Adam Smith :: Political Economist Adam Smith Biographies Essays

Adam metalworkerAdam Smith, a brilliant eighteenth-century Scottish political economic expert, had theadvantage of perspicacity the significance ol colonies by a rigorous examinationbased on the colonial experience of 300 years. His overview has a built-in biashe strongly disapproved of excessive regulation of colonial trade by parentcountries. But his analysis is rich with insight and remarkably dispassionate inits argument. Adam Smith recognized that the discovery of the New World not onlybrought wealth and prosperity to the Old World, nevertheless that it also marked a dividein the history of mankind. The passage that follows is the work of this economictheorist who discusses problems in a language readily belowstandable by everyone.Adam Smith had retired from a death chair at Glasgow University and Was livingin France in 1764-5 when he began his great work, The Wealth of Nations. Thebook was being written all during the years of strife between Britain and hercolonies, but i t was not published until 1776. In the passages which follow,Smith points to the impossibility of monopolizing the benefits of colonies, andpessimistically calculates the cost of empire, but the book appeared too late tohave any effect upon British policy. Because the Declaration of Independence andThe Wealth of Nations, the political and economic reliations of empire andmercantilism, appeared in the same year, historians have often designated 1776as one of the turning points in ultramodern history. The text On the cost of Empire,the eloquent exhortation to the rulers of Britain to awaken from their grandiosedreams of empire, is the closing passage of Smiths book.Adam Smith was a Scottish political economist and philosopher. He has becomefamous by his influential book The Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith was the sonof the comptroller of the customs at Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland. The exact dateof his birthing is unknown. However, he was baptized at Kirkcaldy on June 5, 1723,his fathe r having died some six months previously.At the age of about fifteen, Smith proceeded to Glasgow university, studyingmoral philosophy under the never-to-be-forgotten Francis Hutcheson (as Smithcalled him). In 1740 he entered Balliol college, Oxford, but as William RobertScott has said, the Oxford of his time gave little if any help towards what wasto be his lifework, and he relinquished his exhibition in 1746. In 1748 hebegan 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 thesubject of the progress of opulence, and it was then, in his middle or late