Monday 09 March 2026 5:11 am  |  Updated:  Thursday 05 March 2026 2:32 pm

On This Day: Adam Smith publishes The Wealth of Nations

By: Eliot Wilson

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Today in 1776, 250 years ago, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published, discovering rather than inventing the principle that free trade and efficient division of labour create general prosperity making the world richer, writes Eliot Wilson

Adam Smith was 52 and had spent most of the preceding decade in his hometown of Kirkcaldy, the “Lang Toun” which stretched along the Fife coast of the Firth of Forth. His father, who had died before he was born, had been Comptroller of Customs in the small town where linen was woven and ships were built, but Smith had ambition beyond Fife. He looked beyond the string of prosperous little ports and fishing villages which had led James V to call it “a beggar’s mantle fringed wi’ gowd”.

Smith had read moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow where the chair in the subject was held by the Ulsterman Francis Hutcheson who advocated moral sense theory and was the first professor to lecture in English rather than Latin. He then won a Snell Exhibition to undertake postgraduate study at Balliol College, Oxford, which he found stagnant and stifling compared to the vibrancy of Scotland in the early years of the Enlightenment. Returning to his native country,........

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