On the 302nd anniversary of Adam Smith’s baptism, his enduring insights into free trade and the folly of protectionism remain a powerful rebuttal to today’s rising economic nationalism, says Eliot Wilson

Three hundred and two years ago today, in 1723, in the Old Kirk in Kirkcaldy, a baby was baptised. His precise date of birth is unknown, and his father, a senior solicitor and customs official, had died a few months previously. The widowed Margaret Smith, from a local landowning family, gave her only child the name her husband had borne: Adam.

The Scotland into which Adam Smith was born had a population of a little over a million and, although it was one of the most urbanised societies in Europe, its burghs were small: Edinburgh was home to 50,000, Glasgow 15,000, Aberdeen and Dundee around 10,000. Nowhere else came close. The Royal Burgh of Kirkcaldy, on the north shore of the Firth of Forth, counted perhaps 1,500 inhabitants, a trading port fringed with coal mines, its modest shipbuilding industry gradually growing.

One event 16 years before Smith’s birth had changed the economic context for Kikrkcaldy and for Scotland, and it is easy to imagine the child steeped in it: the passage of the Acts of Union 1707, which had brought England and Scotland together as a single political unit. The acts created a customs and monetary union,........

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