Adam Smith by Christopher J. Berry

Author:Christopher J. Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780191087295
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2018-08-07T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Making and working

The Wealth of Nations is a big book. The definitive Glasgow edition has two volumes with over 900 pages in total. It was a long time in the making. Published in 1776 its roots can with certainty be traced back to Smith’s lectures at Glasgow University in the 1750s. His thinking was subsequently shaped by his time in France, where he met several thinkers working on related themes. He also received practical information from merchants in Glasgow and landowners in Scotland. Thanks to the generous pension from the family of the Duke of Buccleuch, he was able on his return from France to focus on composing the book. This took several years which were largely spent with his mother in Kirkcaldy.

The Wealth of Nations is the most famous book in the history of economics because it was ‘the father of modern economic thinking’. Its fame rests on it being the first systematic analysis of what Smith called ‘commercial society’ (the term ‘capitalism’ is a later coinage). There were plenty of other books before Smith’s that discussed the subjects he would cover. Many of these were pamphlets or books written to argue a particular case, such as a defence of trading companies like the East India Company or to support the balance of trade and the interests of merchants. There were others which, like the Wealth of Nations, did develop a general and more theoretical approach, and scholars have traced Smith’s indebtedness to some of these. Smith himself is sparing in his references to other works (he makes an exception in referring to the work of Hume), but it is fair to say that none of these discussions had the range or depth of Smith’s book. Hume wrote suggestive essays and Richard Cantillon, perhaps his most analytically sophisticated predecessor, unlike Smith, did not situate his analysis in a broad historical and social context.

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