His father was also well known for his book, titled Turkey Past and Present (1807), a work that described in great detail the social, political, and military institutions of the Ottoman Empire.
[4] In August 1836, after having work experience abroad with relatives, Thornton obtained a clerkship in the East India House at its Leadenhall Street headquarters, London.
[5]Thornton continued to elaborate about his position as a clerk in the examiner's office and compared it with that of Mill's experiences at the East India Company: According to the ordinary course of things in those days, the newly-appointed junior would have had nothing to do, except a little abstracting, indexing, and researching, or pretending to search, into records; but young Mill was almost immediately set to indite despatches to the governments of the three Indian Presidencies, on what, in India House phraseology, were distinguished as "political" subjects—subjects, that is, for the most part growing out of the relations of the said governments with 'native' states of foreign potentates.
[6] In 1838, after moving to the marine branch of the examiner's office, Thornton went from an un-salaried probationary period with an 80-pound-a-year stipend to earning anannual income of 500 pounds a year.
Eventually, with his career as a mandarin at the East India Company, he was able to purchase a property of upper-middle class means in London, where he would live out the rest of his days.
The jobs that Dalhousie commissioned and Thornton had a hand in were mainly projects for infrastructure development, including postal improvements, telegraph and cable services, and the introduction of scientific education programs.
[7] Thornton's duty as the assistant examiner was mostly to prepare draft dispatches and any policy documents that regarded the East India Company's public works activities.
The documents dealt with the construction of railways and roads, canals, bridges, and irrigation apparatuses in Burma, India, and the Straits Settlement.
The content in dispatches and then later minute papers ranged from one- or two-page documents of confirmations of store deliveries, and extensions for public service appointments, and a letter of acknowledgment, to hefty fifty-page documents concerned with serious policy issues such as trade, defence and public infrastructure.
He composed a dispatch for Singapore's southern defenses in order to protect the British garrison in the imperative water lanes of Indo-China.
Thornton argued that Robert Malthus had "overlooked and undervalued the tendency which the possession of property has to engender prudence, and seems, indeed, to have thought that the quality is rarely to be found among members of the laboring class, except under the pressure of misery.
"[11] He posited that there was a "low-level trap" for the laboring class in the economical development of society: that the realities of life for the impoverished were too much to allow them to focus on any real prospect of prosperity.
"Thornton displayed his more developed economic and political views in his next work, A Plea for Peasant Proprietors, with the Outlines of a Plan for their Establishment in Ireland, published in 1848.
[10] Thornton believed that, ideally, the nationalism of the Irish lands would have been most profitable and that slowing down private proprietorship would be a necessary evil.
"[14] On Labour was poorly reviewed as an inaccurate piece by the famed German economist and intellectual Lujo Brentano.
[10] Thornton's second edition of On Labour"included a new, supplementary chapter in which he describes cooperation as "destined to beget, at however remote a date, a healthy socialism as superior to itself in all its best attributes as itself is to its parent."
[10] In 1875, Thornton would return to his first and favorite love – in the realm of economics – with land tenure systems heading the fray of his arguments.
Accompanying his newest arguments were irrigation and multiple "artifacts" of "bureaucratic levers of control and economic development".
"[14] In addition to these then contemporary Indian issues, Thornton explained his own experiences and problems at India House, and provided solutions.
This called the "Dalhousie Plan", and Thornton claimed that it would generate a "cost per-mile far above that experienced in direct government construction.
[16] On 22 February 1878 Thornton delivered a speech of his last publication, a paper titled "Irrigations regarded as a Preventive of Indian Famines".
The volume consisted of a number of essays that harshly criticized the views and opinions of multiple respected philosophers and intellectuals.
He continued to write poetry and conceived a volume of verse titled Modern Manichaeism, Labour's Utopia, and other Poems, published in 1857.
However, their common workplace and passions for economics and philosophy – and the incessant discussions of these, sometimes, intertwining topics – made them great friends.
According to Thornton's memoir, although he could recognize Mill by sight around the India House, he had no real occasion to converse with Mill until, in 1846, he sent him a copy of his Over-population: "A day or two after he came into my room to thank me for it; and during the half-hour's conversation that thereupon ensued, sprang up, full grown at birth, an intimate friendship, of which I feel that I am not unduly boasting in declaring it to have been equally sincere and fervent on both sides.
From that time for the next ten to twelve years, a day seldom passed without, if I did not go into his room, his coming into mine, often telling me as he entered that he had nothing particular to say; but that, having a few minutes to spare, he thought he might as well have a little talk.
For instance, in 1850, Mill wrote a published letter to the editor of the Westminster Review, naming Thornton as a contributor to the work and arguments as a whole.
Comments have been gathered from the Political Economic Club to support this conclusion, including one notable excerpt from Leslie Stephen: "I am suffering the torments of the damned from that God-forgotten Thornton, who is boring on about supply and demand...
With his rough disdain and Thornton's tendency to querulous irritability there must be occasional splutterings, and the only way of keeping them down is for you and other members to attend as often as convenient discountenance them by quietly maintaining the rules of debate.
Based on Thornton's personal estate of eight thousand pounds, accounted for after his death, he lived the comfortable middle-class life of a bureaucrat at mid-rank.