Sir John Bowring, or Phrayā Siam Mānukūlakicca Siammitra Mahāyaśa (17 October 1792 – 23 November 1872) was a British political economist, traveller, writer, literary translator, polyglot and the fourth Governor of Hong Kong. He was appointed by Queen Victoria as emissary to Siam, later he was appointed by King Mongkut of Siam as ambassador to London, also making a treaty of amity with Siam on 18 April 1855, now referred to as the "Bowring Treaty". His namesake treaty was fully effective for 70 years, until the reign of Vajiravudh. This treaty was gradually edited and became completely ineffective in 1938 under the government of Plaek Phibunsongkhram. Later, he was sent as a commissioner of Britain to the newly created Kingdom of Italy in 1861. He died in Claremont in Devon on 23 November 1872.
Bowring was born in Exeter of Charles Bowring (1769–1856), a wool merchant whose main market was China, from an old Unitarian family, and Sarah Jane Anne (d. 1828), the daughter of Thomas Lane, vicar of St Ives, Cornwall. His last formal education was at a Unitarian school in Moretonhampstead and he started work in his father's business at age 13. Bowring at one stage wished to become a Unitarian minister. Espousal of Unitarian faith was illegal in Britain until Bowring had turned 21.
Bowring acquired first experiences in trade as a contract provider to the British army during the Peninsular War in the early 1810s, initially for four years from 1811 as a clerk at Milford & Co. where he began picking up a variety of languages. His experiences in Spain fed a healthy skepticism towards the administrative capabilities of the British military. He travelled extensively and was imprisoned in Boulogne-sur-Mer for six weeks in 1822 for suspected spying (though merely carrying papers for the Portuguese envoy to Paris).
He incorporated Bowring & Co. with a partner in 1818 to sell herrings to Spain (including Gibraltar by a subsidiary) and France and to buy wine from Spain. It was during this period that he came to know Jeremy Bentham, and later became his friend. He did not, however, share Bentham's contempt for belles lettres. He was a diligent student of literature and foreign languages, especially those of Eastern Europe. He somehow found time to write 88 hymns during this time, most published between 1823 and 1825.
Failure of his business in 1827, amidst his Greek revolution financing adventure, left him reliant on Bentham's charity and seeking a new, literary direction. Bentham's personal secretary at the time, John Neal, labelled Bowring a "meddling, gossiping, sly, and treacherous man" and charged him with deceiving investors in his Greek adventure and mismanaging Bentham's funds for Bowring's own prestige with the Westminster Review and an early public gymnasium.
Bowring had begun contributing to the newly founded Westminster Review and had been appointed its editor by Bentham in 1825. By his contributions to the Review he attained considerable repute as a political economist and parliamentary reformer. He advocated in its pages the cause of free trade long before it was popularized by Richard Cobden and John Bright, co-founders of the Anti-Corn Law League in Manchester in 1838: "Jesus Christ is Free Trade, and Free Trade is Jesus Christ."
He pleaded earnestly on behalf of parliamentary reform, Catholic emancipation, and popular education. Bentham failed in an attempt to have Bowring appointed professor of English or History at University College London in 1827 but, after Bowring visited the Netherlands in 1828, the University of Groningen conferred on him the degree of doctor of laws in February the next year for his Sketches of the Language and Literature of Holland. In 1830, he was in Denmark, preparing for the publication of a collection of Scandinavian poetry. As a member of the 1831 Royal Commission, he advocated strict parliamentary control on public expenditure, and considered the ensuing reform one of his main achievements. Till 1832, he was Foreign Secretary of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association.
Bowring was appointed Jeremy Bentham's literary executor a week before the latter's 1832 death in his arms, and was charged with the task of preparing a collected edition of his works. The appointment was challenged by a nephew but Bowring prevailed in court. The work appeared in eleven volumes in 1843, notably omitting Bentham's most controversial works on female sexuality and homosexuality.
Free trade took on the dimensions of faith to Bowring who, in 1841, quipped, "Jesus Christ is free trade and free trade is Jesus Christ", adding, in response to consternation at the proposition, that it was "intimitely associated with religious truth and the exercise of religious principles".
Through Bentham connections and in spite of his radicalism, Bowring was appointed to carry out investigations of the national accounting systems of the Netherlands and France in 1832 by the government and House of Commons, respectively. The mark left by his work in France was not welcomed by all; as one commentator remarked,
Of all men, high or low, that I ever met in society, this Dr Bowring is the most presuming and the most conceited. He is a fit charlatan, for Whig employment; pushing and overbearing in his manner, and, like other parvenus, assuming an official importance which is highly ridiculous.
Yet his work was so highly regarded by the Whig government that he was then appointed secretary of the Royal Commission on the Public Accounts. He had made his name as something of an expert on government accounting. He stood the same year for the newly created industrial constituency of Blackburn but was unsuccessful.
In 1835, Bowring entered parliament as member for Kilmarnock Burghs; and in the following year he was appointed head of a government commission to be sent to France to inquire into the actual state of commerce between the two countries. After losing his seat in 1837, he was busied in further economic investigations in Egypt, for which he produced a very extensive report, as well as Syria, Switzerland, Italy, and some of the states in Imperial Germany. The results of these missions appeared in a series of reports laid before the House of Commons and even a paper delivered to the British Association of Science with his observations on containment of the plague in the Levant. He also spoke out passionately for equal rights for women and the abolition of slavery.
On a still narrow, landed constituency, Bowring, campaigning on a radical and, to Marx and Engels, inconsistent platform of free trade and Chartism, secured a seat in parliament in 1841, as member for Bolton, perhaps England's constituency most affected by industrial upheaval and riven by deep social unrest bordering on revolution. In the House, he campaigned for free trade, adoption of the Charter, repeal of the Corn Laws, improved administration of the Poor Law, open borders, abolition of the death penalty, and an end to flogging in the Army and payments to Church of England prelates.
During this busy period he found leisure for literature, and published in 1843 a translation of the Manuscript of the Queen's Court, a collection of Czech medieval poetry, later considered false by Czech poet Václav Hanka. In 1846 he became President of the Mazzinian People's International League.
Without inherited wealth, or salary as MP for Bolton, Bowring sought to sustain his political career by investing heavily in the south Wales iron industry from 1843. Following huge demand for iron rails brought about by parliament's approval of massive railway building from 1844 to 1846, Bowring led a small group of wealthy London merchants and bankers as Chairman of the Llynvi Iron Company and established a large integrated ironworks at Maesteg in Glamorgan during 1845–46. He installed his brother, Charles, as Resident Director and lost no time in naming the district around his ironworks, Bowrington. He gained a reputation in the Maesteg district as an enlightened employer, one contemporary commenting that 'he gave the poor their rights and carried away their blessing'.