CONTROVERSIAL COLONEL
Robert Torrens 1780-1864
Robert Torrens 1780-1864
Peter Moore
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CONTROVERSIAL COLONEL
Robert Torrens 1780-1864 Peter Moore |
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The long-awaited biography of the man who was Ireland’s premier political economist as well as the leading theorist of the Classical (or English) School of Economics after David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. Full accounts are offered of Torrens’ multiple careers, as officer of Royal Marines (1796-1834), Member of Parliament for Ipswich, Ashburton and Bolton (1826-27, 1830-34), minor novelist (1808, 1813-14), owner-editor of The Globe and Traveller newspaper (1820-64), chairman of the South Australian Commission and its successor, the Colonial Land and Emigration Board (1835-41), and author of over 80 works of political economy (1808-58). Twenty-three years in the research and writing, this tome recovers Torrens’ irregular personal and family life, accounts for his diverse other interests (from bayonet-fighting to steam engines), and places his Irish heredity in its full perspective against imperial and colonial concerns. Not to be confused with his second son, the land title system reformer, Sir Robert Richard Torrens (1812-84), Colonel Torrens is shown to have been acutely focused on making the 1801 Act of Union with Ireland a genuine compact in political, economic and social senses; and to have fostered emigration from Ireland to South Australia (along with emigration generally from the United Kingdom to British dominions) as an interim measure while the Irish economy was brought into line with the mainland’s. Built on a world-wide paper chase for his private correspondence – no corpus survives, though over 200 letters and other manuscripts have turned up – and contacts with such luminaries as the late Lord Robbins and Professor Frank Whitson Fetter, and with living leaders in their discipline, Dennis O’Brien (Durham), William. O. Thweatt (Vanderbilt), and Professor Giancarlo de Vivo (Naples), himself the editor of the seven volumed set released by Thoemmes in June 2000.
IN PREPARATION |
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