Abstract: How did 19th century Australians think about liberalism, economics and political economy more generally? Nineteenth century Australia has been described variously as having a ‘neoclassical’, enlightenment, or Benthamite political culture. This paper provides an empirical approach to the question of early Australian ideas. Exploiting the records of 1891 book sales and auctions in Australia between 1800 and 1849, the paper examines the relative prevalence of key economic, political and liberal texts available to 19th century Australians. The works of classical enlightenment authors such as Adam Smith and John Locke were far more prevalent, and more likely in demand, than those of Jeremy Bentham. To the extent utilitarian ideas were prevalent, they were more in the form of William Paley’s conservatism than Bentham’s radicalism.

 1. Introduction

How can we know how 19th century Australians thought about liberalism, economics and political economy? The question is of more than esoteric interest. Australians have long searched for their national ‘character’ or ‘identity’ in the ideological milieu of the first decades after settlement. For the liberal pessimists of the 1930s, Australia’s military origins set a trajectory of Australia’s political culture that had not yet been overcome (Hancock 1931; Shann 1930). Macintyre (1991) and Roe (1965) see early Australian life as a contest between conservatives and democrats, culminating in the former’s defeat. Berg (2015), Dixon (1986), Gascoigne (2002), Melleuish (1995) locate Australia’s early culture firmly in the Enlightenment values of the 18th century. Finally, a short but influential piece by Collins (1985) described Australia as a ‘Benthamite’ society, characterised Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian, individualist, rationalist and legalist philosophy of public policy.

These assessments frequently rest on the ideas, embodied in a few classical authors such as Adam Smith, John Locke and Bentham, that were available to the colonists. Julie McIntyre’s (2011) perceptive drawing out of the influence of Smith’s perception of the civilizational superiority of wine over spirits and beer on early Australian

alcohol policy shows how these ideas informed political choices. Yet these analyses beg a few, fundamental questions. Were the great classics of the enlightenment even available to the colonists, which they purportedly influenced? Were the great classics read? And which ones? Dixon (1986) observes that the major libraries of the period held books by Adam Smith and the other Scottish enlightenment writers. An understanding of individual Australian colonists can be derived from records of their libraries; see, for instance, Roe’s (1987) catalogue of George Bass’ book collection, with its heavy representation of Scottish and continental enlightenment authors. Yet it remains the case that for all the emphasis in these works of the European ideas of the 18th and 19th centuries, and all the claims of their significance in Australian culture, we are not sure that Australians actually had access to these foundational texts of liberalism, the enlightenment and political economy.

This paper provides that analysis. It identifies the books of economics, and political economy available to Australian colonists through an analysis of book catalogues and the Australian book trade between 1800 and 1849. The findings allow us to clarify our understanding of 19th century intellectual culture and, even, begin to exclude proposed interpretations of that culture. The availability of books is a complement to other approaches. The works cited above draw out Australian culture and ideologies from the words and actions of the colonists. Other approaches have focused on the early writings of Australian liberals and economic thinkers (Goodwin 1966; Groenewegen and McFarlane 1990). Here I focus on what books the colonists read – or at least were available for them to read – when trying to decide the direction the new society ought to take.

The analysis in this paper is focused on and index of Australian book sales and auctions between 1800 and 1849 built by Elizabeth Webby as part of her PhD research (Webby 1971), published in three parts as Webby (1978, 1979a, 1979b). This index is drawn from the handful of catalogues still surviving in Australian libraries and a much more extensive record of auction and book sale advertisements printed in newspapers. Many of the latter list and in some cases describe the books which were to be sold. For the purposes of analysis here, Webby’s list has been complemented by a few further auctions and sales identified by a manual search of the digitised newspaper collection now provided by the National Library. While Australian historians have long been concerned about the limitations of the Australian archival record (Hughes 2003; Inglis 1974), the comprehensiveness of this index presents an opportunity to draw some empirical findings about the nature of the early Australian intellectual environment. It is possible, in a small, geographically discrete colony like Australia’s, to identify every copy of the important works of liberalism and political economy available to the historical record.

The book trade in Australia in the 19th century has been well studied. Webby’s (1971, 1978, 1979a, 1979b) monumental investigation of auctions and sales between 1800–1849 forms the basis of this study. Webby’s analysis, however, focuses on the volume of the book trade and literary works, rather than political, historical or economic works. Kirsop (1995, 1997, 2009) provides an analysis of the structure and form of the book trade, as well as the relevant limitations of using the records of the book trade as a guide to Australian reading tastes.

The paper proceeds as follows. Part 2 outlines the shape and structure of the early Australian book trade, a description of the sources that describe the book trade available to historians, and the limitations of those sources as tools of analysis. Part 3 details the findings of the analysis, showing the availability and distribution of relevant works in political economy and other works of liberalism, conservatism. Part 4 relates the findings to the claim that Australia was a Benthamite society, and focuses on the distinction between Benthamite utilitarianism and the prevalence of the works and ideas of the theological utilitarian William Paley. Part 5 concludes.

2. The Australian Book Trade

The three primary mechanisms by which books were made available to Australian colonists was through direct importation – that is, bringing a personal library into the southern hemisphere – by purchasing at a bookseller, or by purchasing at auction. Certainly, it is the case that the settlers brought many relevant books with them. Jane Franklin related one passenger taking a group of working men ‘almost thro’ Smith’s Wealth of Nations’ (Franklin and Russell 2002, 135). These latter two markets had a peculiar shape and economic characteristics, which were driven by both the specificities of the book trade and the fact that the reading public in Australia was small and the overwhelming majority of written work had to be imported vast distances.

As Table 1 shows, the dataset is dominated by sales and auctions in Sydney. The first recorded book sale occurred on 13 January 1805. The first sale of which we have information about the books sold occurred the next day, at which (according to a report in the Sydney Gazette a week later noted) were sold Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, and a copy of William Blackstone’s Commentaries. The latter, as Webby (1971) points out, sold at a significant premium over its new price in London. The first advertised sale in Hobart occurs in July 1816 – the four volume Domestic Encyclopedia, ‘at the same price as sold in London’.¹ Sales turn up in Launceston (1829), Perth (1837), Adelaide (1838), Maitland (1839), Melbourne (1839), Geelong (1841) and Brisbane (1846). A small number of advertisements and catalogues also exist for sales in Windsor, Parramatta, and a large consignment in Port Fairy.

The period chosen for analysis – 1800–1849 – is guided by the limits of Webby’s data. While this is mostly a practical matter, the period accords with broader trends in the book trade. Kirsop (1995, 1997) divides the 19th century trade into four periods. Between white settlement and the 1820s book import and exchange was mostly reliant on books, which had been individually and personally imported by settlers. The dataset includes 56 book sales and auctions between 1805 and 1819. The second period of the book trade lasted until the mid-1850s. In this period, Australia was moving away from its sole identity as a penal colony. Local book and pamphlet production began to satisfy a growing reading public, and large volumes of books began to be imported. Nevertheless, the high costs of transport and communication, along with the thinness of the book buying and selling public, meant that this was still ‘haphazard’ (Kirsop 1997) and the trade was still dominated by auctions. In Kirsop’s periodization, this ends roughly with the discovery of gold in Victoria and New South Wales and the dramatic population growth and demographic changes that discovery brought about. Kirsop’s third period lasts from the 1850s until 1890. By the fourth period, the market had become regularised and recognisably modern: There were 247 retail booksellers in 1897 in Victoria alone (Kirsop 1997).

Table 1. Book sales and auctions, 1800–1849.

Sydney	1042
Hobart	231
Adelaide	176
Melbourne	146
Launceston	137
Geelong	42
Maitland	40
Perth	39
Brisbane	10
Parramatta	10
Port Fairy	1
Windsor	1

Of course, the fact that a book was offered for sale or auction does not necessarily imply that it was purchased, or read, or even desired. Webby (1971) assumes that the supply of books from London was a fair indicator of demand. By contrast, Kirsop (1995, 2009) argues that the Australian market looks more like a dumping ground for the disposal of excess British stock. The second period of the book trade is characterised by its reliance on the consignment practice. Consignments had two salient characteristics. First, they meant that the delivery of books to Australia was irregular and subject to periodic episodes of scarcity and glut. The dataset reveals periods of intense book trading activity and relative ease. Second, consignments were not directly responsive to demand. Consignments were dispatched from England according to the sender’s assessment of what would sell best, rather than at the request of the Australian retailers. Of course that assessment might well take into account the need to discard old stock. Speculative importing appears to have been common in the first decades of the 19th century for many goods, not just books (Kingston 1994). The consignment trade continued as long into the 19th century, and as late as the 1880s, Australian retailers were complaining to their London counterparties of the inadequate responsiveness of the practice. On that basis Kirsop concludes that book lists in Australia represent an uncertain basis for which to draw conclusions about the preferences and tastes of the Australian colonists.

Nevertheless, this objection should not be taken too far. Comparing the consignments with more directly demand-responsive indicators – such as the reviews and comment in Australian newspapers on English literature – Webby finds that the same authors dominated public discussion as they do consignments; with heavy representations from Dickens, Scott, Byron, Shakespeare and Milton. Personal libraries put up for auction when their owners were leaving the colony are obviously more directly reflective of Antipodean demand, and deceased estate or bankruptcy auctions even more so. More fundamentally, dwelling too much on how much the book trade satisfied Australian desires is, for our purposes here, somewhat tangential: regardless of whether the colonists demanded Adam Smith, it was Adam Smith which they were supplied, and in intellectual life as well as economic life supply creates its own demand.

A further issue concerns who read the books – both the socioeconomic distribution of books and the relationship between owning a book and reading it. Mansfield (1847) suggests that just under 80% of Sydney residents could read, but there is clearly a distinction between threshold ability to read and consumption of books in their time as in ours reading tastes varied considerably according to education and wealth. Webby (1971), looking at the unfortunately limited sources of this question, concludes that poorer Australians preferred religious tracts and true crime. It is entirely possible that the books identified here were not read by the bulk of the population. The weight we place on the uneven socioeconomic transmission of ideas is dependent on our views about the class drivers of institutional choice in the Australian colonies. It is also entirely possible that these books were purchased but remained unread on Australian bookshelves. We might make a supposition: the higher cost of books in the 19th century compared to today (and fewer alternative entertainments) suggests that a higher percentage of purchased books were read than today. Nevertheless, even an unread book has value: signalling to the owner and visitors a particular set of values. The Wealth of Nations may have rested unread in as many personal libraries in the 19th century Australia as it does in 21st century Australia, but it might still tell about the vision colonists had of themselves and the values they wanted to reinforce and project.

3. Books on Sale in Australia

The database has 1889 listed sale events, comprising of 655 advertisements for booksellers and 1233 distinctly identifiable auctions. This includes those from Webby’s index as well as a few others, which have been uncovered through my subsequent research. We can be relatively confident that individual copies listed for sale auction do not appear in subsequent auctions (unless they are purchased, then put up for sale by their new owners some time later). Many auctions were conducted without reserve – suggesting that all books were ultimately exchanged – and the patterns of sales do not seem to show the same books appearing in repeated auction events. The stock of retail booksellers presents a different problem. Books remain in stock unless sold. Webby has removed advertisements for retail book sales that are obvious duplicates. Many advertisements for retail book sales focus on newly listed books, specifically noting the ship on which the new stock of books arrived. This gives us a relative degree of confidence that double counting is kept to a minimum. On the other side of the equation, the list is very much incomplete. Many advertisements brag of hundreds of books for sale, but whose records we lack. Where books are listed, we can be certain that they are incomplete.

For this analysis, I have extracted the details of recognisable, identifiable individual books, which directly address principles and attitudes towards politics, political economy, economic questions, as well as key enlightenment texts. These judgements have been necessarily arbitrary in places. Much literature spoke of economic and political concepts, both implicitly and explicitly. No doubt Australian readers drew lessons from the works of Dickens and Shakespeare with implications about the role of the state and the morality and purpose of the exchange economy. Some works aimed explicitly to draw out economic lessons from literary devices. Harriet Martineau’s fictionalised economic tales, published as part of her Illustrations of Political Economy (Martineau 1832), Poor Laws and Paupers Illustrated (Martineau 1833), and Illustrations of Taxation (Martineau 1834), were sold in at least 12 sales between 1843 and 1849.

Other principles of political economy could no doubt be directly and indirectly derived from the large quantities of religious works available in the colony.

Tracts on economics and political economy no more dominated the literary market in the 19th century than they do today. Australian bookshelves were filled by history, biography, religion, school books and, of course, fiction, poetry and plays. The colonies were well supplied with the collected works of Shakespeare and the reprinted (or pirated) Pickwick Papers. Readers could get their hands on a few copies of Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary (Hume 1748), but much more common was his History of England (almost always bundled with the single-volume Continuation of the History of England by Tobias Smollett). Practical works were also common. J.R. McCulloch’s textbooks on political economy – including his Discourse on the rise, progress, peculiar objects, and importance of, political economy (McCulloch 1824) and his Principles of Political Economy (McCulloch 1825) – were occasionally available, but far more prevalent was his enormously successful Dictionary, Practical, Theoretical and Historical, of Commerce and Commercial Navigation (McCulloch 1832), of which there were at least 64 copies made available between 1836 and 1849. McCulloch’s Dictionary was not a work of political economy but contained much that was drawn from the Scottish tradition of political economy; with the heavy emphasis on statistical work giving economics a position as a social science (O’Brien 1970, 98).

For the purposes of keeping the analysis at a manageable level, explicitly historical works have been excluded. Likewise, large libraries of medical and legal texts were offered for sale throughout the 19th century, and many economic and political principles were likely to be derived from the latter, yet they have not been counted. The one exception to this is Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, which was by far the most popular legal text at the time. Table 2 shows the result of this analysis.

Table 2 is limited to those of which four copies or more are identifiable, partly for practical reasons and partly because the limitations of the historical record compel modesty about how precise this data is. The table is also restricted to identifiable books or collected works. In many cases, advertisements solely refer to the author, for example, ‘Hume’, rather than a specific book by David Hume being offered for sale. Rather than making assumptions about exactly what book is being referred to (Hume’s essays or his histories, for instance) authors without book titles have been excluded in the table below. Many books were offered in volumes of a single work: for example, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is often listed as produced in three volumes. A three-volume copy of Wealth of Nations appears in Table 2 as a single copy. Some auctions included more than one copy for sale, and where this is clear, each copy is included in the table.

Further questions are raised by booksellers, who may have had multiple copies of each work they advertised for sale. Where information is lacking, I have listed this as one edition. It is very possible that data therefore understates the prevalence of the most popular titles – a problem compounded by the practice of not listing ‘standard works’ in many advertisements. To the extent that booksellers (and auctioneers) believed that the most popular economics, political theory and political economy books could be considered standard, they will be underreported in Table 2. A case in point is Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s A Letter from Sydney (Wakefield 1829). Wakefield’s book created some significant controversy in Sydney, but appears to have been sold primarily (or perhaps only) at the Australian Stationary Warehouse (The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 29 April 1830, p. 2), and we cannot be sure in what volume. A Letter from Sydney was excerpted in a number of newspapers in the first half of 1830. It is interesting, however, and perhaps suggestive, that Wakefield’s book does not seem to appear in later estate auctions, which we might expect if it had been sold in significant quantities.

The most striking thing about the table is the dominance of Smith’s Wealth of Nations during this period, with 132 copies available in 128 separate book sales and auctions. It first appears in a small auction of ‘the Property of a Gentleman, deceased’ in 1812 (The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 29 February) and remains enough of a fixture to be often described as among the ‘standard works’ in advertisements of the era. Smith’s book was a fixture of discussion and debate about taxation, land reform and labour. These figures understate the prevalence of Smith’s book. For example, a three-volume edition appears as part of the library gifted to the Reverend Barzillai Quaife, upon his taking ministry of the Scots Church in Sydney in 1846 (The Sydney Morning Herald, 21 November), and as part of a list of books missing on the death of the Attorney General in Van Diemen’s Land (Hobart Town Courier, 14 August 1830).² The Wealth of Nations was part of the first syllabus (alongside Nassau Senior’s Political Economy) of the University of Melbourne’s 1855 Political Economy course that was taught by William E. Hearn, who had arrived in the colony that year (La Nauze 1972).

The inculcation of Smithian ideas were not limited to copies of the Wealth of Nations. Harriet Martineau intended her popularisations of political economy to bring the ideas of modern political economy to those ‘outside [James’ Mill’s] Political Economy Club’ (Martineau 1877) and her indebtedness to Smith’s economics in particular has been widely recognised (Pichanick 1980; Thomson 1973). Smith’s book, to Martineau, was ‘marvellous when all the circumstances are considered, but … not fitted nor designed to teach the science to the great mass of the people’ (Martineau 1832, no.1, p. x). Smith’s intellectual influence over Martineau was extensive. The eponymous ‘Miss Martineau’ appeared in extracts in newspapers throughout the 1830s and 1840s, particularly her Society in America (Martineau 1837). As Vetter (2008) points out, this book leaned heavily on the idea of sympathy detailed in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith 1759).

Smith’s was not the only key economic work available in Australia. The historical record shows four copies of David Ricardo’s On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). The first recorded sale of Ricardo was in 1828, when the doctor and administrator Henry Grattan Douglass put a large number of books on sale in Sydney as he left for Britain (Paul and Paul 1828). Another copy was sold in the estate auction of the publisher Robert Howe in 1830 (Bodenham 1830). Further copies were sold by auction in Sydney in 1845 (The Sydney Morning Herald, 30 January, 3) and as part of the liquidation of the former colonial secretary Alexander McLeay’s library of nearly 4000 volumes in April of the same year (Blackman 1845).

The mixture of books available to Australian colonists seems to reflect enlightenment interests, as well as more direct local concerns. Given the significance of Malthusian theories of population to Australia’s colonisation and its indigenous population, it is unsurprising to see the prevalence of his Essay on the Principle of Population (Malthus 1798).³ Australian libraries were scattered with works that fed off this debate, including the critiques by the Tory MP Michael Thomas Sadler (1830), the economist William Thornton (1846), the anarchist philosophy William Godwin (1820), the proto-Marxist Piercy Ravenstone (1821), as well as the supportive volume by Egerton Brydges (1819), and the even more pessimistic approach by John Weyland (1816). Four copies of Malthus’ Principles of Political Economy (Malthus 1820) were also available.

Table 2. Economics, political theory and political economy titles available for purchase in Australia 1805–1849.

Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations4	132
William Paley’s Moral and Political Philosophy	89
J.R. McCulloch’s Commercial Dictionary	66
William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England	61
Jean Louis De Lolme’s The Constitution of England	39
John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding	32
Harriet Martineau’s tales5	28
John Locke’s Essays and John Locke’s Works	25
Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France	22
Edmund Burke’s Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful	16
Edmund Burke’s Works	15
Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population	15
John Locke’s Some Thoughts Concerning Education	14
Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments	13
David Hume’s Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary	8
The Works of Henry St. John Bolingbroke	7
Germaine de Sta€el’s Principal Events of the French Revolution	7
Thomas Babington Macauley’s Critical and Historical Essays	6
Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws	6
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Works	6
John Wade’s History of the Middle and Working Classes6	6
Jeremy Bentham’s Rationale of Judicial Evidence	5
Edmund Burke’s Speeches	5
George Richardson Porter’s Progress of the Nation	5
Jean-Baptiste Say’s A Treatise on Political Economy	5
Jeremy Taylor’s A Discourse on the Liberty of Prophesying	5
Jeremy Bentham’s Chrestomathia	4
Jeremy Bentham’s The Rationale of Reward	4
Alexander Bethune and John Bethune’s Practical Economy7	4
Thomas Chalmer’s Christian and civic economy of large towns	4
Adam Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society	4
William Godwin’s An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice	4
David Macpherson’s Annals of Commerce	4
Thomas Malthus’ Principles of Political Economy	4
David Ricardo’s Principles of Political Economy and Taxation	4

Classical enlightenment authors were widely available, including six copies of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws in translation, the works of Voltaire and Rousseau as a collection and in separate volumes, and in both French and English. When George Gipps returned to England in 1846, he put up his property for auction including 86 French volumes of Voltaire, including 20 volumes of correspondence and a 14-volume edition of his philosophical dictionary. (Gipps, who features heavily in McIntyre’s analysis of the role of Adam Smith’s ideas about wine in Australia, put his copy of the Wealth of Nations up for sale as well.) The works of John Locke were also widely available in the colonies. While there were at least nine copies of his full collected works on sale, the more common individual works gives some indication of interest in Lockean ideas. At least 32 separate copies of An essay concerning human understanding (1689) and 14 copies of Some thoughts concerning education (Locke 1693) were made available for sale in this period. Seven more copies of Human Understanding were distributed as ‘Locke and Bacon’, a volume in which his philosophical essay was paired with a collection of Francis Bacon’s essays. But for all the emphasis given to Locke’s philosophy of land appropriation and use in the Australian context (Gascoigne 2002; Ivison 1997; Short 2003, 2007), the Two Treatises of Government (1689) was rarely sold as a separate volume (although of course it was featured in each complete copy of his collected works).

4. Benthamism and the Early Australians

If Australia was characteristically a Benthamite society, as Collins (1985) argued, it certainly was not exclusively so. The Webby index reveals 56 copies of individual works by Jeremy Bentham, with his first appearing in a Sydney booksale in November 1834. On this face of it, this is a substantial number. However, there are a few caveats necessary if we are trying to trace – or at least detect – his influence in the colonies. The first problem is that Bentham’s writings are notable for both their variety and their volume, and there are no stand out works in the Australian collections. The most prevalent was the six copies of the five-volume Rationale of Judicial Evidence (Bentham 1827) edited by John Stuart Mill, followed by four copies each of his education collection Chrestomathia (Bentham 1816) and The Rationale of Reward (Bentham 1825). The Webby index only reveals two copies of his landmark Fragment on Government (Bentham 1776) and Principles of Morals and Legislation (Bentham 1789), although the editions of Bentham’s ‘Works’ advertised in Sydney in 1846 and 1847 very likely included in those volumes.

A second problem in tracing Benthamite ideas is the fact that the prevalence of Bentham is distorted by one significant importation in 1831 and sale of works in Sydney in 1846. At this sale in May 1846, John Dunmore Lang put to auction a large library of books which he had purchased 15 years earlier in London and Edinburgh for his Australian College (Blackman 1846). The Australian College was one of the key educational institutions in Sydney but had closed in 1841 in the unwelcoming economic climate of the 1840s depression (Burkhardt 2014). The library was put up for sale in 1846 to finance the college’s reopening, and it included more than two dozen of Bentham’s books and pamphlets. While this sale would have ensured the distribution of Bentham’s ideas after 1846, the unusual circumstances of the collection make it hard to argue that the quantity of Bentham in the colonies was primarily demand-driven.

Works by Bentham were available in libraries. (Books in lending and subscription libraries have not been listed in the totals above.) In late 1834, the Hobart Town Book Society acquired and advertised a full set of Bentham’s works. Yet Bentham’s works were not available in libraries where they might have been expected. A catalogue of the Sydney Law Library in 1843 had 472 volumes of legal and non-legal works yet none by Bentham. The Sydney Law Library was an association founded in 1842 by a group of solicitors including Robert Owen and James Norton for the purposes of promoting the honour and respectability of the legal profession (The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 29 September 1842, p. 2).

In their reading material at least, it is not obvious that Australians followed Benthamite notions of progress and improvement. The Lang importation in 1831 is the first appearance of his books in the Australian colonies, and it was only until 1834 (two years after Bentham’s death) that the first volume – Elements of the Art of Packing (1821) – was made available for sale. At the very least, for each of those Australian characteristics that Collins (1985) attributes to Bentham’s interests, there were large quantities of works available in the colony directly opposed. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England and Burke’s conservative Reflections on the Revolution in France were directly counterpoised against Benthamite notions of reform and each were far more available to Australian colonists than Bentham’s work. Where Burke and Bentham line up on the doctrine of natural rights, Locke and Blackstone present a countervailing influence. Blackstone and The Constitution of England (de Lolme 1775: first English translation 1775), by the Swiss liberal Jean Louis de Lolme, would have offered the colonists a contrary view on Bentham’s legalism.

Yet Jeremy Bentham was not the only possible source for the transmission of what Collins describes as ‘Benthamism’. Utilitarian ethics had a strong influence on one writer whose books rivalled Adam Smith for prevalence in the colony. William Paley was best known in the Australian colonies for his theological works – particularly his View of the evidences of Christianity (Paley 1794) and Natural Theology; or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (Paley 1802). It was in his Natural Theology that Paley formulated the watchmaker analogy for the existence of God. However, Paley was also a philosopher of secular politics and the ‘last great proponent’ (Cole 1991, 226) of the theological utilitarian tradition of John Gay and Joseph Priestley. Paley’s Principles of moral and political philosophy (Paley 1785) was widely available in the colonies. Twenty-four copies of the work were available as an individual volume, as well as a further 65 copies of Paley’s collected works, which included the Principles alongside his Evidences of Christianity and the Natural Theology. It may well be that purchasers of the works were uninterested in the secular philosophy of government bundled along with his Christian apologetics. Paley’s works were being sold throughout the Australian colonies at the time his political utilitarianism was attacked by the geologist and theologian Adam Sedgwick in 1832 as ‘selfish, secular, anti-Christian, and impracticable’ (cited in Cole 1991). But regardless of what the colonists thought of Paley’s brand of utilitarianism, it was much more available than Bentham’s.

As Melleuish and Chavura (2016) argue, Australian ‘utilitarianism’ was a deeply religious one. Paleyan utilitarianism has many similarities with Benthamite utilitarianism – such as the moral priority of happiness and the notion of happiness as indicated by the balance of pleasure and pain – but Paley’s utilitarianism was founded in a deeper notion of the desire of God to bring about human happiness. As he wrote in the Principles, ‘the method of coming at the will of God, concerning any action by the light of nature, is to inquire into the tendency of that action to promote or diminish the general happiness’. Paley was a political conservative, supporting Britain’s existing constitutional arrangements, where Bentham (at least in his later works more prevalent in the colonies) was a radical. Paley defended the established order and warned against political and economic reform. He emphasised the unintended consequences of change – ‘incidental, remote, and unthought-of evil or advantages, frequently exceed the good that is designed, or the mischief that is foreseen’. For Paley, only gradual, conservative and institutionally-minded change could work in the service of utilitarian happiness (Crimmins 1989). Yet to simply describe Paley as simply ‘conservative’ misses much.

His apparent rejection of ‘conscience’ cast him as outside the conservative philosophical mainstream (Oslington 2017). Crimmins (1989) and Le Mahieu (2002) bring out a stronger contrast between Bentham and Paley. Paley’s emphasis on individual autonomy and moral choice is starkly different from Bentham’s rationalistic paternalism. In this way, Paley bridged the philosophical radicalism of late Bentham with the philosophical conservativism of Edmund Burke, helping develop the classical liberal political philosophy of the 19th century.

5. Conclusion

Australian colonists of course brought their own ideas about the role of political economy and politics to the colonies, influenced by the books they read and contemporaries they knew in their countries of origin. As Kirsop (2011) perceptively notes, those Australians had cultural memories that stretched back often long into the 18th century: the Hobart of 1846 was not so far away from the Warwickshire towns of the 1770s and 1780s. Even if the Two Treatises was not widely read or supplied, that does not mean the colonists were not inculcated with his ideas, either from being familiarised with them in their countries of origins or more diffusely from the intellectual milieu in which they lived. Likewise, it is entirely possible that Benthamism had a greater cultural hold on Paleyan utilitarianism in Australia, but this was not reflected in the works the early Australians demanded and (we ought to assume) read.

It would be good to make claims about the prevalence of certain books in different colonies. For example, were liberal works more common in free colonies such as South Australia? Unfortunately, individual colonies tend to be dominated by a small number of auctioneers and booksellers – less than half a dozen, even in the largest colonies at this time – and each had its own approach to advertising the names of the books offered for selling. For instance, J. B. Neale in South Australia rarely lists any author names, let alone works, and his virtual monopoly of the South Australian book auction market until his retirement in 1848 (Webby 1971, 192–193) makes it impossible to claim anything about the reading habits of South Australians relative to the inhabitants of other colonies. Further scrutiny of the historical record may be able to draw more fine-grained conclusions.

Nevertheless, this analysis does suggest a great deal about the milieu of the early Australians. The power of the Collins (1985) thesis comes from his suggestion that the utilitarian political culture of early Australia explains elements of political culture in 20th century Australia. I have previously argued for the existence of a strand of classical liberal thought through the 19th century, which was largely extinguished after federation until its revival in the post-war world (Berg 2015). The argument of this paper helps fill out that picture. Australia was more conservative than the Benthamite radicalism depicted by Collins. Yet this conservativism should not be overstated – conservatism, as a distinct ideology represented by Paley and Burke, was deeply challenged by the availability of liberal economics and natural rights theorists. Rather, the picture drawn from the availability of books in Australia is of a deep engagement with what Jonathan Israel (2010) has called the ‘conservative enlightenment’, an intellectual environment where the liberals like Adam Smith and John Locke were in contest with conservatives such as William Paley, William Blackstone and Edmund Burke.

References

Bentham, J. 1776. A Fragment on Government. Dublin: J. Sheppard.

Bentham, J. 1789. An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. London: T. Payne.

Bentham, J. 1816. Chrestomathia. London: Payne and Foss, and R. Hunter.

Bentham, J. 1825. The Rationale of Reward. London: J. and H. L. Hunt.

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1. Later in the period, books were sometimes advertised ‘at London prices’, suggesting that the cost of Australia’s great distance had been somewhat reduced. ↩︎
2. Quaife wrote the first proper work of philosophy in 19th century Australia (Quaife 1872, also see Melleuish and Chavura 2016 and Lockley 1967). ↩︎
3. Malthus’ Population first appears in a sale in Sydney in July 1821 (The Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, 30 June 1821, p. 2). Unfortunately, the information provided does not allow us to distinguish between the first edition and the significantly revised later editions of this work. ↩︎
4. Includes one copy of William Enfield’s abridgment of the Wealth of Nations. ↩︎
5. Includes Martineau’s Illustrations of Political Economy, Illustrations of Taxation, and volumes therein sold separately. ↩︎
6. John Wade’s History of the Middle and Working Classes was published in 1833. Wade was a utilitarian and journalist with an interest in trade unions and poverty, and his book focuses on what he saw was absent in Smith’s Wealth of Nations: employment fluctuations, over-population and the poor laws, to which he applied a relatively orthodox lens. ↩︎
7. Practical Economy, published in 1839 by the brothers Alexander and John Bethune, is a somewhat moralistic book written to teach the working classes the basis of political economy for the purpose of encouraging thrift and good habits. ↩︎