Debating the Moral and Political Economies of Convictism: Samuel Marsden’s Essays on Agriculture and the Spirit Trade in Early New South Wales

Samuel Marsden's essays on agriculture and the spirit trade, written circa 1807, are read as early examples of colonial economic thought. Marsden lamented the corrupting influence of the spirit trade, which encouraged drunkenness and idleness, undermining agriculture, 'the great source of national wealth'. Accordingly, he called for strict government control over prices and markets, a ban on barter for spirits or grain and compulsory agricultural labour. These views can be interpreted as an argument for a more moral economy, in which convicts were reformed and redeemed through agricultural labour within an orderly community of deferential convict labourers, emancipist small-holders, and paternal masters. But this influential vision of the colony would become the basis for a future political economy of convictism, a novel discourse that understood the colonial economy as centred on the productivity of convict labour.