 In 1786–87 Bentham visited Russia, where his brother Samuel was in the pay of Prince Potemkin, the favourite of Empress Catherine. There he wrote A Defence of Usury (1787), his first contribution to economic affairs, in which he rejected Adam Smith’s defence of a legal maximum for interest rates. Bentham argued that Smith’s position was inconsistent with his general advocacy of freedom of trade and would restrict economic growth and national prosperity by deterring investment and innovation. The volume later received high praise from J.S. Mill, who thought it “the best extant writing on the subject” (1963–91, II, 923). It received its widest audience in America, where it was reprinted on many occasions and frequently cited in the debates over the usury laws (Crimmins 2022, 53–54, 75, 209–11). It was in Russia, too, that Bentham took an idea of Samuel’s and developed it into the “panopticon”, the full dimensions of which he explained in Panopticon; Or, The Inspection House (1791). The panopticon is a building of circular design intended for any institutional arrangement where the “inmates” required constant supervision—such as hospitals, schools, workhouses and poor houses—but the panopticon became most well-known as a prison for “grinding rogues honest and idle men industrious” (1838–43, IV, 342). Appalled by the inefficiency and inhumane conditions in Britain’s penal regime, Bentham developed the idea of the panopticon penitentiary as a substitute penal system, in which convicted criminals would be subject to a disciplinary regime based on the maxim (penned in relation to his poor law writings of 1797, but not then published) that “the more strictly we are watched, the better we behave” (2001, 277). In achieving the ends of punishment it represented a significant advance on the dilapidated condition of England’s gaols, the rat-infested hulks anchored in the Thames and the practice of transporting convicts into penal servitude in the colonies. In the years following, Bentham used this critique as a platform to expand upon his general disdain for colonies, first enunciated in Emancipate Your Colonies! in 1793 (2002, 289–313), to argue for a free, self-governing community of settlers in southern Australia in “Colonization Company Proposal” (1831 [2022]; see also Causer, Finn and Schofield 2022).