Smith · 1776
Adam Smith and the Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith was born in Kirkcaldy in Fife in 1723, the posthumous son of the Comptroller of Customs. He held the chair of moral philosophy at Glasgow from 1752 to 1764, then resigned to take a tutorship of the young Duke of Buccleuch and a salary for life on the Buccleuch estate. He spent twelve years in the small house at Kirkcaldy where his mother kept the books, walking on the strand below the house in the afternoons, writing An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The book came out in two quarto volumes from William Strahan in London on the ninth of March 1776. Two months later it was clear to anyone reading it carefully that European economic argument had a new spine. Five months after that, the American colonies declared independence on the principles, in part, of the same book. David Hume read his presentation copy on his deathbed at Edinburgh and wrote to Smith that he was much pleased.
It is the early evening of the eighth of February 1776, in the upper sitting-room of the small house in High Street, Kirkcaldy, with the light gone over the Forth and Edinburgh on the far shore as a pattern of small lights. He is fifty-two years old. He is Adam Smith, late of Glasgow, formerly tutor to the Duke of Buccleuch, latterly resident with his mother Margaret Douglas in this town, in the eleventh year of the project that has now reached its last fair-copy.
The manuscript is on the writing-desk: nine hundred quarto pages in his own hand, plus three boxes of corrections in the hand of his cousin Janet Douglas who has helped him through the spring. The press, William Strahan in London, expects the parcel by the next packet from Leith. He has the parcel tied with green ribbon. He has, on the desk beside it, a separate sheet of foolscap with the title of the book in three lines, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, by Adam Smith, LL.D. and F.R.S., Formerly Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow, and the year 1776 in Roman.
He has been at the desk since six. He has been on the strand for an hour after dinner. He has spoken to no-one this afternoon except Mrs Douglas, who has been ill, and the cook. The town outside is quiet because the herring fleet is at Anstruther for the night.
He thinks: the chapter on the division of labour will offend the manufacturers because it makes the pin-maker's apprentice the source of their wealth and the manufacturers the channel.
He thinks: the chapter on the colonies will offend the colonists, because it tells them their economic interest does not lie in monopoly trade with London, and it will offend London, because it tells the same story from London's side.
He thinks: the chapter on rent will offend the landlords. The chapter on the wages of labour will offend the masters. The chapter on the public debt will offend Lord North.
He thinks: I have not written a book to offend anyone. I have written a book to describe what is the case. The case offends because the case is what it is.
He thinks, picking up the ribbon: David is dying in Edinburgh. I will send him the first complete set as soon as Strahan can bind one. I should not delay this longer for any reason. The packet has to go on Tuesday.
He ties the ribbon. He writes the cover-letter to Strahan. He places the parcel on the chair by the door for the carrier in the morning.
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published by William Strahan and Thomas Cadell on the ninth of March 1776 in two quarto volumes at one pound sixteen shillings. The first edition of one thousand copies sold out within six months. David Hume received his presentation copy at Edinburgh in March, read it through in two weeks of declining health, and wrote to Smith on the first of April: Euge! Belle! Dear Mr Smith, I am much pleas'd with your performance, and the perusal of it has taken me from a state of great anxiety. Hume died on the twenty-fifth of August. Smith wrote his eulogy in the form of a letter to Strahan that did Hume's defence to a Christian public; it was, by the conservative reaction it earned in 1777, the most disliked piece of his prose. The book itself, by the steady judgment of two and a half centuries of economic historians, is the foundational text of the discipline. Within four months of its publication a assembly in Philadelphia issued a Declaration that quoted no specific passage of it but assumed it whole. Smith was given the post of Commissioner of Customs in Edinburgh in 1778 (a sinecure of three hundred pounds a year, with light duties), and lived there with his mother for the next twelve years. He died at Edinburgh on the seventeenth of July 1790. He had directed his executors to burn his unpublished manuscripts; sixteen folio volumes went into the fire in the kitchen at Panmure House before his death. He is buried in Canongate Kirkyard. The book has not been out of print in the English-speaking world since the second edition of 1778.