William Thomas Thornton

William Thomas Thornton, CB (14 February 1813 – 17 June 1880) was an English economist, civil servant and author.

Life Thornton was born at Burnham, Buckinghamshire on 14 February 1813, the son of the merchant Thomas Thornton and Sophie Zohrab; she was the daughter of a Persian merchant, Paul Zohrab, who had settled in Turkey. Thornton's father was heavily involved in international commerce from a young age. He had lived in Constantinople and its surrounding region for many years in pursuit of British mercantile interests. His father was also well known for his book, titled Turkey Past and Present (1807), a work that described in great detail the social, political, and military institutions of the Ottoman Empire.

Thornton was educated at the Moravian settlement at Ockbrook in Derbyshire and spent three years in Malta with his cousin, Sir William Henry Thornton, an auditor general for Malta. From 1830 to 1835, Thornton lived abroad in Constantinople with Consul-General Cartwright.

He was the youngest of eight children, with his father dying in 1814. He was subsequently raised by his father's family, predominantly by his aunt Elizabeth Moore.

Thornton continued to elaborate about his position as a clerk in the examiner's office and compared it with that of Mill's experiences at the East India Company:

According to the ordinary course of things in those days, the newly-appointed junior would have had nothing to do, except a little abstracting, indexing, and researching, or pretending to search, into records; but young Mill was almost immediately set to indite despatches to the governments of the three Indian Presidencies, on what, in India House phraseology, were distinguished as "political" subjects—subjects, that is, for the most part growing out of the relations of the said governments with 'native' states of foreign potentates. This continued to be his business almost to the last.

Senior administrator at examiner's office In 1838, after moving to the marine branch of the examiner's office, Thornton went from an un-salaried probationary period with an 80-pound-a-year stipend to earning an annual income of 500 pounds a year. By 1839, Thornton was doing well enough financially that the East India Company had him contribute into the Widows' Fund, a pension plan set up by the company to financially help widows of employees whom had died, through a compulsory contribution that was required for higher-up employees. In 1842, he began to pay income taxes. In 1856, he was appointed the assistant examiner in the Examiner's Office. In 1858, he attained the position of senior administrator of the secretary of the India House's Department of Public Works. He received a raise in salary for both promotions. As assistant examiner, he had received a raise from 600 pounds per year to 900 pounds per year, and as the senior administrator at the Department of Public Works, he received a raise to 1200 pounds per year. He would continue receiving modest raises every few years throughout his career. Eventually, with his career as a mandarin at the East India Company, he was able to purchase a property of upper-middle class means in London, where he would live out the rest of his days.

Thornton's duty as the assistant examiner was mostly to prepare draft dispatches and any policy documents that regarded the East India Company's public works activities. The documents dealt with the construction of railways and roads, canals, bridges, and irrigation apparatuses in Burma, India, and the Straits Settlement. The documents were first circulated throughout the India Office, then sent to the central administration in India. However, before the dispatches could be sent to India they had to be approved by both the court of directors for the company and then by the board of control, the representative of the authority of parliament. The chief examiner and his senior assistants had a large influence on the content of the dispatches.

Dispatches and minute papers that Thornton had to draft were composed on average 10 times per year. However, in the years 1856-1861 and 1870–1872, Thornton authored a significantly higher than average number of dispatches; most notably, in the years 1860 and 1861, Thornton composed eighty-eight and seventy, respectively. Since 1856, it is evident – due to the large increase of Thornton signatures and handwriting in the minute papers and dispatches – that his responsibilities had increased at the Department of Public Works. The content in dispatches and then later minute papers ranged from one- or two-page documents of confirmations of store deliveries, and extensions for public service appointments, and a letter of acknowledgment, to hefty fifty-page documents concerned with serious policy issues such as trade, defence and public infrastructure. most notably, the validity of comparisons of prosperity between the medieval and modern laboring classes. He posited that there was a "low-level trap" for the laboring class in the economical development of society: that the realities of life for the impoverished were too much to allow them to focus on any real prospect of prosperity. Thornton also cited competition; workers "are too numerous to earn a competent subsistence for themselves and their families, competition takes place amongst them: each, in his anxiety to obtain employment, offers to accept lower wages than he requires for his comfortable maintenance... Neither has this state any tendency to correct itself. Whatever point populations that may attain, it can with equal ease at least maintain itself there."

Thornton argued against the reasoning that if the poor were lifted out of poverty they would just become lazy and feckless, with the belief that sudden lifting out of poverty would foster the behaviour necessary to maintain prosperity. He believed that simply owning property and holding other responsibilities would encourage prudence and sound-mindedness. During a period when economic discussion was focused on the wages fund doctrine, Thornton saw that wages were determined by the ratio between the "fund" and the population of laborers in the market, but he contested the stance that the denominator complied with the simple stories of "immiseration" (economical impoverishment).

In 1870, On Labour was translated into German and published by Heinrich Schramm. In 1894, Richard Burdinski translated and released Die Produktiv-Genossenschaft als Regenerationsmittel des Arbeiterstandes. Eine Kritik der Thornton-Lassalleschen Wirtschaftsreform. The book also covered India's controversies over the railway development across the country, the ship canals, and telegraph wires that ranged from cities to cities. It was also a huge endorsement and call for a public educational establishment that would be the foundation of a prosperous Indian commercial market and in turn would provide the "infrastructure in which markets operate."

"Irrigations regarded as a Preventive of Indian Famines" On 22 February 1878 Thornton delivered a speech of his last publication, a paper titled "Irrigations regarded as a Preventive of Indian Famines". Thornton read his paper before the Society of Arts.

This shows that even though they were at odds in economic and political opinions and philosophy, Mills still found a way to be supportive of Thornton's work, not only in an encouraging manner but also on a fundamental economic fundamental level as well. Mill was able to deliver both a public and personally endorsement for Thornton's On Labour without compromising his own beliefs; Mill believed that "the political objectives were fundamentally sound", and that "the need for synoptic text treating the theory of unionism was imminent."