William Thomas Thornton, CB (14 February 1813 – 17 June 1880) was an English economist,"The early economic writings of William Thomas Thornton" Donoghue, M Fremantle, University of Notre Dame Australia, 2007 (History of Political Economy, 39(2), 209-252. doi: 10.1215/00182702-2007-002) civil servantG. Le G. Norgate, 'Thornton, William Thomas (1813–1880)’, rev. John Vint, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 accessed 6 Dec 2012 and author.Amongst others he wrote Overpopulation and its Remedy, 1845; A Plea for Peasant Proprietors, 1848; Modern Manichaeism, Labour's Utopia, 1857; "On Labour, its Wrongful Claims and Rightful Dues: its Actual Present and Possible Future", 1869; "Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics", 1873; and "Word for Word from Horace", 1878. British Library web site accessed 17:17 GMT 6 December 2012
Life Thornton was born at Burnham, Buckinghamshire on 14 February 1813, the son of the merchant Thomas Thornton and Sophie Zohrab; she was the daughter of a Persian merchant, Paul Zohrab, who had settled in Turkey.Donoghue, M. (2008). William Thomas Thornton’s family, ancestry, and early years: Some findings from recently discovered manuscripts and letters. History of Political Economy, 40 (3), 511-550. ). Thornton's father was heavily involved in international commerce from a young age. He had lived in Constantinople and its surrounding region for many years in pursuit of British mercantile interests. His father was also well known for his book, titled Turkey Past and Present (1807), a work that described in great detail the social, political, and military institutions of the Ottoman Empire.
Thornton was educated at the Moravian settlement at Ockbrook in Derbyshire and spent three years in Malta with his cousin, Sir William Henry Thornton, an auditor general for Malta. From 1830 to 1835, Thornton lived abroad in Constantinople with Consul-General Cartwright.
He was the youngest of eight children, with his father dying in 1814. He was subsequently raised by his father's family, predominantly by his aunt Elizabeth Moore.
Career
Clerkship 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.The official record of Thornton’s appointment is as follows: "Resolved with reference to the Courts' Resolution of the 27 ulto, that Mr William Thomas Thornton be appointed Junior Clerk in the Established branch of the Examiner’s Office on probation for one year, under the Regulations of 9 March 1831" (Oriental and India Office Collections, L/AG/30/12)
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.
Records show that Thornton did not draft any dispatches in his early career, or if did, he did not 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.
Senior administrator at examiner's office In 1838, after moving to the marine branch of the examiner's office, Thornton went from an un-salaried probationary period with an 80-pound-a-year stipend to earning an 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.
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.H. J. Habakkuk (1940, 788–89) notes that before 1850 expenditures on public works in India amounted to a paltry £250,000, but by 1854 they had grown to an impressive £4,000,000, largely due to the public works schemes initiated under Dalhousie's administration.
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.For a detailed account of the procedure by which drafts prepared in the examiner's office were submitted at various points to the company chairman, the appropriate committee of the Court of Directors, the Board of Control, and the Court of Directors as a whole, see Moir 1986, 140–50.
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.Dispatches prepared by Thornton are easily identifiable by his signature appearing on the inside page of an original dispatch, and by his handwriting in the case of minute papers, which replaced the dispatches in 1860 as policy documents. 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, defence and public infrastructure.
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.
Published works
Over-population and its Remedy 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, most notably, the validity of comparisons of prosperity between the medieval and modern laboring classes. In a January 1847 issue of the Edinburgh Review, Thornton's arguments against that comparison were largely criticized.
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." 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."
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."