The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Wakefield, Edward Gibbon

Born Mar. 20, 1796, in London; died May 16, 1862, in Wellington, New Zealand. British economist and political figure.

Wakefield, a prominent representative of English classical political economy, was the author of a commentary on A. Smith’s An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. In his A Letter from Sydney (1829) and England and America (1833), Wakefield proposed a plan for systematic colonization, suggesting that the sale price of land in the colonies be raised and that other measures be taken that would encourage the emigration of hired workers from Great Britain. Wakefield also believed that this emigration of workers would lessen the danger of social outbreaks in the mother country. K. Marx considered the plan to be an attempt at “primitive accumulation” in the colonies. Wakefield was one of the authors of the Durham Report (1839) regarding the situation in Canada after the uprising of 1837–38. He made a fortune speculating in land in Australia and New Zealand. Wakefield promoted the annexation of New Zealand, and after settling in the colony in 1852 he played an active part in its political life.

WORKS

Facts Relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis. London, 1831.
A View of the Art of Colonization. New York, 1969.

REFERENCES

Marx, K., and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 23; vol. 25, part 2; vol. 26, parts 1–3; vol. 46, parts 1–2; vol. 47. (See Index of Names.)
Erofeev, N. A. “‘Sistematicheskaia kolonizatsiia’: Iz istorii angliiskoi kolonial’noi politiki XIX v.” In Imperializm i bor’ba rabochego klassa. Moscow, 1960.
Bloomfield, P. E. G. Wakefield, Builder of the British Commonwealth. London, 1961.

References in periodicals archive

'A colony that is not attractive to women, is an unattractive colony', (2) Edward Gibbon Wakefield had commented in his book A View of the Art of Colonisation in 1849, adding to a growing chorus of mid-nineteenth century voices who cast migrant women as an essential component in the formation of Britain's burgeoning settler colonies.

South Australia was the first and only Australian colony to be founded in accordance with the principles of Edward Gibbon Wakefield's 'systematic colonisation': a system which emphasised the importance of gender balance within the colonies and assigned a specific, overwhelmingly domestic role for female migrants.

'Your vocation is marriage': Systematic Colonisation, The Marriage Plot and Finding Home in Catherine Helen Spence's Clara Morison (1854)

By the time Edward Gibbon Wakefield first outlined his theory of systematic colonisation in A Letter from Sydney (1829), British novelistic writing was clearly organised around a dichotomy between realism and romance.

(17) See Erik Olssen, 'Wakefield and the Scottish Enlightenment, with Particular Reference to Adam Smith and His Wealth of Nations', in Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the Colonial Dream: A Reconsideration (Wellington: GP Publications, 1997), pp.

Forms of settlement: colonial space, time and genre from Adventure in New Zealand to The Fossil Pits

Bacon and others tried fruitlessly to interest the British Government in the idea but in the end they were defeated by the schemes of Edward Gibbon Wakefield who had also seen the inside of the debtors prison.

Still Waters remember Ianthe

Edward Gibbon Wakefield, an aristocrat from Macclesfield, plotted to abduct Ellen Turner from her Liverpool school and whisked her away across the Scottish border.

Infamous kidnapping

Edward Gibbon Wakefield, an aristocrat from Macclesfield, not only plotted to kidnap Ellen Turner from her Liverpool school, but whisked her away across the Scottish border.

Records reveal tale of kidnapped bride

It was a movement which attracted the support of a wide range of philanthropic people in many ranks of society, including, among such still-remembered names as Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Stuart Mill, the unlikely William Henry Giles Kingston, remembered, if at all today, as the author of Peter the Whaler.

Founded in 1830 by a number of supporters of emigration, including Edward Gibbon Wakefield and John Stuart Mill, the Colonization Society persuaded the Government, in 1837, to appoint an Agent-General for Emigration.

Spreading Victorian virtues overseas