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William Thomas Thornton, 1813-1880.
William Thomas Thornton was a British maverick economist and EIC bureaucrat.
Originating from Burnham, Buckinghamshire, William T. Thornton was educated at the Moravian school in Ockbrook. After spending a few years in Malta and Constantinople, Thornton became an East India Company employee - entering as a clerk in 1836. After the EIC was nationalized in 1858, Thornton stayed on as secretary of public works in the India Office until his retirement.
Although classified here as an anti-Classical economist, W.T. Thonrton was nonetheless a member of the Ricardian Political Economy Club and a good friend of John Stuart Mill. Thornton worked alongside Mill in the India Office almost every day from 1846 to 1858, and was one of the latter's few intimates.
Thornton's 1845 assault on Malthus's population theory, or rather his belief that it could be overcome by small property-ownership among the poor, was well-received. Albeit his 1848 Plea for land reforms in Ireland fell upon deaf ears.
In a series of articles in the Fortnightly Review (1866-68) culminating in his famous 1869 book, On Labour, William Thornton launched his famous assault on the "supply-and-demand" theory of market price, arguing that the implied "mechanism" was faulty and that price was indeterminate. Thornton has been hailed in the modern day as the first economist to pay serious attention to stability theory and market microstructure. His argument led to energetic responses by J.S. Mill, J.E. Cairnes, Thomas E. Cliffe-Leslie and W.S. Jevons. Fleeming Jenkin's diagrammatic depiction of supply and demand curves was constructed to refute Thornton.
In that same book, Thornton led an assault on the Ricardian wages fund doctrine. In his 1869 response, J.S. Mill recanted the doctrine.
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