Jeremy Bentham and Australia is a collection of scholarship inspired by Bentham’s writings on Australia. These writings are available for the first time in authoritative form in Panopticon versus New South Wales and other writings on Australia, a volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham published by UCL Press.
In the present collection, a distinguished group of authors reflect on Bentham’s Australian writings, making original contributions to existing debates and setting agendas for future ones. In the first part of the collection, the works are placed in their historical contexts, while the second part provides a critical assessment of the historical accuracy and plausibility of Bentham’s arguments against transportation from the British Isles. In the third part, attention turns to Bentham’s claim that New South Wales had been illegally founded and to the imperial and colonial constitutional ramifications of that claim. Here, authors also discuss Bentham’s work of 1831 in which he supports the establishment of a free colony on the southern coast of Australia. In the final part, authors shed light on the history of Bentham’s panopticon penitentiary scheme, his views on the punishment and reform of criminals and what role, if any, religion had to play in that regard, and discuss apparently panopticon-inspired institutions built in the Australian colonies.
This collection will appeal to readers interested in Bentham’s life and thought, the history of transportation from the British Isles, and of British penal policy more generally, colonial and imperial history, Indigenous history, legal and constitutional history, and religious history.
Praise for Jeremy Bentham and Australia
‘That a single volume of unpublished work can elicit such a wide range of interventions is testament to the fertility of Bentham’s thought and questions around criminal transportation, incarceration, settler colonialism and their legacies that it prompts. Many of these legacies in the Australian context are potentially unsettling ones and it to the credit of editors and contributors that these have been tackled head on. Certainly, when the bicentenary of his death rolls around, Bentham scholarship will be in rude health.’
Australian Book Review
‘an invaluable, indispensable, and timely companion to Bentham’s collected volume’
Journal of Comparative Law
‘Jeremy Bentham and Australia brings together an impressive assembly of researchers who each offer sophisticated analyses’
Journal of Australian, Canadian, and Aotearoa New Zealand Studies
‘opens new fields for reflection on canonical texts from the history of European ideas.’
Revue d’études benthamiennes
Table of Content
List of contributors
List of figures and tables
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Tim Causer
Part I. The historical context of Bentham’s writings on Australia
1 Bentham and the criminal-fiscal state
Deborah Oxley
2 Bentham, convict transportation, and the Great Confinement Thesis
Hamish Maxwell-Stewart
Part II. Bentham and the theory and practice of transportation to Australia
3 ‘Confinement’, ‘banishment’, and ‘bondage’: contesting practices of exile in the British Empire
Kirsten Mc Kenzie
4 Would Western Australia have met Bentham’s five measures of penal justice?
Katherine Roscoe and Barry Godfrey
5 ‘Inspection, the only effective instrument of reformative management’: Bentham, surveillance, and convict recidivism in early New South Wales
Matthew Allen and David Andrew Roberts
Part III. The constitutional implications of Bentham’s writings on Australia
6 Jeremy Bentham and the imperial constitution at the Meridian, 1763–1815: legislature, judicature, and office in the Administration of England and the British Empire
Edward Cavanagh
7 ‘The British Constitution Conquered in New South Wales’: Bentham and constitutional reform in early Australia, 1803–24
Anne Brunon-Ernst
8 Jeremy Bentham on South Australia, colonial government, and representative democracy
Philip Schofield
9 ‘Peopling the Country by Unpeopling It’: Jeremy Bentham’s silences on Indigenous Australia
Zoë Laidlaw
Part IV. Bentham, the panopticon penitentiary scheme, and penal institutions and practices in Australia and Britain
10 Inverting the panopticon: Van Diemen’s Land and the invention of a colonial Pentonville Prison
Honey Dower
11 The panopticon archetype and the Swan River Colony: establishing Fremantle Gaol, 1831–41
Emily Lanman
12 Religion and penal reform in the Australian writings of Jeremy Bentham
Hilary M. Carey
13 The panopticon penitentiary, the convict hulks, and political corruption: Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham’
Tim Causer
Index
About the author
Philip Schofield is Director of the Bentham Project, Faculty of Laws, UCL, and General Editor of the new authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham.
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