Owen and the Engineers: Cross-Fertilization between Engineering and Early Socialism in the Owenite Tradition

This paper investigates the attitudes towards engineering within early socialism in Britain. It asks why Owenites, as well as Chartists and Fourierists, were drawn to German-American utopian engineer John Adolphus Etzler’s settlement plans in the tropics. Etzler envisioned a tropical paradise run by machinery, where workers and their families lived in a cooperative community and worked only 50 days a year. First, the paper conceptualises the notion of utopian engineering, then it discusses the ambivalences in Robert Owen’s attitudes towards machinery. It shows that Owen endorsed mechanization as a tool to reduce child labour but feared that it caused unemployment and misery among adult skilled workers. The third part investigates Owen’s endorsement of Etzler’s colonial scheme, arguing that the early socialist and the engineer were mutually dependent on each other. Etzler provided Owen with a solution to his technological conundrum, while Owenite publications offered him a means to reach broader audiences for his Tropical Emigration Society. By demonstrating this entanglement, my paper adds to the literature of the relationship between utopia, early socialism, and engineering, and shows that mechanization was as central to early socialism as the abolition of private property, bourgeois marriage and religion.