Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796-1862) was a British colonial reformer, promoter, and advocate of systematic colonization.

Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a London land agent's son, was born on March 20, 1796. He was educated at Westminster and entered the Foreign Service in 1814. Two years later he eloped with a ward in chancery, and Parliament condoned the offense. In 1826, six years after the death of his wife, Wakefield abducted a 15-year-old heiress from school; this time Parliament annulled the marriage, and Wakefield spent three years in Newgate Prison. In prison he became interested in both corrective punishment and colonial development. He advocated the abolition of transportation on the grounds that it had no deterrent effect and attributed the slow development of the Australian colonies to a policy based on free land grants and convict labor.

In A Letter from Sydney (1829), England and America (1833), and The Art of Colonisation (1849), Wakefield propounded a theory of...