The year 1776 was a momentous one, and not just because of what Americans commemorate every July 4. On March 9 of that year, a book was published that changed the world forever: Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
We remember Smith’s book for launching economics as a distinct social science and as a new way of exploring reality that opened a window onto the underlying dynamics of commercially oriented societies. But in 1776, the few American colonists who might have read The Wealth of Nations were probably most impressed by the book’s concluding paragraphs.
Here Smith argued that the trade restrictions associated with the British mercantile system would become economically “oppressive and insupportable” for the American colonies as their economic development accelerated. In the long term, Smith believed, the colonies would decide that the restraints imposed on their trade outweighed the benefits of being part of the British Empire.
To that extent, The Wealth of Nations gave the American colonists a commercial rationale for becoming independent states.
But why would rebellious American colonists be interested in the economic reflections of a Scottish philosopher who had never visited and would never visit North America? The answer is that educated eighteenth-century Americans were intensely interested in all things Scottish.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member