Thomas Collins Banfield

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Thomas Collins Banfield (born April 3, 1802 in Castlelyons County Cork , Ireland , † November 24, 1855 in Bucharest , Romania ) was an Irish-born philologist and economist.

Life and work

Thomas Collins Banfield, son of John Francis Banfield (1768-1830) and Elisabeth Collins, came from a Protestant Irish family. Nothing is known about his childhood and youth, but his excellent language skills at a young age indicate that he had close contacts to German-speaking countries from an early age or that he grew up there.

Banfield's first half of life, which he spent mainly in Germany and Austria, was dominated by philological and artistic interests. Until 1828 he served at the Bavarian court in Munich as the personal librarian of Crown Prince Maximilian II Joseph (Bavaria) and as a language teacher. He then worked for a few months as an associate professor for English language and literature at the Collegium Carolinum in Braunschweig , but was dismissed on October 12, 1828 for disobedience. In the summer of 1829 he got a job as a lecturer of the English language at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen , which he held until the summer semester of 1831. One of his students there was the Crown Prince Maximilian, who he trusted from Munich. Banfield's teaching load in Göttingen comprised eight hours per week. Among other things, he based the lessons on his two-volume anthology "The beauties of the poets of Great Britain" published in 1829. During this time, Banfield also made a contribution to the German-English cultural exchange with a translation of Wilhelm Tell by Friedrich Schiller .

Through the mediation of the Göttingen anthropologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach , who valued him as a family friend, Banfield met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in the spring of 1830 . His diary of April 12, 1830 shows a visit to Weimar. He remained on friendly terms with Goethe's daughter-in-law Ottilie von Goethe , who was enthusiastic about Ireland and whom he presumably met on this occasion, until at least the 1840s. In the second half of 1831 Banfield moved to Vienna, where he wrote two grammatical textbooks published in 1832 in addition to private lectures on the English language and literature.

As an external person, Banfield submitted his 25-page publication “De montium apud antiquissimas gentes cultu” as a dissertation to the University of Vienna in 1834, an archaeological-mystical study of the religious worship of the mountains.

On May 2, 1835, Banfield married Josephine (von) Frech (born March 23, 1809; † January 15, 1882), daughter of the imperial-royal forester Joseph Franziskus Frech (1770-1836) in Vienna. The marriage produced six children, including the first-born son Richard Mitis Banfield (1836-1906), who later became the father of the Austrian naval aviator Gottfried von Banfield (1890-1986).

The medical historian Romeo Seligmann , a friend of Banfield, wrote from memory after his death: “Having lived in Vienna for many years, Banfield created a friendly home here; A lovable personality both mentally and physically, despite the baggage of a versatile scholarship, he walked lightly through the world, maintaining a cheerful elasticity even under heavy pressure. ”A fruit of Banfield's stay in Austria for about a decade and one of the first testimonies to himself Now increasingly prevailing economic interests was the treatise published in London in 1842 “The Austrian Empire; her population and resources ”.

After the Banfields temporarily resided in Augsburg in the early 1840s, the family took up residence in Wiesbaden in late 1843. One of the advantages of this choice of location for Banfield was the good transport connections, which he now often used for his intensive trips to Great Britain. Shortly after moving from Augsburg, Banfield wrote to a friend that he “was about to publish a system of state economy in which the current system, especially the one popular in England, did not meet the needs of the time.” The critical examination of the doctrines that set the tone in Great Britain at the time, especially the school of David Ricardo , from then on determined Banfield's public commitment, which was reflected from 1843 in publications and lectures, for example at the University of Cambridge and the London Institute for Economical Sciences.

As a scholar of economics, Banfield, who, despite his ambitions, did not present an original and coherent system, was soon forgotten. As in previous years in the field of fiction, his main merit was mediating between Great Britain and continental Europe by working with economists such as Johann Heinrich von Thünen , Friedrich von Hermann , Heinrich Friedrich von Storch and Pellegrino Rossi , from whom he himself was greatly inspired felt, made known in the English-speaking world. Banfield was an avowed supporter of the subjective theory of values ​​established by Friedrich von Hermann and a rigorous advocate of the free market economy with limited state influence to marginal corrections. He by no means ignored the social consequences of liberalism and capitalism, which were unmistakable in Great Britain at the time, but did not consider them to be inherent in the system in his belief in the self-regulation of the market in the interests of all and in the ethically sound foresight of financially strong economic actors.

Title page: Thomas C. Banfield: Industry of the Rhine. Series I: Agriculture. London: Knight, 1846

While Banfield was increasingly involved in Great Britain from the 1840s onwards, Germany remained a central point of life for him. Study trips, which he undertook through the Rhenish provinces in 1846/47, supplemented by earlier observations in southern Germany, were the basis for his extensive presentation "Industry of the Rhine", published in 1846 and 1848 in two volumes devoted to agricultural and industrial-commercial conditions - again an example of the knowledge transfer sought by Banfield between continental Europe and Britain, but also a source work relevant to economic history in Germany itself.

For all his erudition, Banfield was evidently a very practical and inventive person. He appeared repeatedly as the holder of patents, around 1846 for the invention of a machine for processing ore. In the Prussian districts of Siegen and Altenkirchen , he was involved in projects for iron and cobalt ore processing for a while.

On the recommendation of the British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel , Banfield was hired in 1846 as a secretary in the Privy Council (Privy Privy Council). His last assignment in the civil service took him to Southeast Europe in 1855 to oversee the material and financial support of the British Land Transport Corps during the Crimean War . On this mission, Banfield died in Bucharest, where he was also buried, of a stroke.

Fonts

  • The beauties of the poets of Great Britain with explanatory notes., Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1829 (2 volumes, 584 and 478 pages).
  • William Tell. A dramatic poem, translated from the German of Schiller. London: Black, Young, and Young; Reprint Braunschweig 1831: Vieweg.
  • New practical English grammar for Germans. Vienna: Tendler, 1832.
  • A key to the practical English grammar for Germans. Vienna: Tendler, 1832.
  • About the monuments of antiquity in historical consideration, in: Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode, 1833, pp. 753–756 and 760–762. link
  • De Montium apud antiquissimas gentes cultu. Dissertatio auctore Thoma C. Banfield. Vienna: Gerold, 1834, 25 p.
  • The Austrian Empire; her population and resources. London: Taylor, 1842.
  • Six letters to the Right Hon. Sir Robert Peel, Bart., Being an attempt to expose the dangerous tendency of the theory of rent advocated by Mr. Ricardo, and by the writers of his school. London: Taylor, 1843. Link
  • The organization of industry, explained in a course of lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge in Easter term 1844. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1844.
  • Four lectures on the organization of industry; being part of a course delivered to the University of Cambridge in Easter term 1844. London: Taylor, 1845.
  • Economic Letters, in: New Year Books of History and Politics, ed. von Friedrich Bülau, 1845 / II, pp. 428-438, 1846 / I, pp. 62-73 and 324-346, 1846 / II, pp. 237-246 and 344-362. link
  • Industry of the Rhine. Series I: Agriculture. London: Knight, 1846.
  • The progress of the Prussian nation. 1805, 1831, 1842. By TC Banfield, Esq., FSS, of the Privy Council Office, Corresponding Member of the Central Statistical Commission of Brussels. [Read before the Statistical Society of London, 20th December, 1847], In: Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, London, 11 (1848), pp. 25-37.
  • Industry of the Rhine. Series II: Manufactures. London: Knight, 1848.
  • The economy of the British Empire; containing a condensed tabular survey, with appropriate discussion of the territories, population, resources and government of the British Empire and its dependencies. London: David Bogue, 1849.

literature

  • Eduard Berens: Attempt at a critical dogma history of the basic rent, Leipzig 1868, pp. 270–275. link
  • JR: Banfield, Thomas C., in: Dictionary of political economy, ed. By Robert Harris Inglis Palgrave, vol. 1, London 1901, p. 91. Link
  • Henry Higgs: Banfield, Thomas C., in: Encyclopaedia of the social sciences, ed. By Edwin RA Seligman, vol. 2, New York 1930, p. 415-416. link
  • Thomas Henry Elkins: The Siegerland a hundred years ago according to the report of an English economist, in: Siegerland 30 (1953), pp. 13-16.
  • Thomas Henry Elkins: An English traveler in the Siegerland, in: The geographical journal 122 (1956), p. 306-316.
  • Albin Gladen: An economic study trip: Thomas C. Banfield in the Bergisches Land 1846/47, in: Gerhard Huck and Jürgen Reulecke, “... and active life is visible everywhere!” Travel in the Bergisches Land around 1800, Neustadt an der Aisch 1978, p 225-251.
  • RD Collison Black: Banfield, Thomas Charles [sic!], In: The New Palgrave. A dictionary of economics, vol. 1, London 1987, p. 182
  • 1846/1847 - A British economist travels the Rhine-Ruhr area, in: Günter von Roden (Ed.): Duisburger Notes. Contemporary reports from 1417–1992, Duisburg 1998, s. 188-192.
  • Eileen M. Curran: Thomas Collins Banfield, in: The biographical dictionary of British economists, vol. 1, Bristol 2004, p. 56-58.
  • Shin Kubo: Political economy at mid-nineteenth-century Cambridge: reform, free trade, and the figure of Ricardo, in: European journal of the history of economic thought 22 (2015), p. 873-894. link

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Catalogus Professorum of the Technical University Carolo-Wilhelmina in Braunschweig. Part 1: Teachers at the Collegium Carolinum 1745-1877, Braunschweig 1986, p. 3.
  2. ↑ Lecture directories of the University of Göttingen SS 1829-SS 1831. https://www.sub.uni-goettingen.de/sammlungen-historische-bestaende/alte-drucke-1501-1900/historische-vorlesungsverzeichnis/
  3. ↑ JF Blumenbach to JW v. Goethe, Göttingen April 7, 1830. In: F. Th. Bratranek (Ed.), Goethe's Naturwissenschaftliche Korrespondenz, 1st volume, Leipzig 1874, p. 59.
  4. ^ Advertisement in: Celebrations for Friends of Art, Science and Literature, No. 41 of January 4, 1832, p. 328.
  5. ↑ Review by Ch. W. Huber in: Blätter für Literatur, Kunst und Critique 1 (1835), pp. 15-16.
  6. ↑ Romeo Seligmann, History of Medicin and Diseases, in: Annual report on the services and progress in the entire Medicin ... for the year 1874, 9 (1875), p. 395.
  7. ^ Occasional mention of Banfield as "particular person [in the sense of private owner] of Augsburg" in tourist advertisements during his travels undertaken at the time.
  8. ^ Thomas C. Banfield to Unknown, Wiesbaden December 2, 1843. Archive of the German Archaeological Institute, Dept. of Rome.
  9. ↑ The privilege “because of failure to exercise” expired after 5 years. General Imperial Law and Government Gazette for the Empire of Austria, issue 32 from March 28, 1850.
  10. ↑ Obituary in: Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 84 of March 24, 1856, p. 1342.
personal data
SURNAME Banfield, Thomas Collins
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Irish philologist and economist
DATE OF BIRTH April 3, 1802
PLACE OF BIRTH Castlelyons
DATE OF DEATH November 24, 1855
Place of death Bucharest