7 - Adam Smith in the British Empire

Summary

Approximately one-third of the Wealth of Nations is about empire, or at least about the long-distance commerce that was so intricately entangled, in Adam Smith's description, with the eighteenth-century empires. There is something idiosyncratically disagreeable, Smith suggested, in the circumstances whereby companies come to be the sovereigns of the countries which they have conquered. Smith has been celebrated or execrated, during most of the period since his death in 1790, as the inspiration of one or more great abstractions: free trade, the national economy, self-interest, sympathy, the essentially utilitarian framework, in Akeel Bilgrami's expression, of a desacralized world, or a world without enchantment. The politics of empire was central, too, to the other great influence on Smith's political and economic thought, the French economic theories with which he was so preoccupied in the 1760s. Smith was, in his own terms, an effective critic of empire.