Wakefield, Edward Gibbon
Wakefield, Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862), an expert on colonization, was born in London. He attended Westminster School between 1808 and 1810 and a secondary school in Edinburgh from 1810 to 1812, exhibiting in both institutions “signs of an intractable disposition” (Carlyle 1899). When he failed in a brief try at diplomacy and his first marriage was terminated by his wife’s death, Wakefield endeavored to repair his fortunes by tricking a schoolgirl heiress into marriage. Her infuriated relatives succeeded in annulling the union and in having Wakefield punished with a three-year term of imprisonment, which he duly served in London’s Newgate Prison between 1826 and 1829. Enforced leisure enabled Wakefield to compose his powerful Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis (1831), a treatise along Benthamite lines arguing that what deters crime is the certainty of apprehension, not the severity of punishment. More important, his prison experience set Wakefield to speculating, initially about his own emigration from England and subsequently about the whole subject of colonization. His Letter from Sydney (1829), published anonymously at the end of his prison sentence, purported to be an actual communication from an English emigrant in Australia. Although Wakefield had not visited Australia, his tone was sufficiently plausible and the contents sufficiently detailed to win the book some celebrity. Wakefield’s View of the Art of Colonization (1849) was a longer and more polemical work, but A Letter from Sydney contained the essential features of the Wakefield system of colonization. In it, he argued that the three correct principles governing new settlement were, first, the termination of free grants of land and the setting of a “sufficient price” on unoccupied territory; second, the use of the sales proceeds to finance the movement of voluntary settlers, properly distributed by sex, age, and skill, to new colonies; and third, the grant of self-government once colonial population reached fifty thousand.
As a theorist of population, emigration, and colonization, Wakefield displayed considerable powers of originality and exposition. Indeed, he appears to have anticipated two key theoretical concepts much in vogue among nineteenth-century students of economic development—the strategic significance of social overhead capital and the desirability of balanced economic growth. The original edition of Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848) quoted Wakefield as the recognized authority on colonization, and the 1852 edition cited emigration from Ireland in the wake of the potato famine as a grim demonstration of the accuracy of Wakefield’s analysis.
If anything, Wakefield was still more successful as a colonial organizer than he was as a theorist. The South Australia Association was founded in 1834 to promote Wakefield’s views, and after the society had won the support of the duke of Wellington, Parliament in the same year passed legislation that included provisions for the sale of land at a fixed price of five shillings per acre and for the use of the proceeds to subsidize the movement of English settlers to South Australia. In 1838
Wakefield accompanied Lord Durham to Canada and had a large share in the writing of Durham’s famous Report on the Affairs of British North America, the basis of Canadian advance to self-government. In the 1840s Wakefield played an active role in the colonization of New Zealand. Between 1852 and 1854 he served as a highly influential adviser to the government of the young colony. The last years of his life, marred by illness, Wakefield spent in retirement.
Robert Lekachman
[See alsocapital, social overhead.]
WORKS BY WAKEFIELD
(1829) 1929 A Letter From Sydney, the Principal Town of Australasia, & Other Writings on Colonization. London and Toronto: Dent; New York: Dutton.
(1831) 1832 Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis; With an Appendix, Concerning Murder for the Sale of the Dead Body. 2d ed. London: Wilson.
(1849) 1914 A View of the Art of Colonization: In Letters Between a Statesman and a Colonist. Oxford: Clarendon.
SUPPLEMENTARY BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bloomfield, Paul 1961 Edward Gibbon Wakefield: Builder of the British Commonwealth. London: Longmans.
Carlyle, Edward I. (1899) 1938 Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862). Volume 20, pages 449-452 in Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford Univ. Press.
Mill, John Stuart (1848) 1961 Principles of Political Economy. New ed. Edited by W. J. Ashley. New York: Kelley.