Adam Smith :: Political Economist Adam Smith Biographies Essays

ex SmithAdam Smith, a vivid eighteenth-century Scottish governmental economist, had theadvantage of judging the significance ol colonies by a rigorous examinationbased on the colonial experience of ccc years. His overview has a built-in biashe strongly disapproved of excessive command of colonial trade by parentcountries. But his analysis is full-bodied with insight and remarkably dispassionate inits argument. Adam Smith recognized that the discovery of the New World not onlybrought wealth and successfulness to the Old World, but 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 infrastandable by everyone.Adam Smith had retired from a professorship at Glasgow University and Was livingin France in 1764-5 when he began his prominent work, The Wealth of Nations. Thebook was being written all during the years of fight between Britain and hercolonies, but it was not pu blished until 1776. In the passages which follow,Smith points to the impossibility of monopolizing the benefits of colonies, andpessimistically calculates the bell of empire, but the book appeared too late to brace 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 modern 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 get goingfamous by his influential book The Wealth of Nations (1776). Smith was the newsof the comptroller of the customs at Kirkcaldy, Fife, Scotland. The exact dateof his birth is unknown. However, he was baptized at Kirkcaldy on June 5, 1723,his father having die d 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 circumstantial 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 headmaster Kames.Some of these dealt with rhetoric and belles-lettres, but later he took up the display case of the progress of opulence, and it was then, in his middle or late