William Thomas Thornton

In August 1836, after having work experience abroad with relatives, Thornton obtained a clerkship in the East India House at its Leadenhall Street headquarters, London. According to his own account, Thornton was swayed towards the East India Company by a personal encounter with the then-chairman of the company, Sir James Carnac.

In December 1837, he was transferred to the marine branch of the secretary's office. This allowed him to have more time to focus on his other pursuits, particularly his economic studies and work. The position had reportedly become vacant due to the untimely death of John Stuart Mill's father, James Mill.

According to Thornton's obituary of Mill, Mill was largely responsible for Thornton's appointment to his father's old position:

"The death of Mr. Mill senior, in 1836, had occasioned a vacancy at the bottom of the examiner's office, to which I was appointed through the kindness of Sir James Carnac, then chairman of the company, in whose gift it was. Within a few months, however, I was transferred to a newly created [marine] branch of the secretary office."[4]

Thornton continued to elaborate about his position as a clerk in the examiner's office and compared it with that of Mill's experiences at the East India Company:

"According to the ordinary course of things in those days, the newly-appointed junior would have had nothing to do, except a little abstracting, indexing, and researching, or pretending to search, into records; but young Mill was almost immediately set to indite despatches to the governments of the three Indian Presidencies, on what, in India House phraseology, were distinguished as "political" subjects—subjects, that is, for the most part growing out of the relations of the said governments with 'native' states of foreign potentates. This continued to be his business almost to the last."[4]

Records show that Thornton did not draft any dispatches in his early career, or if did, he didn't sign off or initial any at the office. It's probable that his early work at the examiner's office consisted of the more menial tasks, mostly administrative and clerical work, like retrieving correspondence, writing précis and filing documents.[5]

In 1838, after moving to the marine branch of the examiner's office, Thornton finally made a large leap in his financial situation from an un-salaried probationary period with an 80-pound-a-year stipend to earning a very respectable annual income of 500 pounds a year. By 1839, Thornton was doing well enough financially that the East India Company had him contribute into the "Widows' Fund" (a pension plan set up by the company to financially help widows of employees whom had died) through a compulsory contribution that was required for higher-up employees. In 1842, he began to pay income taxes. In 1856, he was appointed the assistant examiner in the Examiner's Office. In 1858, he attained the position of senior administrator of the secretary of the India House's Department of Public Works. He received a raise in salary for both promotions. As assistant examiner, he had received a raise from 600 pounds per year to 900 pounds per year, and as the senior administrator at the Department of Public Works, he received a raise to 1200 pounds per year. He would continue receiving modest raises every few years throughout his career. Eventually, with his career as a mandarin at the East India Company, he was able to purchase a property of upper-middle class means in London, where he would live out the rest of his days.[5]

From 1848 to 1856, the Governor General of India was Lord Dalhousie. His term marked a time where Thornton was able to claim multiple professional exploits in his work at India House Department of Public Works. Dalhousie greatly believed in governmental infrastructure development, and believed that it was an immensely important tool of economic progress for society. The jobs that Dalhousie commissioned and Thornton had a hand in were mainly projects for infrastructure development, including postal improvements, telegraph and cable services, and the introduction of scientific education programs. The latter was believed to be helpful for people to appreciate and use other technological advances from around the world.[6]

Thornton's duty as the assistant examiner was mostly to prepare draft dispatches and any policy documents that regarded the East India Company's public works activities. The documents dealt with the construction of railways and roads, canals, bridges, and irrigation apparatuses in Burma, India, and the Straits Settlement. The documents were first circulated throughout the India Office, then sent to the central administration in India. However, before the dispatches could be sent to India they had to be approved by both the court of directors for the company and then by the board of control, the representative of the authority of parliament. The chief examiner and his senior assistants had a large influence on the content of the dispatches.[7]

Dispatches and minute papers that Thornton had to draft were composed on average 10 times per year. However, in the years 1856-1861 and 1870-1872, Thornton authored a significantly higher than average number of dispatches; most notably, in the years 1860 and 1861, Thornton composed eighty-eight and seventy, respectively.[8] Since 1856, it is evident - due to the large increase of Thornton signatures and handwriting in the minute papers and dispatches - that his responsibilities had increased at the Department of Public Works. The content in dispatches and then later minute papers ranged from one- or two-page documents of confirmations of store deliveries, and extensions for public service appointments, and a letter of acknowledgment, to hefty fifty-page documents concerned with serious policy issues such as trade, defense and public infrastructure.[5]

Thornton wrote dispatches for the construction of the Rangoon-Prome trunk road, which still exists today. He composed a dispatch for Singapore's southern defenses in order to protect the British garrison in the imperative water lanes of Indo-China. Thornton also composed dispatches that concerned public works for the Bombay, Madras, Bengal presidencies.[5]

In 1857, a group of indigenous soldiers mutinied against the East India Company's army and in turn the British control over India. The mutiny, the Sepoy Rebellion, had many causes, and was eventually thwarted by the British in 1858. The result of the rebellion left doubts over the East India Company's ability to govern their territories. In September 1858, the British government seized control of the East India Company's territories, and it was decided amicably that control of the territories in question should be transferred to the crown.

After twenty years, Thornton rose to the head of East India Company's public works department, and in 1858 became the first secretary to the India Office. In his leisure time he studied economic issues, and was a friend but not a follower of John Stuart Mill. Although Thornton and Mill differed in their political and economic philosophies, they were able to maintain a long-lasting friendship, which was nurtured by their mutual love of discussion and argument.

In 1873, Thornton was made CB after being recommended by the Duke of Argyll. On 17 May 1873 Thornton contributed an account of John Stuart Mill's work at the India House to The Examiner.

In 1845, Thornton published his first economic work, Over-population and its Remedy, which focused on the colonization of Irish wastes, and the Irish peasantry. Thornton downplayed the importance of emigration and disapproved of state interference, but encouraged subdivision of the land. In this work, Thornton refers to and praises Mill's work Principles of Political Economy, and contests the views of John Ramsay McCulloch,[9] most notably, the validity of comparisons of prosperity between the medieval and modern laboring classes.[9] In a January 1847 issue of the Edinburgh Review, Thornton's arguments against that comparison were largely criticized.[9]

The work is generally seen as anti-Malthusian. Thornton argued that Robert Malthus had "overlooked and undervalued the tendency which the possession of property has to engender prudence, and seems, indeed, to have thought that the quality is rarely to be found among members of the laboring class, except under the pressure of misery."[10] He posited that there was a "low-level trap" for the laboring class in the economical development of society: that the realities of life for the impoverished were too much to allow them to focus on any real prospect of prosperity. Thornton also cited competition; workers "are too numerous to earn a competent subsistence for themselves and their families, competition takes place amongst them: each, in his anxiety to obtain employment, offers to accept lower wages than he requires for his comfortable maintenance... Neither has this state any tendency to correct itself. Whatever point populations that may attain, it can with equal ease at least maintain itself there."[10]

Thornton elaborated on his explanation:

"A labourer, offering his services for hire is simply offering labour for sale. No one is bound to accept the offer. No one is under any obligation to buy nor a fortiori to buy at any particular price. There is, therefore, no particular price to which the labourer has a right, or by not obtaining which he can be wronged. No price can be proposed either to him or by him, which can be one whit more fair or just than any other price. Any price is just which he agrees to take, and another to give, and this, and not one tittle more than this, constitutes his due."[11]

Thornton argued against the reasoning that if the poor were lifted out of poverty they would just become lazy and feckless, with the belief that sudden lifting out of poverty would foster the behavior necessary to maintain prosperity.[12] He believed that simply owning property and holding other responsibilities would encourage prudence and sound-mindedness.[13] During a period when economic discussion was focused on the wages fund doctrine, Thornton saw that wages were determined by the ratio between the "fund" and the population of laborers in the market, but he contested the stance that the denominator complied with the simple stories of "immiseration" (economical impoverishment).[13]

By 1846, Thornton naturally had strong opinions about the Poor Laws of England, and had published his comments on them:

"It cannot be denied that in this instance the rate of wages was in part determined by the price of provisions, but this can only happen where the circumstance which naturally regulate the price of labour are arbitrarily interfered with. When the money price of labour is suffered to adjust itself according to the proportions the supply and the demand, it will remain unaffected by any variations in the price of provision or of other commodities."

Thornton displayed his more developed economic and political views in his next work, A Plea for Peasant Proprietors, with the Outlines of a Plan for their Establishment in Ireland, published in 1848.[9] Mill was given proofs of Thornton's latest work as a courtesy to a friend and it was released a few weeks before his own Political Economy, which contained influences from Thornton's latest work.[9] By 1874, the work had long been out of print, however, due to the new passing of the Irish Land Act of 1870, Thornton's work resurfaced as newly relevant and was reprinted. It was published with two additional chapters, the "Social and Moral Effects of Peasant Proprietorship", and "Ireland: a Forecast from 1873".[9] Thornton believed that, ideally, the nationalism of the Irish lands would have been most profitable and that slowing down private proprietorship would be a necessary evil.[9]

In 1869, Thornton released his first work in the field of economics since he had left the Political Economic Club. On Labour, its Wrongful Claims and Rightful Dues; its Actual Present and Possible Future was considered his comeback work. The book was reviewed twice in The Fortnightly Review by John Stuart Mill. He considered it in a sympathetic manner, considering that the views expressed in the book were largely at odds with Mill's own. It is believed that Thornton's personal relationship with Mill, and Mill's desire to encourage his friend to re-enter into the fray of the economic field, are what made him write two reviews on Thornton's book.[9]

Mill's review of On Labour was itself reviewed by an editor from the Macmillan Company, and this second-order review asserted that Mill was fully aware the book would stir controversy:

"I have thought about the Thornton book. The following considerations sum to the point.

Mill's testimonial could not very well be made known on the surface of the book. Even if It could, just now it would not be so very effective, though it might become so. Thornton's book is not of the size or caliber to be a standard work or text-book. It has already been published in the Fortnightly Review, and the students of economic questions who would otherwise have bought it are now familiar with it.

On the other hand is the very weighty fact that the subject will shortly be the subject of the day - and will probably continue so for considerable time to come; and everything bearing on it will be brought. And Thornton is an authority in economics, as the author of the "Plea for Peasant Proprietors." It will be a risk, decidedly, I think - though the book is one which would look well in your list."[13]

Other reviews and receptions of "On Labour" were made public in the months to come. Cairnes said he believed that On Labour is the kind of "earth-shattering fissure that rocks the world of political economy."[13]

On Labour was poorly reviewed as an inaccurate piece by the famed German philosopher and intellectual Franz Brentano. Brentano testified in his essay "On Gilds and Trades Unions" that Thornton's chapter on the origins of trade unions was "unhistorical".[9]

Thornton's second edition of On Labour"included a new, supplementary chapter in which he describes cooperation as "destined to beget, at however remote a date, a healthy socialism as superior to itself in all its best attributes as itself is to its parent." Thornton also continued with a forewarning that the period of gestation "must not be violently shortened".[14]

In 1870, On Labour was translated into German and published by Heinrich Schramm. In 1894, Richard Burdinski translated and released Die Produktiv-Genossenschaft als Regenerationsmittel des Arbeiterstandes. Eine Kritik der Thornton-Lassalleschen Wirtschaftsreform.[9]

In 1875, Thornton would return to his first and favorite love - in the realm of economics - with land tenure systems heading the fray of his arguments. Accompanying his newest arguments were irrigation and multiple "artifacts" of "bureaucratic levers of control and economic development".[13] The final work was a book titled Indian Public Works and Cognate Indian Topics. The book also covered India's controversies over the railroad development across the country, the ship canals, and telegraph wires that ranged from cities to cities. It was also a huge endorsement and call for a public educational establishment that would be the foundation of a prosperous Indian commercial market and in turn would provide the "infrastructure in which markets operate."[13] In addition to these then contemporary Indian issues, Thornton explained his own experiences and problems at India House, and provided solutions. His explanation for publicly funded projects to develop India's infrastructure, versus a private investor's solution, was that "among its virtues, it surveys the late classical case for the legitimate undertaking of public works, suggesting that market rates of return may be inadequate guide for choice of projects in poorer or less developed countries: there, the second-round of effects of drawing out 'idle capital' might more than offset the costs of what initially appear to be unpromising projects."[13]

In Indian Public Works, Thornton continued his argument against an idea that was in debate during the time: the call for private investment to aid the Indian government to develop its railroad infrastructure, and the idea that the investors' return would be guaranteed. This called the "Dalhousie Plan", and Thornton claimed that it would generate a "cost per-mile far above that experienced in direct government construction."[13] In Indian Public Works, Thornton recommended that the Indian government should weigh their options of multiple and varying "cooperative schemes to deal with problems of motivating and supervising labor".[15]

On 22 February 1878 Thornton delivered a speech of his last publication, a paper titled "Irrigations regarded as a Preventive of Indian Famines". Thornton read his paper before the Society of Arts.[9]

In 1873, Thornton's Old-fashioned Ethics and Common-sense Metaphysics was published. This work pursued intellectual topics other than economics. The volume consisted of a number of essays that harshly criticized the views and opinions of multiple respected philosophers and intellectuals. David Hume was exhorted, along with Thomas Henry Huxley and the Utilitarian movement as a whole.[9]

In 1854, Thornton wrote a poem titled "The Siege of Silistria" and it was published within the year. He continued to write poetry and conceived a volume of verse titled Modern Manichaeism, Labour's Utopia, and other Poems, published in 1857. In 1878, Thornton's translation of "Word for Word From Horace" was published, which was a literal verse translation of Horace's Odes.[9]