Abstract
‘The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope,’ Adam Smith told readers of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ‘are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.’ They had served, in certain respects at least, to unite ‘the most distant parts of the world’, and in so doing had opened the way to an era of global commerce. And yet, Smith continued, noting the relatively recent date of those discoveries, ‘it is impossible that the whole extent of their consequences can have been seen’.1 In view of the great crisis shaking the British Atlantic Empire in the 1770s, few of Smith’s contemporaries would have staked a claim to any certainty regarding the future relations between European nations, their colonies and the wider world. Certainly one way of structuring those relations, the idea of empire, appeared in Britain’s case to be gravely threatened by the unprecedented strain placed upon metropolitan-colonial ties by the cost of victory in the Seven Years’ War. Smith we know to have been ‘very zealous in American affairs’, and numerous studies have attempted to situate him within the contemporary debate over these ‘present disturbances’.2 The general thrust of Smith’s critique of the colonial trading regime is, perhaps, sufficiently well known to need little exposition; as Donald Winch has argued, it forms ‘part and parcel of Smith’s attack on the “monopolising spirit” of the mercantile system, and his general case for free trade between nations’.3
Keywords
- Mother Country
- Colonial Society
- Liberty Fund
- Civilized Nation
- Natural Liberty
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Notes
Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner and W. B. Todd (eds), 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981), II, 626. Hereafter referred to as WN.
David Hume, on the authority of the Duke of Bucleugh, notes Smith’s zeal on the subject of America. Letter to Smith, 8 February 1776, in A. Smith, Correspondence, E. C. Mossner and I. S. Ross (eds), (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 186. Emma Rothschild has written recently of the ‘Sense of the Overseas Connections of Empire as Almost within Sight, in Eighteenth-Century Scotland’, The Inner Life of Empires: An Eighteenth-Century History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 220. The secondary literature on Smith’s contribution to the debate on America is large, if sometimes antiquated.
Helpful studies include I. S. Ross, The Life of Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 248–69;
P. N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994);
D. Winch, Adam Smith’s Politics: An Essay in Historiographic Revision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 146–63 and the same author’s Classical Political Economy and Colonies (London: G. Bell, 1965), 6–24;
A. S. Skinner, ‘Adam Smith and the American Economic Community: An Essay in Applied Economics’, Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 59–78;
D. Stevens, ‘Adam Smith and the Colonial Disturbances’, in A. S. Skinner and T. Wilson (eds), Essays on Adam Smith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 202–17.
J. Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 25–58, contains some useful insights.
Smith, WN, II, 619–26, 933–47. Smith’s exploration of this possibility gave rise in the early twentieth century to the suggestion that he should be seen as a distant precursor of the late nineteenth-century advocates of imperial federation. See, for example, E. A. Benians, ‘Adam Smith’s Project of an Empire’, Cambridge Historical Journal 1 (1925): 249–83.
Duncan Bell accords Smith’s legacy a more ambivalent role in nineteenth-century debate on empire: D. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 198–9, and Passim.
Smith, WN, II, 934. Michael Sonenscher has recently suggested that this ‘Utopia’ be seen as a response to Sir James Steuart’s ‘rhapsody of public debt’ that imagined the functioning of taxation in a world-state. Smith’s union of the colonies and Great Britain appears on Sonenscher’s account as a similar thought experiment, if with more limited ambitions. Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 64–5.
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, ‘De l’Esprit des Lois, ou du rapport que les lois doivent avoir avec la constitution de chaque gouvernement, les mœurs, le climat, la religion, le commerce, etc. A quoi l’auteur a ajouté des recherches nouvelles sur les lois romaines touchant les successions, sur les lois Françoises et sur les lois féodales’, in R. Callois (ed.), Œuvres complètes de Montesquieu, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), II, 643.
Istvan Hont, ‘Jealousy of Trade: An Introduction’, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 1–37 and Passim.
For discussion, see Yves Benôt, ‘L’Encyclopédie Et Le Droit de Coloniser’, by Benôt, in R. Desné and M. Dorigny (ed.), Les Lumières, L’esclavage, La Colonisation (Paris: La Découverte, 2005), 164–72.
François Véron Duverger de Forbonnais, ‘Colonie’, in Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond D’Alembert (eds), Encyclopédie: Ou Dictionnaire Raisonné Des Sciences, Des Arts Et Des Métiers, 17 vols. (Paris: Briasson et al., 1751–1765), III, 648. On Forbonnais and the Gournay group, see Sonenscher, Before the Deluge, 179–89, and I. Hont, ‘The “Rich Country-Poor Country” Debate Revisited: The Irish Origins and French Reception of the Hume Paradox’, in C. Wennerlind and M. Schabas (eds), David Hume’s Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2008), 243–323.
Benjamin Franklin, ‘Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, & c. (1751)’, in A. Houston (ed.), The Autobiography and Other Writings on Politics, Economics, and Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 215–21.
David Hume, ‘Of the Populousness of Ancient Nations’, in E. F. Miller (ed.), Essays Moral, Political and Literary (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1987), 377–464. Robert Wallace, A Dissertation on the Numbers of Mankind in Ancient and Modern Times: In Which the Superior Populousness of Antiquity Is Maintained. With an Appendix, Containing Additional Observations on the Same Subject, and Some Remarks on Mr. Hume’s Political Discourse, of the Populousness of Antient Nations (Edinburgh: G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1753).
Some took this prospect in a very literal sense. Arthur Young, for example, in his Political Essays Concerning the Present State of the British Empire; particularly respecting I. Natural advantages and disadvantages. II. Constitution. III. Agriculture. IV. Manufactures. V. The colonies. And VI. Commerce (London: W. Strahan; T. Cadell, 1772) suggested that the monarch would do well to decamp for America in person: ‘Let him man his royal navy, and at the head of a gallant army, and those who will follow royalty, transfer the seat of empire to that country, which seems almost peculiarly formed for universal domination.’ Young, Political Essays, 430. See also N. Guyatt, Providence and the Invention of the United States, 1607–1876 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 76–82, for discussion of the prospect of Translatio Imperii in the 1760s and 1770s.
Josiah Tucker, Four tracts, Together with Two Sermons, on Political and Commercial Subjects, (Glocester [sic]: R. Raikes; J. Rivington, [1774]), 194. On Tucker, see J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Josiah Tucker on Burke, Locke, and Price: A Study in the Varieties of Eighteenth-Century Conservativism’, Virtue, Commerce and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 157–91 and Miller, Defining the Common Good, 399–412.
Ronald L. Meek’s, ‘Pioneering Study’, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), left something of a question mark hanging over eighteenth-century stadial theory, laying it open to the charge of legitimating European conquest of native American peoples and others deemed to fit the category of savage. This is not an issue that will be examined in any detail here. Jennifer Pitts’ recent work, A Turn to Empire, has tried to refute the charges in the case of Smith, at least.
Istvan Hont, ‘The Language of Sociability and Commerce: Samuel Pufendorf and the Theoretical Foundations of the “Four-Stages” Theory’, in A. Pagden (ed.), Languages of Political Theory in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 253, reprinted in Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 160;
and, most recently, Adam Smith’s, ‘History of Law and Government as Political Theory’, in R. Bourke and R. Geuss (eds), Political Judgement: Essays for John Dunn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 131–71.
See also Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
and N. Phillipson, Adam Smith: An Enlightened Life (London: Allen Lane, 2010), 102–19.
On these implications, see Istvan Hont, ‘The Political Economy of the “Unnatural and Retrograde” Order: Adam Smith and Natural Liberty’, in Schriften aus dem Karl-Marx-Haus (ed.), Französische Revolution und Politische Ökonomie, 41 vol. (Trier: Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, 1989), 122–49, reprinted in Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 354–88.
Adam Smith, ‘Early Draft of the Wealth of Nations’, in R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. G. Stein (ed.), Lectures on Jurisprudence (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 579.
For an examination of Locke’s arguments in this regard, see James Tully, ‘Rediscovering America: The Two Treatises and Aboriginal Rights’, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 136–76.
Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 11–2 and Passim.
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Hopkins, T. (2013). Adam Smith on American Economic Development and the Future of the European Atlantic Empires. In: Reinert, S.A., Røge, P. (eds) The Political Economy of Empire in the Early Modern World. Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315557_4
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