The New World of Adam Smith

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
New World ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Trade Competition

This chapter examines Adam Smith's theories during the Industrial Revolution, which came to England and southern Scotland in the last third of the eighteenth century. During the Industrial Revolution, the workers who previously had been producing goods in their cottages or food and wool on their farms moved to the factories and the factory towns. Merchants began to invest their capital in factories and machinery or in the far from munificent wages that kept alive the workers. This change was made possible by the industrialist, whose orientation was to the production of goods, rather than their purchase or sale. The chapter discusses Smith's views on a variety of subjects, which he articulated in the Wealth of Nations, including borrowing, capitalism, free trade, competition, credit, distribution, innovation, justice, labor, manufacturing, merchants, monopolies, political economy, prices, production and productivity, profit, public policy, rent, standard of living, and value.

The Tercentenary of Henry Martyn's Considerations upon the East-India Trade

2002 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Maneschi
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Economic Welfare ◽  
Real Cost ◽  
Classical Political Economy ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
The Impact

Henry Martyn's Considerations Upon the East-India Trade, published anonymously in 1701, stands out as a major contribution to the field of political economy that took root in Britain in the eighteenth century, and to the demonstration of the gains from free trade (Martyn 1701). Martyn provided one of the earliest formulations (and by far the clearest) of what Jacob Viner termed the “eighteenth-century rule” for the gains from trade, that “it pays to import commodities from abroad whenever they can be obtained in exchange for exports at a smaller real cost than their production at home would entail” (Viner 1937, p. 440). The numerical examples that Martyn used to illustrate it went even beyond the case for free trade advanced seventy-five years later by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Martyn's tract contains other remarkable insights that became important features of classical political economy, such as the nature and advantages of the division of labor, the dependence of the latter on the extent of the market, the workings of a market economy, the role of money, and the impact of international trade on resource allocation, on productivity, and on economic welfare.

Adam Smith: A Very Short Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Berry
Keyword(s):  
Social Environment ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
European History ◽  
Special Interests ◽  
Short Introduction ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Trade Competition

In 1776, Adam Smith (1723–90) wrote The Wealth of Nations, the foundational book that led to him being called the ‘father of economics’. However, Adam Smith was far more than an economist. Adam Smith is introduced through an overview of his writings and moral philosophy. Adam Smith: A Very Short Introduction offers a balanced and nuanced view of this seminal thinker, embedding his fierce defence of free trade, competition, and assault on special interests in contemporary European history, politics, and philosophy. It outlines Smith’s central ideas and how his intellectual and social environment influenced his thinking. It also discusses Smith’s influence on subsequent generations, and the ways in which he has been interpreted.

‘Less Abused than I had Reason to Expect’: The Reception of The Wealth of Nations in Britain, 1776–90

1987 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard F. Teichgraeber
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Social Attitudes ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Economic Developments ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Economic Thinking ◽  
Limited Process

When Adam Smith set out to re-shape the dominant economic policies and assumptions of his time, he knew success in pressing for ‘free trade’ would depend on his ability to imprint his views on the minds of contemporary statesmen and legislators. But he was never confident that this operation might take place during his lifetime. In the Wealth of Nations, he declared that to expect freedom of trade to be accepted entirely in Great Britain was ‘as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it’, and this was by no means an offhand remark. Much of the massive book was coloured by Smith's awareness that liberal economic doctrines, whatever their considerable intellectual merits, ran far ahead of actual political and social attitudes in eighteenth-century Europe. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a variety of political and economic developments of course refuted Smith's view that ‘free trade’ was an unattainable ideal. But the historical verification of his economic thinking was a slow, difficult, and limited process.

Nicolas Gueudeville's Enlightenment Utopia

Moreana ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (Number 209) (1) ◽  
pp. 24-60
Author(s):  
Russ Leo
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Political Anthropology ◽  
French Translation ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Original Length ◽  
English Law

Nicolas Gueudeville's 1715 French translation of Utopia is often dismissed as a “belle infidèle,” an elegant but unfaithful work of translation. Gueudeville does indeed expand the text to nearly twice its original length. But he presents Utopia as a contribution to emergent debates on tolerance, natural religion, and political anthropology, directly addressing the concerns of many early advocates of the ideas we associate with Enlightenment. In this sense, it is not as much an “unfaithful” presentation of More's project as it is an attempt to introduce Utopia to eighteenth-century francophone audiences—readers for whom theses on political economy and natural religion were much more salient than More's own preoccupations with rhetoric and English law. This paper introduces Gueudeville and his oeuvre, paying particular attention to his revisions to Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan's 1703 Nouveaux Voyages dans l'Amérique Septentrionale. Published in 1705, Gueudeville's “revised, corrected, & augmented” version of Lahontan's Voyages foregrounds the rational and natural religion of the Huron as well as their constitutive aversion to property, to concepts of “mine” and “yours.” Gueudeville's revised version of Lahontan's Voyages purports to be an anthropological investigation as well as a study of New World political economy; it looks forward, moreover, to his edition of Utopia, framing More's work as a comparable study of political economy and anthropology. Gueudeville, in other words, renders More's Utopia legible to Enlightenment audiences, depicting Utopia not in terms of impossibility and irony but rather as a study of natural religion and attendant forms of political, devotional, and economic life. Gueudeville's edition of Utopia even proved controversial due, in part, to his insistence on the rationality as well as the possibility of Utopia.

African Slavery and Spanish Empire

2015 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Schneider
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Demographic Situation ◽  
Transatlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Racial Slavery

This article traces a philosophical shift that opened the door to a new departure in eighteenth-century Spanish empire: a newly emerging sense that the slave trade and African slavery were essential to the wealth of nations. Contextualizing this ideological reconfiguration within mid-eighteenth century debates, this article draws upon the works of political economists and royal councilors in Madrid and puts them in conversation with the words and actions of individuals in and from Cuba, including people of African descent themselves. Because of the central place of the island in eighteenth-century imperial rivalry and reform, as well as its particular demographic situation, Cuba served as a catalyst for these debates about the place of African slavery and the transatlantic slave trade in Spanish empire. Ultimately, between the mid-eighteenth century and the turn of the nineteenth, this new mode of thought would lead to dramatic transformations in the institution of racial slavery and Spanish imperial political economy.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 214-240
Author(s):  
Laura J. Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Points Of Interest

This chapter turns to Joseph Addison's Spectator and finally to Adam Smith, who transformed the theatrical cosmopolitanism of the Restoration into a theory of emotions and cosmopolitics. Like many philosophers in the eighteenth century, Adam Smith aims to understand both emotions and political economy. The chapter explains that the book shows how these two points of interest were profoundly intertwined in the Restoration. In order to try to understand the significance of this intersection, the book turns, as does Smith, to the theater for insight. Restoration theater has been underestimated, partly because the two worlds of Amber and Bruce Carlton have been often read in different contexts and in different kinds of critical projects. While certainly theater audience members of the Restoration period would have had different expectations for comedy, tragedy, tragicomedy, and heroic drama, they nevertheless witnessed them in the same moment of imperial ambition, political turbulence, and cosmopolitan explorations. Restoration plays have sometimes been read as frivolous entertainment or nationalist propaganda, but the book characterizes them as more ambitious and more capacious, often too edgy or insufficiently nationalistic for subsequent contexts. It makes the case for key theater experiences that were produced with wit, daring, and insight as not expressing the last gasp of absolutist monarchy, but instead engaging some beginnings: of war capitalism, of the embrace of sophistication, of England's entrance into the slave trade in earnest, and of new possibilities for human passions redirected for this expanding world.

The Proper Context of Business

2019 ◽  
pp. 31-66
Author(s):  
James R. Otteson
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Social Institutions ◽  
Invisible Hand ◽  
Moral Sentiments ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Proper Context

Chapter 2 investigates the explanation Adam Smith gave in his famous Wealth of Nations (1776) for why some places are wealthier than others, and what political, economic, and other social institutions are required for increasing prosperity. The chapter discusses the conception of “justice,” as opposed to “beneficence,” that Smith offered The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), as well as Smith’s economizer, local knowledge, and invisible hand arguments from his Wealth of Nations that form the basis of his political economy. We look at the duties of government implied by Smithian political economy, including both what he argues government should do and what it should not do. We also look at empirical evidence to answer the question of whether Smith’s predictions on behalf of his recommendations have come true in the intervening centuries.

ADAM SMITH AS ADVOCATE OF EMPIRE, c. 1870–1932

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-198 ◽  
Author(s):  
MARC-WILLIAM PALEN
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Long Term Effects ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Economic Downturns ◽  
Wealth Of Nations

ABSTRACTThis article examines howThe wealth of nations(1776) was transformed into an amorphous text regarding the imperial question throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Adam Smith had left behind an ambiguous legacy on the subject of empire: a legacy that left long-term effects upon subsequent British imperial debates. In his chapter on colonies, Smith had proposed both a scheme for the gradual devolution of the British empire and a theoretical scheme for imperial federation. In response to the growing global popularity of protectionism and imperial expansionism, the rapid development of new tools of globalization, and the frequent onset of economic downturns throughout the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, turn-of-the-century proponents of British imperial federation formed into a formidable opposition to England's prevailing free trade orthodoxy – Cobdenism – a free trade ideology which famously expanded upon the anti-imperial dimensions ofThe wealth of nations. Ironically, at the turn of the century many advocates for imperial federation also turned to Smith for their intellectual inspiration. Adam Smith thus became an advocate of empire, and his advocacy left an indelible intellectual mark upon the burgeoning British imperial crisis.

Reflections on Monopolies and Free Trade at the End of the Eighteenth Century: A Tobacco Trading Company between Puerto Rico and Amsterdam in 1784

Itinerario ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Ana Crespo Solana
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
New World ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
Trading Company ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Considerable Success ◽  
Direct Trade

Even after the passing of the ‘Free Trade’ acts in Europe and America between 1765 and 1803, colonisation still meant trade for European mercantile and maritime powers which were beginning to think of themselves as liberal in the politico-economic sense. As before, the only suitable way of obtaining profits appeared to be economic exploitation, albeit within a politico-institutional structure. This ideal had inspired the inflexible system that had dominated the relations of both Spain and Portugal with their respective transatlantic colonies. Likewise, ever since their first incursions into the New World, northern Europeans had encouraged the creation of commercial companies dedicated to monopolising any of the goods that colonies might possibly have to offer. Dutch, English and French merchants developed farreaching private and state programmes designed to direct trade and colonisation and to encourage the populating of the new lands. During the seventeenth century, some of these companies achieved considerable success. They were able to settle, with or without permission from the Spanish monarchy, in territories formally under Spanish control, such as Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, coastal Venezuela or Guiana, regarded as areas eminently suited to business projects.

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