if then found deserving of confidence to undertake a Poor Panopticon on public accountFootnote 13—accounting on oath for the fidelity of the expenditure. (Brouillon January 5 1797, cited in Quinn, Reference Michael2001, xliv)
Neither panopticon was implemented but, as Quinn notes, the prison would have paved the way for the Industry House: “Contrary to Bentham’s firm expectations at this time, the plan for a penitentiary panopticon was never executed and so did not pave the way for the building of a panopticon poor house” (Quinn Reference Michael2001, xliv). Given how central the pauper panopticon was to Bentham, David Lieberman wonders why so little scholarly attention is paid to it.
Discussion of panopticism … has largely and unfortunately ignored the case of pauper panopticons. As an exercise in inspection house architecture, “Pauper Management Improved” dwarfed the prison project and demands attention in any consideration of this element in Bentham’s thought. (Lieberman Reference Lieberman2013)
It is indeed puzzling that Bentham’s domestic colonization scheme receives so little attention in the literature—on either panopticism or colonialism—as it lies at the intersection of both. Bentham’s pauper panopticon builds on but also challenges Foucault’s analysis of panopticism.
First, the pauper panopticon engages in disciplinary power in exactly the way Foucault analyzes it—the principle of “inspection” via architecture is key. “The major effect of the Panopticon [is] to induce in the inmate a sense of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power” (Foucault Reference Foucault1977, 201). Bentham thus argues,
Without the benefit of inspection, I would not be responsible for the conduct or condition of a single individual … A plan of architecture, governed by a new and simple principle—the central -inspection principle—General form, circular; or for cheapness circularly polygonal… . The governed, “the paupers of all ages and classes” occupying the several divisions at the circumference; the governors (the officers) the central part termed the Lodge, or Inspection Lodge. (Reference Bentham1798, Vol. 31, 105, 117)
Bentham scholar Janet Semple concurs with Foucault that the panopticon is “an instrument of power to subjugate men, of mind over mind, of endless invisible surveillance … in which Bentham did envisage experiments in education, training and medicine” (Semple Reference Semple1993, 113).
But pauper panopticons as colonies also challenge and expand Foucault’s analysis. First agrarian labor and waste land as central features of Bentham’s proposed pauper panopticon are all but absent from Foucault’s account of disciplinary power. As I have argued elsewhere with respect to Mettray Colony, “Foucault is unable to provide a coherent explanation of … why colonies existed as colonies and had the characteristics they did, in particular agrarian labour as key to daily life.”Footnote 14 In his analysis of Bentham’s panopticism, Foucault claims such disciplinary power is “dependent upon bodies and what they do,” but he also argues it is not concerned with “the Earth and its products” nor “wealth and commodities”—which are both features, he suggests, of sovereign rather than disciplinary power (Reference Foucault and Gordon1980, 104). While Foucault is correct Bentham is concerned with improvement of people in his colonies, improvement of land is as important.
Which brings me to the second important way Bentham’s colonialism challenges and expands Foucault’s analysis of panopticism. Cultivation of waste land is important specifically because this is where the profits will be created. While Locke may have been the first scholar to advance an economic defense of settler colonialism rooted in agrarian labor on waste land in seventeenth century America as he claims it will create wealth for colonizers (Arneil Reference Arneil1996), Bentham likewise argues profits will be created in his domestic colony via free (child) labor and cheap waste land for investors in the National Charity Company. A colonial lens thus brings key economic dimensions to the forefront of Bentham’s panopticons—“wealth and commodities” rooted in the “Earth and its products”—the very characteristics Foucault deems as not central to panopticism in his own analysis.
Thus, Bentham’s pauper panopticon is different from his prison panopticon, and even though Foucault and Foucauldian scholars focus on the latter, Bentham saw it as a precursor to his much larger pauper panopticon plan. Foucault’s disciplinary power provides insights into the “improvement” of people via discipline/inspection, but his panopticism is challenged/expanded in two key ways through colonialism—improvement of land via labor is as important as improvement of paupers, exactly because of the economic profits produced by cultivation.
Jeremy Bentham and Settler Colonialism: The 1831 Colonization Company Proposal
Bentham was a lifelong critic of imperialism. In essays like “Emancipate their Colonies!” (Reference Bentham1830) and “Rid Yourselves of Ultramaria” (Reference Bentham and Schofield1995) he denounces French and Spanish imperial colonies, respectively. And while he critiques British imperial/penal colonies, as discussed, in Book V of the Outline; his fully developed critique of British transportation and penal colonies is articulated in the first six folios of Panopticon versus New South Wales and other Writings on Australia (Reference Causer, Schofield, Causer and Schofield2021), edited by Tim Causer and Philip Schofield. These critiques are both “expressions of his philosophical objections to convict transportation and the penal colony of New South Wales” and “products of his fury at the abandonment by the British government of his panopticon penitentiary scheme” (Causer Reference Causer2019, 1).
In the first of his essays on Australia, “New Wales” written in 1791, Bentham argues British policy is not a “colonisation plan” but “mere barren transportation” by the metropole. (Reference Bentham, Causer and Schofield2021d, 6). In three letters between 1802 and 1803 to Lord Pelham, Home Secretary, Bentham attacks overseas colonies as failing to achieve the four purposes of penal justice identified by William Blackstone or his additional fifth purpose: “Economy” (Reference Bentham, Causer and Schofield2021c, 7–8). On this last point he argues transportation, penal colonies and imperialism drain the British economy, particularly compared with the economic benefits of his “Panopticon plan [where] one fourth part of the produce of each man’s labour would without any additional expence to Government have been employed” (8). Finally, in the essay, “A Plea for the Constitution” Bentham argues overseas penal colonies are unconstitutional (Reference Bentham, Causer and Schofield2021a). Gascoigne claims Bentham was so central to the British debate over penal colonies that supporters and critics defined themselves against him: “It was Bentham who chiefly determined the terms of the debate about the nature of punishment within Britain and its colonies … advocates and critics of transportation … inevitably tended to couch their arguments against a Benthamite background” (Reference Gascoigne2002, 125).
While Bentham expressed a life-long opposition to penal/imperial colonies, in the last year of his life (1831) he champions a settler colony in Australia in the newly published Colonization Company Proposal (Proposal). Like Sinclair and Young shape Bentham’s Outline in Reference Bentham1798, Edward Wakefield plays a similar role here. Claiming Bentham had a “prejudice” against colonization “on the ground of the mischievous loss of capital which it might occasion to the mother-country” (Reference Wakefield1833, 102), Wakefield “credits himself with persuading Bentham to regard colonization as a work of the greatest utility” (Causer and Schofield Reference Causer, Schofield, Causer and Schofield2021, 4). Bentham seems to agree in a letter to Joseph Hume as he has “thrown [his] mantle over” to Wakefield as a “most valuable man” and “shall turn him to good account.”Footnote 15 Bentham’s proposal, in turn, is described by Wakefield as a “treatise … by one of the wisest and best of mankind” (Reference Wakefield1833, 104).
Colonization Company Proposal: Paupers, Waste Land and Cultivation
Bentham’s Proposal, Causer and Schofield argue, “was a response to a plan proposed by the National Colonization Society to establish a colony on the south coast of Australia … the members of the Society had been inspired by … Wakefield’s plan of “systematic colonization” (Reference Causer, Schofield, Causer and Schofield2021, 2) and thus builds upon the Statement of the Principles and Objects of a Proposed National Society for the Cure and Prevention of Pauperism, by Means of Systematic Colonization attributed to Wakefield, which lays out “a general system of colonization founded on the main principles of Selection, Concentration and the Sale of Waste Land, for the purposes of Emigration” (Reference Wakefield1830, 69). The settler colony in Bentham’s Proposal mirrors his domestic colony in several ways. Pauperism is the target in both cases with the common solution to segregate/transport paupers to waste land, engage them in agrarian labor to become industrious and create profits, overseen by a joint stock company—the subtitle is “Proposal for the Formation of a Joint-Stock Company” (Bentham Reference Bentham, Causer and Schofield2021b, 1). He speaks of waste “lands … uninhabited, unoccupied and nothing worth” (27) that need to be acquired, properly managed, and cultivated to create profits. As Wakefield notes, “In order that Colonization … should be a profitable employment of capital, it is necessary to preserve a due proportion between people and land. This can be done only by the price required for all waste land”(Bentham Reference Causer, Schofield, Causer and Schofield2021, 38).Footnote 16 Thus, the Proposal like the Outline/PMI is anchored in English paupers cultivating cheap waste land to improve their lives and create profits for investors in a joint stock company.
Inducements and Ends for Different Groups in the Colony
Bentham identifies three groups in his colony: settler colonialists (includes both paupers and settlers with capital), founders, and “constituted authorities.” The goal is “maximization of the happiness of the persons [with] determinate specific end or ends in view” (5). He analyzes what the inducements and “special ends” might be for each of these three groups. The goal for paupers is transformation from idleness to industriousness: “1. Transferring individuals, in an unlimited multitude, from a state of indigence to a state of affluence,” (6) and improvement of minds and bodies: “immigrants are not to have merely the means of existence … but, well-being … in respect of the body as in respect of the mind” (5). But the ultimate inducement for pauper settlers is a promise of private property. On arrival they are “not to have possession … of any portion of land … the wages of their labour … paid to them by employers” their “sole means” of livelihood (21); the “ulterior inducement” is “assurance of becoming proprietors of land … by the savings which it will be in their power to make [through] wages of their labour” (20).
The ends for founders and British citizens are fewer taxes, expanded trade, and profits. “Immediate relief” comes from lower taxes in the “Mother Country” as costs of indigence are reduced. “Affording to … the remaining … population of the Mother Country, relief, from the pressure of … continually increasing indigence” as well as an “increase [in] the market for the produce of the Mother Country” (6). Perhaps most importantly, investors will make money via “a constantly increasing rate of interest and profit on the capital advanced by them by the purchase of their respective shares” (7). For local colonial authorities, the end is governing without interference by the metropole. Bentham provides assurances via his principle of “vicinity maximizing” that colonial authorities will be self-governing, consistent with his life-long critique of imperial metropoles ruling colonies from afar. Wakefield quotes from Bentham’s Proposal in his own essay, “That they would chuse to govern themselves cannot be doubted by any one, who is at all acquainted with the evils of being governed from a distance. Bentham well describes how difficult it is for subject colonies to obtain any redress” (Reference Wakefield1833, 244).
One striking feature of the Proposal is Bentham’s identification of Liberia as the ideal settler colony in his section on the “Proposed Management and Government in the Colony.” Bentham comments, “On this occasion, a single word Liberia speaks Volumes” (24). With no reference to the racial nature of the colony (separation of the races was key to its creation), Bentham uses Liberia as a model for two reasons. First, it is financed privately at no cost to the metropole: “in the foundation of Liberia, no expense has there been to the Mother Country” (24). Second, it is governed by the American Colonization Society and local authorities, not the state. Thus, the American government does not “intermeddle with the business of Government” but leaves “matters to be settled between Founders and Settlers” in Liberia (25). He concludes if the British metropole tries to rule as an “absentee” power in the colony, rebellion will ensue, which in turn, may lead to an “army [sent] to the Rebels in Australasia … to conquer them?” and then adds, sarcastically, “would quite as soon be conquered be the Moon” (28).
Bentham’s Views on Indigenous Peoples in the Proposal
While Bentham identifies various groups living in the colony and analyzes their interests and ends, he makes little mention of indigenous peoples or their interests. As scholars of settler colonialism have pointed out, Europeans writing about colonies often render indigenous peoples invisible as they frame colonization exclusively as a relationship between European metropoles and settler colonialists (Barker Reference Barker2012; Nichols Reference Nichols2013; Veracini Reference Veracini2010; Wolfe Reference Wolfe2006). Bentham is no exception. In a powerful article that addresses this overlooked aspect of his thought, Zoe Laidlaw concludes there is, in general, an “absence of the indigenous peoples of Australia, the Americas and Africa” in his essays on colonization (Reference Laidlaw2019, 1).
They are not completely absent, however, with a few telling, profoundly negative, references to indigenous peoples, who are constituted primarily as threats to settlers’ property. In his first letter to Pelham, he refers to “native inhabitants” of New South Wales as “quarrelsome,” “brutes in human shape, the very dregs even of savage life … prepared at all times … for plundering the industrious” (Reference Bentham, Causer and Schofield2021c, 32). Both their absence and the highly negative references here are surprising given Bentham drew “extensively on the recently published Account of the English Colony in New South Wales by David Collins, the colony’s first Judge Advocate” (Causer and Schofield Reference Causer, Schofield, Causer and Schofield2021, iv) where he describes his experiences in Australia from 1786–1796. Unlike Bentham, Collins views the “native inhabitants” as central to the colonies and includes 458 references to them in his Account. He also repeatedly describes indigenous peoples as friendly and identifies most of the violence occurring in the colonies to be the result of settlers’ aggression and indigenous peoples responding in kind. Ultimately Collins concludes of the colonies, “the reader of the preceding narrative will have seen … friendly intercourse with the natives … was established.”Footnote 17 If Collins is Bentham’s main source, why are indigenous peoples either absent or, when referred to, invariably violent, savage, or hostile in his own folios?
In the Proposal, specifically, Bentham has only three references (two in marginal notes) to indigenous peoples, all of which ascribe violence or hostility. As minimal as they are, these statements are the most important Bentham makes in this essay as they underline the profoundly negative implications of settler colonialism for people living in large numbers on the land to be colonized. All three appear in the section on disadvantages of “dispersion” (his proposal being built on an “entirely new principle … the Vicinity-maximizing or Dispersion-preventing principle” (Reference Bentham, Causer and Schofield2021b, 1).Footnote 18
The first disadvantage of dispersion is “insecurity against damage to person and property from the hostility of the uncivilized aborigines” (9). Disadvantage 13 is “procuring repayment by seizure of effects” where Bentham writes in the margins, “quarrels with aborigines” (10). In both cases, indigenous peoples are constituted as hostile or quarrelsome in relation to settler land or property. Brenna Bhandar argues, “For Bentham [it is] important to understand the centrality of security to … property … the law must protect the owner… . Savagery, defined by the lack of respect for property is that which property law must guard itself against… . The figure of the Savage runs throughout Bentham’s theorization of property” (Reference Bhandar2018, 101). The construction of indigenous peoples as threats to property is inherent to settler colonialism dating back to Locke who rejects imperial conquestFootnote 19 as the basis for dispossession and instead embraces the colonial principle of agrarian labor on ‘empty’ land as the basis of settlers’ right to property. What follows is the removal of indigenous peoples from their own territory. As Locke first argues, the chief purpose of the state is to secure the private property against those who threaten it including indigenous peoples who resist dispossession of their own territories. This same colonial principle of indigenous peoples resisting settlement is at the heart of Bentham’s Proposal.
Extirpation and Van Diemen’s Land:Footnote 20 Segregation and Genocide
This leads to the final and most chilling reference to indigenous peoples in Bentham’s Proposal in the margins of the first reference to “aborigines” as “hostile and “uncivilized” where he adds, “In Van Dieman’s land it has been determined absolutely to extirpate the natives” (Reference Bentham, Causer and Schofield2021b, 9). Bentham’s seeming acceptanceFootnote 21 of settler colonial authorities’ right to determine that natives are to be removed entirely and/or killed occurs at the end of the so called “Black War” in Tasmania (1824–1831). This was the “militarisation of the entire community in the formation of the “the Line” … a chain of armed men to sweep across the island in an effort to capture any remaining islanders and expel them” (Lawson Reference Lawson2014, 19). Given Bentham’s defense of settler colonial authority and no imperial interference, it is worth noting this policy was driven by settler authorities on the ground in defiance of an imperial metropole trying to restrain them. “The Colonial Office warned against extermination of the islanders … the British government continued to urge the settler and the colonial government to act with restraint in their dealings with the islanders” (Lawson Reference Lawson2014, 19). Bentham’s governance model provides colonial authorities the power to determine a policy of extirpation even if imperial powers ask them to desist. An anti-imperial/pro-colonial framework can worsen the situation for indigenous peoples viewed on the ground as obstacles to the end of settlement and property.
The policy of extirpation in Tasmania may also provide a reason why Liberia is a model for Bentham, as both are versions of profound racial segregation. Liberia was the product of an attempt at African American extirpation, specifically freed slaves, from America. As Frederick Douglass says of Liberia, “Colonization … to us, means ultimate extermination” (Reference Douglass and Foner2000, 186). Consider this comment in comparison with Lieutenant Governor George Arthur’s justification for extirpation in van Diemen’s Land in 1828: “I am … convinced of the absolute necessity of separating the Aborigines altogether from the white inhabitants.”Footnote 22 Arthur’s policies ultimately led to the near extermination of all indigenous peoples in Tasmania: “When Britons arrived in Tasmania in 1803, they found 4,000–15,000 Aborigines. By 1835, fewer than 400 “full descent” Aboriginal Tasmanians remained” (Madley Reference Madley2008, 78). They were “victims of a conscious policy of genocide” (Ryan Reference Ryan1996, 255; Moses Reference Moses2000). Ben Madley (Reference Madley2008) provides a detailed analysis of how extirpation fits the UN definition concluding, “Tasmania under British rule was clearly a site of genocide” (106). Thus, Bentham’s colonial proposal rooted in settler property in waste land via agrarian labor with indigenous peoples constituted as hostile and colonial authorities with the right to act independently of the metropole including determining to extirpate indigenous peoples, creates an ideological foundation for genocide.
It is important to note that inherent in Bentham’s colonialism is also a productive and disciplinary power that seeks to transform the bodies and minds of the “idle” from the inside out. While his focus was on English paupers, this principle could also be applied to ‘idle’ and ‘custom bound’ indigenous peoples in Australia. Indeed as colonial policy evolves in Tasmania, the original policy of extirpation at the beginning of the nineteenth century gives way to a policy of assimilation of indigenous children towards the middle and end, as they are segregated and “re-educated” in colonial institutions rooted in the same colonial principles of “improving” minds/bodies that Bentham first championed. Genocide is inherent in this colonial process as a “stolen generation” of indigenous children in Tasmania are removed from their communities and placed in residential institutions. “In 1997, a government inquiry [National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children] found that Australia’s forcible removals of Aboriginal children … “could properly be labeled “genocidal” (Madley Reference Madley2008, 77).
In drawing this ideological links, I am not arguing Bentham is directly responsible for extirpation or for colonial institutions for indigenous children (the latter created long after he died). What I am suggesting is the defense of settler property and the internal, productive form of power he champions in his defense of colonialism (in a long line of colonialist thinkers) creates a specific kind of power unleashed in practice in colonial institutions and processes. Put simply, extirpation is a colonial genocide rooted in the “improvement” of land; assimilation in residential schools is a colonial genocide rooted in the “improvement” of people.
Colonialism and Imperialism in Bentham’s Political Theory
The preceding analysis of colonialism in Bentham’s writings (domestic and settler) brings me back to the overarching distinction I began with—colonial versus imperial power. Historians of political thought, including Bentham scholars, need to distinguish between colonialism and imperialism contrary to contemporary scholarship, which views them as synonymous or almost impossible to distinguish.Footnote 23 There are, of course, many ways in which colonialism and imperialism overlap and intersect conceptually and historically. First, colonies are the very vehicles through which empires spread themselves around the globe; second, the nineteenth century imperial civilizing mission directed at “improving” custom-bound peoples (Mantena Reference Mantena2010) was very similar to the principle of improvement in colonialism; and, finally, modern European imperialism and settler colonialism are both rooted in white supremacy and power. To distinguish between them is important for it allows us to analyze the particular kind of power unleashed by colonialism rooted in its own ideological commitments and the specific effects on those subject to it.
One useful place to begin in distinguishing the two concepts from each other is Edward Said who defines imperialism as “the practice, the theory and the attitudes of a dominating metropolitan center ruling a distant territory” and colonialism as the “implanting of settlements on a distant territory” (Reference Said1993, 9). Based on our preceding analysis, the definition of colonialism must also include the principles of segregation, agrarian labor, and improvement, and I also expand the idea of territory to mean not just “distant” or overseas lands but domestic waste land, as manifested in Bentham’s pauper panopticon. With these definitions in mind, we turn to the recent scholarly literature on Bentham’s views on colonization and colonies.Footnote 24
R. N. Ghosh (Reference Ghosh1963), Donald Winch (Reference Winch1965), and Lea Campos Boralevi (Reference Campos Boralevi1984) critique the accepted wisdom that Bentham is an imperialist (advanced by Eric Stokes Reference Stokes1959) and emphasize his ambivalence and/or critical attitude to colonization. More recent contributions by Jennifer Pitts, Peter Cain, and David Armitage concur that Bentham is ambivalent but push the case further to argue he is anti-colonialist: he is “critical … toward colonial rule” and critiques “British colonialism with the same disapproval that he did French and Spanish” (Pitts Reference Pitts2003, 202, 209), he is a “sceptic about colonialism” (Armitage Reference Armitage2011, 82), and he makes “one of the greatest contributions to anti-colonial literature anywhere in the Western World” (Cain Reference Cain2011, 24).
None of these authors distinguish colonialism from imperialism in their analyses which is unfortunate because if one did, Bentham would be best described as pro-colonialist and anti-imperialist (recognizing, like others, ambivalence and evolution in his thought). He is pro-colonialist in the sense that he champions, as discussed, domestic colonies—an aspect of his colonialism absent from previous scholarship (because colonies are assumed to be, by definition, foreign/overseas). Thus all domestic colonies proposed or created from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, including Bentham’s, disappear from the historical understanding of the term and the thinkers who champion them, like Bentham, are not defined as colonialists. He also champions settler colonies in the Proposal—using a model similar to the Outline/PMI. The colonialism he defends includes both domestic and settler colonies, both targeting pauperism.
Bentham’s anti-imperialism must also be specified. When he critiques imperialism, he is first rejecting, like Locke, that imperial conquest can be the basis upon which European states claim rights over foreign lands. In “Emancipate Your Colonies” he denounces conquest as “vulgar ambition” and the opposite of emancipation. He also critiques imperialism in the central sense of imperial metropoles dominating over/interfering with settler colonial authorities from afar. He asks the French metropole, “colonists … where is your right to govern them?” (Reference Bentham1830, 1–2). He also critiques France, Spain, and Britain for the enormous expense of colonies and their defense. In the case of Britain, he contrasts imperialism negatively in most of his writings, in comparison with the benefits of his panopticon/domestic colony. Finally he critiques imperialism for its financially draining dimensions.
Bentham’s settler colonialism manifested in his Proposal, which first requires tracts of “waste” land to cultivate in Australia, the settlement of ever growing numbers of paupers along with his governance model, which empowers colonial authorities against imperial metropoles, brings into sharp relief the profoundly negative implications for indigenous peoples of his anti-imperial/pro-settler colonial perspective in a way the previous literature on Bentham and colonies has not done. As Laidlaw comments, “the absence of the indigenous peoples of Australia, the Americas and Africa … from the scholarly debate about [Bentham’s] writings is startling” (Reference Laidlaw2019, 1). She suggests early scholars “accept too readily [his] characterisation of lands subjected to settler colonization as previously ‘unsettled’ or ‘vacant’”: (1) More recent scholars, she argues, focus on imperial dependencies in Asia and universalize his arguments there to all colonized people. Conclusions that Bentham has “first and foremost a close appreciation of particular people and practises in all of their variety and difference” (Engelmann and Pitts Reference Engelmann and Pitts2011, 59) or that he “declines to typecast societies as savage or civilized” (Pitts Reference Pitts, Englemann, Schofield, Lieberman, Pitts and Canuel2011, 485–86) are not true for indigenous peoples. As Laidlaw concludes, if we do not analyze his comments on indigenous peoples, as few and far between as they may be, we “risk allowing India’s inhabitants to represent all those who are colonised [and] miss Bentham’s denial of the existence, humanity and rights of indigenous peoples who stood in the way of settler colonialism” (Reference Laidlaw2019, 5). Thus, recognizing colonialism as distinct from imperialism in Bentham’s writings creates a more complete and negative understanding of his views of colonized people.
Which brings me back to the overarching theoretical binary I began with—colonial, versus imperial power—and how they manifest themselves on those subject to them in Bentham’s thought. As imperialism requires a metropole that conquers, dominates, and rules over foreign people and lands from above and afar, the primary requirement for imperial subjects is obedience to the metropole. As colonialism rejects conquest and domination from afar but empowers colonial authorities at home and abroad to improve people and land, those subject to colonialism are transported/removed and required to change themselves from within; their bodies are to be “improved” from idleness to industriousness and their minds from custom bound/irrational to more rational. Imperialism and colonialism thus map on to a binary of external, repressive power versus internal, disciplinary, and productive power.
And this distinction is important for understanding what happens in practice to those subject to colonialism in colonial processes and institutions over centuries. While colonialism is often embraced by progressive (liberal, socialist) thinkers throughout the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries (drawn to words like labor, happiness, and improvement over repression, conquest, and domination), the power inherent within this ideology has been devastating in a specific way to those living within colonial institutions and/or subject to colonial processes. Had Bentham’s domestic colonies been built, the internalized power of Foucauldian disciplinary practices and the colonial imperative to improve bodies as well as minds through labor would almost certainly have led to physical and mental abuse of those living within them. Such abuse is inherent to the ideology itself, as vulnerable populations are segregated—put beyond oversight from society—and required to change themselves from within, creating very fertile ideological ground for violation of both physical and mental boundaries. Indeed, the history of abuse in labor and farm colonies attests to this consequence historically (Arneil Reference Arneil2017; Toth Reference Toth2019). In the case of settler colonialism, the construction of “waste” land and settler property through cultivation constitutes indigenous peoples as obstacles and/or threats to settlement/property and as such are removed/extirpated by local settler colonial authorities. Colonialism also led to indigenous children in colonial institutions—what are called residential, boarding, or industrial “schools”—being subject to widespread physical, mental, and sexual abuse as well as genocide again rooted in the principles of segregation and improvement from within.
Drawing these connections from theory to practice is not to argue Bentham is directly responsible for such abuse; rather, it is to acknowledge his defense of colonialism specifically, anchored in a productive, internal, and disciplinary power that must transform both people and land from within (as distinct from an imperial, external, repressive power exercised from afar, even as the two intersect and overlap historically and conceptually) has long-reaching implications in both theory and practice. Within this larger argument, I advanced three further claims: Bentham was the original defender of domestic colonialism; his pauper panopticons build upon Foucault’s productive power but, seen through a colonial lens, also challenge and expand the meaning of panopticism to include the political economy of profits via cultivation of land; and, finally, that his settler and domestic colony proposals mirror each other as solutions to pauperism rooted in the economic and ethical “benefits” of segregation and engagement of paupers in agrarian labor on waste land.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank SSHRC Canada, Clare Hall Cambridge, and the Bentham Project at UCL, particularly Michael Quinn whose two-volume Jeremy Bentham: Writings on the Poor Laws (Reference Michael2001; Reference Michael2010) were critically important along with his extraordinary insights in writing and conversation; Philip Schofield and Tim Causer, who shared prepublication materials on Bentham’s writings on Australia; Iain MacKinnon, who identified Sinclair as an early practitioner of domestic colonization, Geertje Bernaerts, who identified Jeremy Bentham as a domestic colonialist; and the editors and reviewers who provided very useful comments and feedback.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The author declares no ethical issues or conflicts of interest in this research.
ETHICAL STANDARDS
The author affirms this research did not involve human subjects.
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