Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the Political Economy of Emancipation

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.