Panopticon vs New South Wales, latest volume in The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, now published

Panopticon versus New South Wales and other writings on Australia, edited by Dr Tim Causer and Professor Philip Schofield, has been published by UCL Press. It is the thirty-fifth volume of the critically-acclaimed authoritative edition of The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham, produced by the Bentham Project, UCL Faculty of Laws, and the first to be published in open access. It is now available to download for free, as well to purchase in affordable paperback and hardback formats, from the UCL Press website.

Panopticon versus New South Wales and other writings on Australia contains Bentham’s landmark texts on the history of criminal punishment, the history of the origin and failure of Bentham’s panopticon penitentiary scheme, the theory of punishment and reform, and the histories of colonialism, imperialism, and international law.

The volume contains seven texts, four of which are published in Panopticon versus New South Wales for the first time:

• The ‘New Wales’ fragments (1791), drafted not long after Bentham had first offered the panopticon penitentiary to the British government in January 1791, and likely in response to recent disturbing reports about the state of the New South Wales penal colony.

• ‘Correspondence, sent to William Wilberforce, of Jeremy Bentham with Sir Charles Bunbury (1802), in which Bentham explains to Wilberforce how Bunbury had been interceding with the British government on behalf of the panopticon scheme. This collection of letters and notes provides the context for his subsequent critique of the penal colony of New South Wales.

• ‘Letter to Lord Pelham’ (1802) constitutes the first detailed critique of transportation to New South Wales, in which Bentham critically assesses the penal colony against his ‘five ends of penal justice’, namely example, reformation, reformation, compensation, and economy.

• In ‘Second Letter to Lord Pelham’ (1802) Bentham provides further evidence of the ongoing failure of New South Wales, contrasting reports of drunkenness, violence, and warfare with its Indigenous peoples, with reports of sobriety, order, and industry in penitentiaries in Pennsylvania and New York.

• In ‘Third Letter to Lord Pelham’ (1802–3), Bentham turns to another major plank of the British penal estate, the prison hulks. Bentham focuses upon the conditions aboard the south coast hulks, and especially their fearsome mortality rate—which Bentham blamed upon successive Home Secretaries, the Duke of Portland and Lord Pelham, who he essentially accuses of murder.

• In ‘A Plea for the Constitution’ (1803) Bentham argued that New South Wales had been founded illegally, and that certain powers assumed and ordinances issued by the colony’s governors had no legal basis, and neither did any punishments inflicted for violating them. Bentham feared that if this became known in New South Wales then the convicts would rebel and raze the colony to the ground.

• Finally, in ‘Colonization Company Proposal’ (1831) Bentham returned to the topic of Australia towards the end of his life when commenting favourably upon the National Colonization Society’s plan to establish a free colony on the south coast of Australia. This hitherto unpublished work adds further complexity to debates around Bentham’s views on colonies and colony-holding, since Bentham generally held an anti-colonial position in his writings.

The editing of the volume was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. To download or purchase Panopticon versus New South Wales and other writings on Australia, please visit the UCL Press website. Until the end of August 2022 readers can save 20% on print copies of the volume by using the code UCLMC22678L.

A collection of essays entitled Jeremy Bentham and Australia: Convicts, Utility, and Empire, edited by Dr Causer, Professor Margot Finn, and Professor Schofield, in which scholars explore the texts in Panopticon versus New South Wales, will be published in open-access by UCL Press in April 2022.