The Political Thought of Thomas Spence

Beyond Poverty and Empire

Matilde Cazzola

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000480849
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

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.

1
Spence and his worlds

DOI: 10.4324/9781003201588-2

‘The Plan’: its contents and changes

‘Spence’s Plan’ was a direct response to the social dislocation affecting thousands of men and women, resulting from enclosures and the dismantling of poor relief that accompanied the establishment of the market economy and industrial society in Britain between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.¹ First expounded in his lecture Property in Land Every One’s Right, read before the Newcastle Philosophical Society in 1775, the Plan was characterized by a number of core features that remained unaltered over the following forty years.² Starting from a sharp critique of the existing societal system, Spence devised his Plan as a project of radical social transformation detailing a new order of things to replace the old. According to him, the origins of the existing evils lay in the loss of man’s natural right to the common enjoyment of land. In fact, ‘the country of any people, in a native state, is properly their common, in which each of them has an equal property, with free liberty to sustain himself and connections with the animals, fruits and other products thereof’.³ The end of this original state of ‘free liberty’ and equality had been caused by an act of usurpation by which the few violently claimed illegitimate private ownership of the soil, dispossessing the many; this possession of landed monopolies had enabled landlords to acquire and retain social and political power over the landless. This condition of injustice and inequality would only be overcome when the ‘whole people in some country’ assembled, unanimously decided to abolish private ownership of land (but not of moveable goods, which would be privately held), and established a parochial system of common landownership. As the parishes, corresponding to the old territorial districts developing around each parish church, were the ‘corporations’ in which the population found itself already organized locally, Spence assigned them the crucial role of landlords. Being the common proprietors of their respective fields, this ensured that ‘[there] are no more nor other landlords in the whole country than the parishes; and each of them is sovereign landlord of its own territories’.⁴ As the administrative units responsible for the allocation and redistribution of plots of land to parishioners, the parishes would be able to rent the soil out in portions but not ‘alienate the least morsel’ of it, that is sell it.⁵ In Spence’s system, as private landownership would be abolished, the plots of land could never be privately owned but only privately cultivated within a system of common property. This system ruled out the existence of small freeholders who, being proprietors of the soil, could have individually sold or bought their plots, leading to new inequalities in a short span of time. As Spence’s system would no longer involve landlords apart from the parishes, everyone, without exception, would pay rent for use of the land in proportion to the size and quality of the plot received in usufruct; this payment was needed to prevent landed accumulation. The rent would be paid in place of all other taxes, tithes, customs, and duties formerly collected and would be used by the parishes for many purposes such as to remunerate public servants, support parochial and central administration, and fund the ordinary maintenance of the urban landscape and local social services (including schools and poor relief). ‘In a word, in doing whatever the people think proper’. Despite the many services that needed to be funded, rent would be affordable for each parishioner, as corruption and waste would be eliminated. Taken together, the parishes would constitute a sort of confederation, with each retaining marked political autonomy from the central government. The parishioners, thanks to universal male suffrage (‘each man has a vote’) and the secret ballot, would enjoy full political liberty, and social justice would be guaranteed by common landownership; as ‘freedom to any thing whatever cannot there be bought’, social and political hierarchies would be totally eradicated. The spread of the Plan, starting from a single parish, was described by Spence as a domino effect: ‘The whole earth shall at last be happy, and live like brethren’.⁶

While these foundational features of Spence’s Plan remained unchanged, its post-1775 versions were updated as a result of the author’s intellectual evolution due to both his personal experiences and the changing social and political context in which he lived.⁷ The first and most important change in the Plan dated back to the ballad ‘The Rights of Man’ of 1783, where Spence first mentioned the redistribution of what he called ‘dividends’.⁸ The Plan was, in fact, a scheme for the redistribution not of land but of rent, as the soil would be not reapportioned but rather held in common. Spence anticipated that, after everyone had paid rent to their respective parishes and all the expenses for public administration and social services had been covered, two-thirds of the total amount of the rent would be left over. These remainders would constitute the dividends, namely, shares of money to be redistributed according to a quarterly schedule ‘among all the living souls in the parish, whether male or female; married or single; legitimate or illegitimate; from a day old to the extremest age’.⁹ This idea was probably inspired by Gilbert’s Act of 1782, which encouraged wage supplementation for poor workers. Interestingly, the most complete accounts of Spence’s system of dividends can be found in his pamphlets The Meridian Sun of Liberty, or the Whole Rights of Man (1796) and The Rights of Infants (1797), which followed the establishment of the system of wage subsidies introduced by the Berkshire parish of Speenhamland in 1795, guaranteeing poor workers a minimum income dependent on the price of bread.¹⁰ Spence’s Plan was also strongly affected by the revolutions of his age. In 1782, influenced by North American developments (and by his reading of Daniel Defoe), he referred to his confederation of parishes as the ‘United Parishes of Crusonia’.¹¹ In 1793, inspired by the terminology of the constitution of the United States, he adopted the terms ‘Senate’ and ‘Congress’, alongside the more common ‘Parliament’, to describe the central institutions of the Spencean parishes.¹² But the second, most significant change in Spence’s thought, which concerned the method by which his Plan might be implemented, dated back to 1795 and was directly connected to the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution. While in former writings, the Spencean system rested upon a unanimous and peaceful collective decision, the pamphlet The End of Oppression (1795) contained Spence’s first explicit theorization of violent revolution as the method for destroying private landownership and establishing the parish system.¹³ The American and the French Revolutions also inspired the two constitutional versions of Spence’s Plan: The Constitution of a Perfect Commonwealth (1798), which borrowed from the Jacobin Constitution of 1793, and The Constitution of Spensonia (1803), which, as Chapter 3 will show, reflected Spence’s increasing distance from French revolutionary developments.¹⁴ These Revolutions also influenced Spence’s religious attitudes. While the 1775 edition of his first lecture mentioned a parochial ‘established religion’ professed by the majority of the population, the 1793 edition, reprinted with the new title The Rights of Man and imbued with the ideas of the ‘Atlantic Enlightenment’, declared that ‘toleration would be allowed to every religion or opinion not repugnant to the Rights of Man’.¹⁵ Here, Spence implicitly took a stance in relation to the contemporary parliamentary debates concerning the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which had made the holding of any public office conditional on being a member of the Church of England.¹⁶ The Plan also reflected, in fact, Spence’s engagement with contemporary British debates. Since the publication of his periodical Pigs’ Meat in 1793, he had referred to his political interlocutors as ‘the swinish multitude’, thereby parodying the expression coined by Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France.¹⁷ Furthermore, in 1795, Spence reprinted another version of his 1775 lecture, whose most significant novelty was in fact its title, which, to stress the limitations of Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–2), became The Real Rights of Man.¹⁸ Spence’s dispute with Paine did not end there, for, in 1797, he wrote The Rights of Infants, where the Plan was spelled out by a woman, who vindicated the rights of mothers and children alongside those of men. The pamphlet also contained an appendix which demolished Paine’s social proposal in Agrarian Justice (1797) and presented the Spencean system of dividends as a radical alternative.¹⁹ Over the years, Spence’s Plan was also formulated in reference to different geographical locations. As Chapter 4 will detail, Spence lived in an age of maritime voyages, white conquests, and anticolonial struggle and appeared to be directly influenced by those events. In A Supplement to the History of Robinson Crusoe, Being the History of Crusonia (1782), the Plan was implemented in Crusonia, the Pacific island conquered by Robinson Crusoe in Defoe’s famous novel.²⁰ Crusonia was Spence’s first utopia and was in all likelihood inspired by James Cook’s expeditions to Oceania between 1768 and 1771; interestingly, one of the ships which carried Cook in his first voyage, HMS Endeavour, had been previously used as a collier in the North East of England.²¹ In 1794, probably struck by the news about the mutiny on the Royal vessel Bounty, whose crew had bundled their captain William Bligh into a small boat in 1789 and had themselves settled on Tahiti and other islands in the South Pacific (before being arrested, brought back to England, and court-martialled), Spence wrote both The Marine Republic, where the Plan was put into practice aboard a sailing ship, and A Further Account of Spensonia, which presented the first description of his second utopia, the island of Spensonia in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.²² In 1796, following new encroachments on native lands by the new-born government of the United States, Spence published The Reign of Felicity in which he explicitly proposed a colonial adoption of the Plan among Native Americans.²³ Therefore, as it was deeply influenced by revolutions, social and territorial developments, and intellectual debates both within and beyond Britain during those years, the Plan can be viewed as an up-to-date, open field of reflection, which mirrored Spence’s times and the transformations he witnessed.

Newcastle and the Town Moor affair

Spence was born in 1750 to poor Scottish parents and raised alongside eighteen siblings in Newcastle upon Tyne, which provided the backdrop to his political education.²⁴ The impoverished milieu in which Spence grew up pushed him, from his earliest yea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: ‘pearls for pigs’
• 1 Spence and his worlds
• 2 The modernity of the Plan
• 3 Into the Revolution
• 4 The Plan’s Atlantic theatre
• 5 Neither public nor private
• Conclusion: beyond eccentricity
• Bibliography
• Index