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This essay contextualizes Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s plan of systematic colonization of Australia within the social and political economic debates surrounding the process of slave emancipation in the British West Indies from the 1830s onwards. Wakefield’s proposal to induce wage labour by preventing the labourers from becoming independent producers and proprietors was an important expression of a pan-imperial concern on the relation between the extension of the “field of employment” and the concentration of the labour force; this issue also troubled the architects of the abolition, charged with the unprecedented task of turning over six hundred thousand West Indian slaves into free labourers without ruining plantation economy. Analysing a wide range of political, economic, and administrative sources related to the abolition of slavery in the Caribbean through the lens of Wakefield’s theory, this essay sheds light on the interconnectedness between the different parts of the British Empire and makes a critique of some crucial categories of political thought, such as the liberal concepts of freedom and labour, as well as the very notion of emancipation.

This essay is meant as a genealogy of the concept of "mob" in early-modern English and British political thought, by assuming the theoretical centrality of the "multitude". The alleged wickedness of the multitude, which materialized on the stage of history during the English Civil War, was neutralized by Hobbes, who reconceived it as either a pre-political (as lying in the state of nature) or non-political (being reduced to a matter of public order) collective actor. Hobbes's depoliticization was disavowed in the 1790s, when, as a reaction against Edmund Burke's contemptuous use of the phrase "swinish multitude", some radicals subversively appropriated the notion with a positive meaning. At the beginning of the 19th century, while the lower orders identified themselves in the "working classes", the set of derogatory features traditionally ascribed to the "multitude" - fierceness, disorder, irrationality, and inability to articulate political claims - converged into the semantic field of the "mob". This essay is meant as a genealogy of the concept of «mob» in early-modern English and British political thought, by assuming the theoretical centrality of the «multitude». The alleged wickedness of the multitude, which materialized on the stage of history during the English Civil War, was neutralized by Thomas Hobbes, who reconceived it as either a pre-political (as lying in the state of nature) or non-political (being reduced to a matter of public order) collective actor. Hobbes’s depoliticization was disavowed in the 1790s, when, as a reaction against Edmund Burke’s contemptuous use of the phrase «swinish multitude», some radicals subversively appropriated the notion with a positive meaning. At the beginning of the 19th century, while the lower orders identified themselves in the «working classes», the set of derogatory features traditionally ascribed to the «multitude» – fierceness, disorder, irrationality, and inability to articulate political claims – converged into the semantic field of the «mob».

The book is an intellectual analysis of the political ideas of English radical thinker Thomas Spence (1750–1814), who was renowned for his "Plan", a proposal for the abolition of private landownership and the replacement of state institutions with a decentralized parochial organization. This system would be realized by means of the revolution of the "swinish multitude", the poor labouring class despised by Edmund Burke and adopted by Spence as his privileged political interlocutor. While he has long been considered an eccentric and anachronistic figure, the book sets out to demonstrate that Spence was a deeply original, thoroughly modern thinker, who translated his themes into a popular language addressing the multitude and publicized his Plan through chapbooks, tokens, and songs. The book is therefore a history of Spence's political thought "from below", designed to decode the subtle complexity of his Plan. It also shows that the Plan featured an excoriating critique of colonialism and slavery as well as a project of global emancipation. By virtue of its transnational scope, the Plan made landfall in the British West Indies a few years after Spence's death. Indeed, Spencean ideas were intellectually implicated in the largest slave revolt in the history of Barbados.

Aim of this introduction to the monographic issue 'Imperial Times. How Europe Used Time to Rule the World (XVIII-XIX Centuries)' is to throw into relief current debates demonstrating the need for greater academic research into imperial times. The question that underlies the contributions to the special issue is how to synchronise the study of history in a postcolonial age; how to navigate history while accounting for the traditional uses of concepts like the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and Modernity. This introduction critically distances the logic underpinning periodisations by challenging the uncritical use of a given interval of time as the basis of a neutral partitioning, and takes stock of how postcolonial studies and global historians have drawn attention, in recent years, to the contingent and political origins of these timeframes. It contends that, for all the talk about a “temporal” and an “imperial turn”, time and empire still appear, at times, to be largely undertheorized in relation to each other. It highlights new conceptualisations brought to the study of temporality in relation to empire by the history of emotions, and of material cultures, put forward by the study of gendered subjectivities, and stimulated by the attention to long-term shifts favoured by novel methodology of environmental history. It takes stock of Reinhart Koselleck’s influence on these historiographical turns, and of recent re-evaluations of his work on time and concepts. Drawing on the hypothesis that conceptions of the future are crucial to our understanding of ideas and practices of time, tradition, history, and change, this introduction also discusses our conception of the history of utopian times, and the specific ties the future has to the history of imperial conceptions and projects. The concluding section is devoted to the methodological purpose behind the special issue: to set out four case studies to trace new pathways for the study of the imperial legacies in the making of a global history of time.

This essay surveys the proposals of slavery reform advanced by two important figures of British and French imperial developments between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries: the administrators, planters, and proslavery thinkers Edward Long and Pierre-Victor Malouet. Long and Malouet applied modern political theory to the government of plantation society in Jamaica and Saint- Domingue. Their concerns about the practical difficulties of plantation management in an age of increasingly recurring revolts by the enslaved led them to formulate schemes of slavery amelioration which, by transforming the slaves into perpetual servants, would preserve the order of colonial society.

This article surveys the concepts of space and power in the political thought of Thomas Pownall, governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay before the Stamp Act crisis and later a member of Parliament. Looking at Pownall’s administrative treatises and parliamentary speeches as sources for a conceptual analysis, I intend to assess Pownall’s political and theoretical involvement in the transformations of his time. Pownall traced a connection between property and power that emerged from his analysis of society and government. In determining the position of power in space, property became the factor which organized space itself. Scaled up in the Atlantic, this connection between property and power influenced Pownall’s reflection on the American Revolution and on Anglo-American relations in the aftermath of independence. Pownall faced the revolutionary developments of his age by articulating new spatial assemblages: his changing response to the American Revolution took the form of two proposals that demanded a constitutional incorporation of the colonies and a federal organization of the North American empire in the 1760s and 1770s, respectively. After American independence, he theorized the Atlantic as an economic and political space organized by commercial relations and controlled by an Anglo-American ‘Atlantic Alliance’.

This essay surveys the ways in which the Jamaican Morant Bay rebellion of 1865 pushed British thinkers and administrators to rethink central issues of freedom, labour, and sovereignty. Reinterpreting some of the political and administrative documents used by historians from a conceptual perspective, I argue that the rebellion and the consequent abolition of the Jamaican house of assembly can be interpreted not as episodes of a «war of races», but rather as moments of a much larger phenomenon, started in the 1830s: the government of the emancipation in the British West Indies.

English radical thinker and activist Thomas Spence (1750-1814) has traditionally been considered a minor figure in the history of political thought. Spence was renowned for his "Plan," the proposal to abolish the private property of the land and promote a common management of it. His claims for the commons as England underwent industrialization sounded anachronistic at home, but made him relevant from an Atlantic perspective. By insisting on the connection between privatization of land and oppression, Spence linked his agrarian radicalism to the struggles against slavery and the dispossession of the natives in colonial contexts. Experimenting the methodological approach of Atlantic intellectual history from below, this article surveys the Atlantic dimension of Spence's Plan. It discusses Spence's practical and theoretical political education, showing his acquaintance with the landed and maritime struggles of his time and how he translated them into radical political theory. Spence also engaged with modern political thinkers and challenged the modern liberal conceptions of state and empire, assigning a crucial role to the sea as a reservoir of revolutionary ideas and practice. Seen from an Atlantic perspective, Spence's Plan can be interpreted as a project of decolonization of the world. The article traces also Spence's enduring influence, both in England and the Americas. The Atlantic relevance of the Plan is proved by Spence's legacy in the British Caribbean: the connection between land and freedom theorized by Spence was to African slaves a glaring matter of common sense.

This chapter surveys the concepts of space and power in the political thought of Thomas Pownall, governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay before the Stamp Act crisis and later a member of Parliament. Looking at Pownall’s administrative treatises and parliamentary speeches as sources for a conceptual analysis, I intend to assess Pownall’s political and theoretical involvement in the transformations of his time. Pownall traced a connection between property and power that emerged from his analysis of society and government. In determining the position of power in space, property became the factor which organized space itself. Scaled up in the Atlantic, this connection between property and power influenced Pownall’s reflection on the American Revolution and on Anglo-American relations in the aftermath of independence. Pownall faced the revolutionary developments of his age by articulating new spatial assemblages: his changing response to the American Revolution took the form of two proposals that demanded a constitutional incorporation of the colonies and a federal organization of the North American empire in the 1760s and 1770s, respectively. After American independence, he theorized the Atlantic as an economic and political space organized by commercial relations and controlled by an Anglo-American ‘Atlantic Alliance’.

Raccolta di saggi in occasione del bicentenario della morte del pensatore politico radicale inglese Thomas Spence (1750-1814).