250 years of the most influential book to come out of Edinburgh
Looking for the man behind an idea which gripped the world
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” - Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations, published in 1776.
These words might seem quite self-explanatory to us now, but 250 years ago they were revolutionary. These are part of one of the first works of economics - so foundational that its author did not live to hear the word “economics” come into common parlance. (Later in Adam Smith’s life it was called political economy, and after his death it was called economics.)
The impact of this single text is difficult to understate; offering one of the first systematic explanations of the transition from feudalism to free market capitalism, and arguing for the first time that a society’s wealth came from productivity rather than its gold reserves, and contributing to the wave of new ideas that flooded Scotland during the Enlightenment. Its author is immortalised in a towering statue by St Giles Cathedral, just metres from his friend and fellow enlightenment thinker, David Hume.
So who was the man who penned these ideas?
Well, as with so many of the great people memorialised in Edinburgh’s history, Adam Smith was born outside the city - in fact he only lived here full-time towards the end of his life. Born in 1723 in Kirkcaldy, Smith grew up in the second busiest port on the Forth at the time. His father had been a lawyer and customs comptroller, and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy local landowner. However after Smith’s father suddenly died before his birth, Smith was raised solely by his mother, who never remarried.
