Publication of The Wealth of Nations
- When
- 9 March 1776
- Where
- place of publication not attested in supplied passages
Smith's treatise appeared on 9 March 1776 in two volumes, the culmination of roughly a decade of work and his central intellectual project.
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published on 9 March 1776 as Smith's central intellectual project, issued in two volumes with books I–III in the first and books IV and V in the second. The work drew on seventeen years of notes and earlier studies and took about ten years to produce. It sought to examine the political and economic principles by which commercial and industrial societies generate wealth, appearing during the Scottish Enlightenment and the Scottish Agricultural Revolution.
Sources
- The Wealth of Nations Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-21
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.