The Empire as a Social Machine: Robert Wilmot-Horton on Emigration, Population and Capital Accumulation

This article examines the activities of Robert Wilmot-Horton as Under-Secretary in the Colonial Office (1821–1828). His support for emigration policies has been the subject of classic scholarship in the history of economic ideas and policy-making. By emphasising the relevance of Thomas Robert Malthus’s intellectual achievements on the relationship between poverty, emigration and capital accumulation – on which Wilmot-Horton relied – this work aims to illuminate the motives that led him to seek intellectual and legislative support for a plan that would allow the Irish and British poor to emigrate to the settler colony of Upper Canada with State assistance. To fully appreciate Wilmot-Horton’s contribution to the history of British imperial administration, it is thus crucial to link the emigration debate with the Colonial Office’s contemporary attempt to reform land administration in settler colonies. This proves the centrality that Wilmot-Horton ascribed to artificial legislative intervention in promoting the affirmation of market relations throughout the empire, thereby ensuring social and political stability in the motherland. Finally, this paper assesses key points of Wilmot-Horton’s emigration schemes and Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s later theories of ‘systematic colonization,’ shedding light on the ways in which the former considered emigration a meeting point between scientific principles and practical administration.