The Ballad of Basic Income: Thomas Spence, Natural Property, and Indigenous Critique

Abstract: In the late eighteenth century, Thomas Spence developed the first plan for a universal basic income within his ballads, dialogues, and utopian vignettes. Inspired by colonial accounts of Indigenous egalitarian land usage, Spence sought to reconcile humanity's common "natural property" in the earth with the requirements of cash-based economies. While recent scholarship has emphasized the anticolonial dimensions of Spence's writings, he also regarded Indigenous peoples as rivals—and targets for an alternative Spencean "civilizing" process. Even as he borrowed from Indigenous egalitarianisms, his theory of natural property jettisoned their corollary emphasis on reciprocal obligation to the earth and other-than-human life.