National Wealth

It's often considered a kind of mystery why Adam Smith didn't write more clearly about the industrial revolution. Let's look at this one a little more closely. One striking fact is that there really is a lot of history in the wealth of nations, whether it's history of medieval times, history of the collapse following the Roman Empire, history of silver prices, history of the colonies or history of the East India Company. But can we look in that book and actually see also a history of the industrial revolution? That's a lot less clear. It's definitely the case that Smith clearly saw the rise of consumer society, which in today's world looks a bit like this photo, but in mid 18th century, Great Britain was already well underway. It's perhaps when you look at Smith's discussions of the rise of towns and nobles spending their money on baubles and trinkets rather than supporting workers on the land, that you can see this in Smith most clearly. So to the extent the industrial revolution was first and foremost a consumer revolution, as has been stressed by such contemporary writers as Mackendrick, well, in that regard, Smith, in a way, did see the onset of the Industrial Revolution. He just didn't focus so much on all those machines. You don't get the sense, reading Smith, that he understood that the modern world would end up looking a bit like this and that there could be discontinuous jumps and the command of humanity over, say, energy and material resources. Instead, Smith is still quite worried about the notion of keeping capital intact, as is reflected by his analysis of productive and unproductive labor. And he actually suggests it's agriculture, which stands the greatest chance of keeping capital intact and extending it.