Aaron Burr had remained abroad for four years, lived in self-imposed exile from 1808 to 1812, passing most of this period in England, where he occupied a house on Craven Street in London.

He has become a good friend, even confidant, of the English Utilitarian philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, and on occasion has lived at Bentham's home.

He has also spent time in Scotland, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and France.

Living in his customary indebtedness but ever hopeful, he had solicited funding for renewing his plans for a conquest of Mexico, but had been rebuffed.

He had been ordered out of England and Napoleon Bonaparte had refused to receive him, although one of his ministers had held an interview concerning Burr's goals for Spanish Florida or the British possessions in the Caribbean.

With help from old friends Samuel Swartwout and Matthew L. Davis, Burr returns to New York and his law practice in 1812, using the surname "Edwards", his mother's maiden name, for a while to avoid creditors.

Robert Owen, at first regarded with suspicion as a stranger, had soon won the confidence of his people.

The mills continue to have great commercial success, but some of Owen's schemes involve considerable expense, which displeases his partners.

Tired of the restrictions imposed on him by men who wish to conduct the business on the ordinary principles, Owen arranges in 1813 to have them bought out by new found investors.

These, including the classical liberal and utilitarian Jeremy Bentham and a well-known Quaker, William Allen, are content to accept just five thousand pounds return on their capital, allowing Owen a freer scope for his philanthropy.

In the same year, Owen first authors several essays in which he expounds on the principles which underlie his education philosophy.

Owen had originally been a follower of Bentham.

However, as time passes, Owen becomes more and more socialistic, whereas Bentham thinks that free markets (in particular, the rights for workers to move and choose their employers) would free the workers from the excess power of the capitalists.

At an early age, Owen had lost all belief in the prevailing forms of religion and had thought out a creed for himself, which he considers an entirely new and original discovery.

The chief points in this philosophy are that man's character is made not by him but for him, that it has been formed by circumstances over which he had no control, that he is not a proper subject either of praise or blame.

These principles lead up to the practical conclusion that the great secret in the right formation of man's character is to place him under the proper influences–physical, moral and social–from his earliest years.

The principles of the irresponsibility of man and of the effect of early influences form the key to Owen's whole system of education and social amelioration.

They are embodied in his first work, A New View of Society, or Essays on the Principle of the Formation of the Human Character, the first of four essays appearing in 1813.

Owen's new views theoretically belong to a very old system of philosophy, and his originality is to be found only in his benevolent application of them.

James Mill writes a number of articles, containing an exposition of utilitarianism, for the supplement to the fifth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1814, the most important being those on "Jurisprudence," "Prisons" and "Government."

Mill was born at Northwater Bridge, in the parish of Logie Pert, Angus, Scotland, the son of James Mill, a shoemaker.

His mother, Isabel Fenton, of a family that had suffered from connection with the Stuart rising, had resolved that he should receive a first-rate education, and sent him first to the parish school and then to the Montrose Academy, where he remained until the unusual age of seventeen and a half.

He then entered the University of Edinburgh, where he had distinguished himself as a Greek scholar.

In October 1798, he was ordained as a minister of the Church of Scotland, but met with little success.

From 1790 to 1802, in addition to holding various tutorships, he occupied himself with historical and philosophical studies.

Finding little prospect of a career in Scotland, in 1802 he went to London, in company with Sir John Stuart, then member of parliament for Kincardineshire, and had devoted himself to literary work.

From 1803 to 1806, he edited an ambitious periodical called the Literary Journal, which professed to give a summary view of all the leading departments of human knowledge.

During this time he also edited the St. James's Chronicle, belonging to the same proprietor.

In 1804, he wrote a pamphlet on the corn trade, arguing against a bounty on the exportation of grain.

In 1805, he published a translation (with notes and quotations) of An Essay on the Spirit and Influence of the Reformation of Luther, a C.F.

Villers's work on the Reformation, an attack on the alleged vices of the papal system.

About the end of this year, he began his The History of British India, which he will take twelve years to complete, instead of three or four, as had been expected.

In that year he had also married Harriet Burrow, whose mother, a widow, kept what was then known as an establishment for lunatics in Hoxton.

He then took a house in Pentonville, where his eldest son, John Stuart Mill, was born in 1806.

In 1808, he had become acquainted with Jeremy Bentham, and will for many years be his chief companion and ally.

He has adopted Bentham's principles in their entirety, and has determined to devote all his energies to bringing them before the world.

Between 1806 and 1818, he writes for the Anti-Jacobin Review, the British Review and The Eclectic Review; but there is no means of tracing his contributions.

In 1808, he had begun to write for the Edinburgh Review, to which he had contributed steadily until 1813, his first known article being "Money and Exchange."

He also wrote on Spanish America, China, Francisco de Miranda, the East India Company, and the Liberty of the Press.

In the Annual Review for 1808, two articles of his are traced—a "Review of Fox's History," and an article on "Bentham's Law Reforms," probably his first published notice of Bentham.

In 1811, he had cooperated with William Allen (1770–1843), a Quaker and chemist, in a periodical called the Philanthropist.

He contributed largely to every issue—his principal topics being Education, Freedom of the Press, and Prison Discipline (under which he expounded Bentham's Panopticon).

He has made powerful onslaughts on the Church in connection with the Bell vs. Lancasterian school system debate, and has taken a part in the discussions that will lead to the foundation of the University of London in 1825.

James Mill prefers to take a theoretic approach to social subjects rather than the more empirical one common in his time.

In his influential History of British India, published in 1818, he describes the acquisition of the Indian Empire by England and later the United Kingdom.

He also brings political theory to bear on the delineation of the Hindu civilization, and subjects the conduct of the actors in the successive stages of the conquest and administration of India to severe criticism.

The book obtains a great and immediate success, and will bring about a change in the author's fortunes: in the following year, Mill will be appointed an official in the India House, in the important department of the examiner of Indian correspondence.

The book itself, and the author's official connection with India for the last seventeen years of his life, effects a complete change in the whole system of governance in the country.

Mill never visits the Indian colony, relying solely on documentary material and archival records in compiling his work.

Mill and Bentham inspire the Philosophical Radicals, a term used to designate a philosophically-minded group of English political radicals whose early members include David Ricardo and jurist John Austin, among other journalists and intellectuals, and are dedicated to economic and social reform along the utilitarian program developed by Bentham.

David Ricardo had set forth his most famous work, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, 1817.

He opens the first chapter with a statement of the labor theory of value, and demonstrates later in this chapter that prices do not correspond to this value.

He retains the theory, however, as an approximation.

The labor theory of value states that the relative price of two goods is determined by the ratio of the quantities of labor required in their production.

Ricardo will continue to work on his value theory to the end of his life.

Ricardo is responsible for developing theories of rent, wages, and profits.

Like Adam Smith, Ricardo is also an opponent of protectionism for national economies, especially for agriculture.

Although Smith had preached free trade, he could not show when and how the trade is profitable.

It is Ricardo who makes it clear by the logic what is now called comparative advantage.

Another idea associated with Ricardo is Ricardian equivalence, an argument suggesting that in some circumstances a government's choice of how to pay for its spending (i.e., whether to use tax revenue or issue debt and run a deficit) might have no effect on the economy.

Several authorities consider that Ricardo is the source of the concepts behind the so-called Iron Law of Wages, according to which wages naturally tend to a subsistence level; others dispute the assignment to Ricardo of this idea.

Ricardo's ideas have a tremendous influence on later developments in economics.

United States economists rank Ricardo as the second most influential economic thinker, behind Adam Smith, prior to the twentieth century.

With his highly logical arguments, he has become the theoretical father of the classical political economy.

Born in London, Ricardo was the third of seventeen children of a Sephardic Jewish family of Portuguese origin who had recently relocated from the Dutch Republic.

His father was a successful stockbroker.

Ricardo had eloped at age twenty-one with a Quaker, Priscilla Anne Wilkinson, leading to estrangement from his family.

His father disowned him and his mother apparently never spoke to him again.

At the time of his marriage, Ricardo had disconnected from Judaism and became a Unitarian.

Without family support, he started his own business as a stockbroker, in which he had become quite successful owing to the connections he had made when working with his father.

During the Battle of Waterloo, he had bet against the French victory and invested in British securities.

By the time he retired from the Exchange at the age of forty-three, his fortune was estimated at about £600,000.

He then purchased and moved to Gatcombe Park, an estate in Gloucestershire (now owned and lived in by Princess Anne, the Princess Royal).

Ricardo had become interested in economics after reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in 1799 on a vacation to the English resort of Bath.

This was Ricardo's first contact with economics.

He had written his first economics article at age thirty-seven and within another ten years will reach the height of his fame when he takes a seat in the House of Commons, representing Portarlington, an Irish rotten borough.

He will hold the seat, which had initially been made available to him by his friend Richard "Conversation" Sharp, until his death in 1823.

Ricardo is a close friend of James Mill, who has encouraged him in his political ambitions and writings about economics.

Other notable friends include Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Malthus, with whom Ricardo had had a considerable debate (in correspondence) over such things as the role of landowners in a society.

He also is a member of London's intellectuals, later becoming a member of Malthus' Political Economy Club, and a member of the King of Clubs.

The first issue of the radical quarterly founded by Jeremy Bentham, The Westminster Review, established as the official organ of the Philosophical Radicals, is published in London on January 24, 1824.

The first edition features an article by James Mill (it will be continued in the second by his son John Stuart Mill), which serves as a provocative reprobation of a rival, more well-established journal, the Edinburgh Review, castigating it as an organ of the Whig party, and for sharing the latter’s propensity for fence-sitting in the aristocratic interest.

The controversy draws in a wide public response; much, however, critical.

Most British subjects who had served with the British East India Company until the end of the eighteenth century had been content with making profits and leaving the Indian social institutions untouched.

A growing number of Anglican and Baptist evangelicals in Britain, however, feel that social institutions should be reformed.

There is also the demand in Britain, first articulated by member of Parliament and political theorist Edmund Burke, that the company's government balance its exploitative practices with concern for the welfare of the Indian people.

The influential utilitarian theories of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill state that societies can be reformed by proper laws.

Influenced in part by these factors, British administrators in India have embarked on a series of social and administrative reforms that are not well received by the conservative elements of Bengali society.

Emphasis is placed on the introduction of Western philosophy, technology, and institutions rather than on the reconstruction of native institutions.

The early attempts by the British East India Company to encourage the use of Sanskrit and Persian have been abandoned in favor of Western science and literature; elementary education is taught in the vernacular, but higher education in English.

The stated purpose of secular education is to produce a class of Indians instilled with British cultural values.

Persian has been replaced with English as the official language of the government.

A code of civil and criminal procedure has been fashioned after British legal formulas.

In the field of social reforms, the British suppress what they consider to be inhumane practices, such as suttee (self-immolation of widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands), female infanticide, and human sacrifice.

The British have almost finished consolidating their position in Ceylon by the early 1830s and begin to take more of an interest in securing the island's political stability and economic profitability.

A new wave of thought, influenced by the reformist political ideology articulated by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill, promises to change fundamentally Britain's relationship to its colonies.

Known as utilitarianism, and later as philosophical radicalism, it promotes the idea of democracy and individual liberty.

This philosophy sponsors the idea of the trusteeship, i.e., that new territories will be considered trusts and will receive all the benefits of British liberalism.

These philosophical abstractions are put into practical use with the recommendations of a commission led by W.M.G. Colebrooke and C.H. Cameron.

Their Colebrooke Report (1831-32) is an important document in the history of the island.

G.C. Mendis, considered by many to be the doyen of modern Sri Lankan history, considers the Colebrooke-Cameron reforms to be the dividing line between the past and present in Sri Lanka.