Publication of The Wealth of Nations

Background. The treatise was the work of Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith, whose full title was An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. It grew out of seventeen years of notes and earlier studies, including observation of conversations among contemporary economists such as Nicholas Magens about economic and societal conditions at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and took Smith about ten years to produce.

Publication. The book appeared on 9 March 1776 as Smith's central intellectual project, issued in two volumes: books I–III in the first and books IV and V in the second. The work emerged during the Scottish Enlightenment and the Scottish Agricultural Revolution, and sought to explain the political and economic principles by which commercial and industrial societies generate wealth.

Reception and Influence. Early readers doubted its popularity: in April 1776 David Hume reportedly said it required too much thought to rival Gibbon's Decline and Fall. Yet the book proved foundational. Lord North drew two taxes from it in the 1777 budget, the 1778 budget adopted Smith's recommended inhabited house duty and malt tax, and William Pitt praised it in the Commons in 1792. Later, Karl Marx called it the true Bible of eighteenth-century classical political economy while critiquing it, and liberal schools broadly embraced or reinterpreted Smith's concepts.

Later Editions. Five editions appeared during Smith's lifetime, in 1776, 1778, 1784, 1786 and 1789. In 1784 Smith issued Additions and Corrections to the First and Second Editions and published a three-volume third edition, which incorporated those corrections and included an index for the first time.