Adam Smith

Adam Smith


Adam Smith, a brilliant eighteenth-century Scottish political economist, had the

advantage of judging the significance ol colonies by a rigorous examination

based on the colonial experience of 300 years. His overview has a built-in bias:

he strongly disapproved of excessive regulation of colonial trade by parent

countries. But his analysis is rich with insight and remarkably dispassionate in

its argument. Adam Smith recognized that the discovery of the New World not only

brought wealth and prosperity to the Old World, but that it also marked a divide

in the history of mankind. The passage that follows is the work of this economic

theorist who discusses problems in a language readily understandable by everyone.


Adam Smith had retired from a professorship at Glasgow University and Was living

in France in 1764-5 when he began his great work, The Wealth of Nations. The

book was being written all during the years of strife between Britain and her

colonies, but it was not published until 1776. In the passages which follow,

Smith points to the impossibility of monopolizing the benefits of colonies, and

pessimistically calculates the cost of empire, but the book appeared too late to

have any effect upon British policy. Because the Declaration of Independence and

The Wealth of Nations, the political and economic reliations of empire and

mercantilism, appeared in the same year, historians have often designated 1776

as one of the turning points in modern history. The text On the cost of Empire,

the eloquent exhortation to the rulers of Britain to awaken from their grandiose

dreams of empire, is the closing passage of Smith's book.


Adam Smith was a Scottish political economist and philosopher. He has become

famous by his influential book The Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith was the son

of the comptroller of the customs at Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland. The exact date

of his birth is unknown. However, he was baptized at Kirkcaldy on June 5, 1723,

his father having died some six months previously.


At the age of about fifteen, Smith proceeded to Glasgow university, studying

moral philosophy under "the never-to-be-forgotten" Francis Hutcheson (as Smith

called him). In 1740 he entered Balliol college, Oxford, but as William Robert

Scott has said, "the Oxford of his time gave little if any help towards what was

to be his lifework," and he relinquished his exhibition in 1746. In 1748 he

began delivering public lectures in Edinburgh under the patronage of Lord Kames.

Some of these dealt with rhetoric and belles-lettres, but later he took up the

subject of "the progress of opulence," and it was then, in his middle or late

20s, that he first expounded the economic philosophy of "the obvious and simple

system of natural liberty" which he was later to proclaim to the world in his

Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. About 1750 he met

David Hume, who became one of the closest of his many friends.


In 1751 Smith was appointed professor of logic at Glasgow university,

transferring in 1752 to the chair of moral philosophy. His lectures covered the

field of ethics, rhetoric, jurisprudence and political economy, or "police and

revenue." In 1759 he published his Theory of Moral Sentiments, embodying some of

his Glasgow lectures. This work, which established Smith's reputation in his own

day, is concerned with the explanation of moral approval and disapproval. His

capacity for fluent, persuasive, if rather rhetorical argument is much in

evidence. He bases his explanation, not as the third Lord Shaftesbury and

Hutcheson had done, on a special "moral sense,"nor, like Hume, to any decisive

extent on utility,but on sympathy. There has been considerable controversy as

how far there is contradiction or contrast between Smith's emphasis in the Moral

Sentiments on sympathy as a fundamental human motive, and, on the other hand,

the key role of self-interest in the The Wealth of Nations. In the former he

seems to put more emphasis on the general harmony of human motives and

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