William Thomas Thornton’s family, ancestry, and early years: Some findings from recently discovered manuscripts and letters

The article discusses information about the family, life, and ancestry of economist William Thomas Thornton found in some of his manuscripts and letters. The importance of the lack of information surrounding Thornton\u27s personal life is explored. The available sources on Thornton\u27s life are described, including the book Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, which contains letters between Mill and Thornton. The discovery of the Thornton family letters is discussed and the usefulness of these documents to the study of Thornton\u27s life is also examined

The early economic writings of William Thomas Thornton

The aim of this article is to evaluate Thornton’s early contributions to the great public debates of the mid-Victorian period. Specifically, it reveals his methods for resolving pressing public concerns of the day through the application of the postulates of classical economics. It also highlights the divergence of his conclusions from the orthodox formulations prescribed by some leading classical writers. The remainder of the article is organized as follows. The first section covers briefly Thornton’s views on the causes of and remedies for overpopulation and poverty in rural Britain. Sections 2 and 3 discuss his views, respectively, on the Old Poor Laws and the New Poor Laws. Section 4 reviews his recommendations on the reform of the industrial workplace and factory system. Section 5 covers his views on land tenure reform, with special reference to the so-called Irish land question. The next section presents a variety of responses by leading Victorian figures to Thornton’s early economic writings. It also highlights the pastoral verse he published in the 1850s as a literary device intended to extol the virtues of a bygone agrarian era. Some concluding remarks follow in section 7

Review of \u3cem\u3eJohn Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand\u3c/em\u3e

John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand opens in St James Park, on a warm summer’s morning, with the teenage Mill striding to his office in Leadenhall Street in the financial heart of the City of London. Suddenly, Mill’s attention is caught by a small bundle abandoned beneath an oak tree. Curious, Mill kneels down beside it and unwraps the layers of soiled blankets only to discover a dead, newborn baby. This grisly experience remained etched in Mill’s mind for the duration of his life and was perhaps formative in shaping his views on the twin rights of life and liberty. [Extract from Introduction

William Thomas Thornton’s career at East India House: 1836–1880

Some recent work on William Thornton (1813–1880), culminating in Philip Mirowski and Steven Tradewell’s recently published Economic Writings of William Thornton (1999), seeks to cement his place in the history of nineteenth-century economics (see Donoghue 2002). But despite the notoriety Thornton achieved through his role in the wage-fund debates of the 1860s and 1870s, few commentators have explored other aspects of his work, particularly his prescient remarks on the nature of economic, political, and social reform in India.1 This absence is somewhat surprising because, for much of his professional career, Thornton served the East India Company at its Leadenhall Street headquarters in London, and, in 1858, when the Crown assumed administration of the company’s territories, he was appointed secretary of the India Office’s Department of Public Works, an important position within the Home Establishment. Thornton formed important relationships at East India House. For example, he met John Stuart Mill, who was employed there, and the two men’s first discussion marked the beginning of a mutually warm and long association. On a day-to-day basis, the demands of drafting company dispatches and attending to other administrative duties were not onerous, so Thornton could pursue his own literary ambitions. The result was the publication of several commendable works on political economy and philosophy, as well as three volumes of poetry. In 1873, as a mark of his unbroken service to the India Office, Thornton was created Companion of the Bath on the recommendation of the Duke of Argyll. Yet, we have no account of his long and successful career. The aim of this essay is to retrieve the broad outline of Thornton’s East India Company career.2 Section 1 examines his administrative responsibilities and duties with the company. Section 2 discusses his close friendship and professional relationship with John Stuart Mill. The two men influenced each other in a variety of ways. Here discussion focuses primarily on their professional activities at East India House before Mill’s retirement in 1858. Section 3 explores whether Thornton’s advocacy of public works programs in India was an expression of his own thinking on the subject, a manifestation of his work as a steward of empire, or both. Some concluding remarks follow

Review of \u3cem\u3eJ.S.Mill Revisited: Biographical and Political Explorations\u3c/em\u3e

The commemorative John Stuart Mill bicentennial conference held at University College London in June 2006 has generated renewed interest in the life and work of this notable Victorian personality. In this latest offering, Bruce Kinzer, the veteran of several scholarly works focusing on various aspects of Mill\u27s political thought, has presented his latest deliberations in a work that focuses on two important and overlapping subjects: the first group of chapters cover certain familiar biographical themes relating strictly to Mill\u27s formative years while the latter half of the book dclves into various facets of Mill\u27s political thought and activities in relation to the ebb and flow of Victorian political life. The overall result is a finely balanced group of essays in which the author, with impressive nuance and lightness of touch, probes into pertinent features of Mill\u27s intellectual biography. [Exerpt from Introduction

Defending Marshall’s \u27Masterpiece\u27: Ralph Souter’s Critique of Robbins’ \u3cem\u3eEssay\u3c/em\u3e

We examine Ralph W. Souter\u27s defence, in the 1930s, of Marshall\u27s Principles against Robbins\u27 attempt to recast economics as a \u27purely formal science of implications\u27. Souter elaborated on Marshall\u27s invocations progressively to increase the realism of economic science and contrasted this perspective on Marshall with Robbins\u27 atomistic bias, neglect of historical time and irreversibilities, arbitrary restrictions on the scope of economic science and emphasis on logical and mathematical form over content. Souter demonstrates that Robbins takes a Walrasian-inspired perspective on Marshall\u27s equilibrium concept whereas the \u27authentically Marshallian\u27 equilibrium notion generally incorporates potential for endogenous change. On this and other matters Souter has priority in drawing attention to Marshall\u27s incipient \u27evolutionary economics\u27

Strong Λπ\Lambda \pi Phase Shifts for CP Violation in Weak Ξ→Λπ\Xi \rightarrow \Lambda \pi Decay

Strong interaction $\Lambda\pi$ phase shifts relevant for the weak nonleptonic decay $\Xi \rightarrow \Lambda \pi$ are calculated using baryon chiral perturbation theory. We find in leading order that the S-wave phase shift vanishes and the $J={1 \over 2}$ P-wave phase shift is $-1.7 ^{\rm o}$. The small phase shifts imply that CP violation in this decay will be difficult to observe. Our results follow from chiral $SU(2)_L\times SU(2)_R$ symmetry.Comment: 8 pages, uses phyzzx, 2 figures included as uuencoded file, CALT-68-1940 and CMU-HEP94-2

Size isn’t everything:rates of genome size evolution, not C value, correlate with speciation in angiosperms

Angiosperms represent one of the key examples of evolutionary success, and their diversity dwarfs other land plants; this success has been linked, in part, to genome size and phenomena such as whole genome duplication events. However, while angiosperms exhibit a remarkable breadth of genome size, evidence linking overall genome size to diversity is equivocal, at best. Here, we show that the rates of speciation and genome size evolution are tightly correlated across land plants, and angiosperms show the highest rates for both, whereas very slow rates are seen in their comparatively species-poor sister group, the gymnosperms. No evidence is found linking overall genome size and rates of speciation. Within angiosperms, both the monocots and eudicots show the highest rates of speciation and genome size evolution, and these data suggest a potential explanation for the megadiversity of angiosperms. It is difficult to associate high rates of diversification with different types of polyploidy, but it is likely that high rates of evolution correlate with a smaller genome size after genome duplications. The diversity of angiosperms may, in part, be due to an ability to increase evolvability by benefiting from whole genome duplications, transposable elements and general genome plasticity