Smith at 300

This observation is from an obscure backwater of the Wealth of Nations. It is about companies that were archaic even in 1776: the Russian Company, the Eastland Company, the Hamburgh Company, chartered in Britain in the sixteenth century, and trading mainly in the Baltic. But the comments on regulated companies are a revealing epitome of Adam Smith’s thought. There is the artful language, and one can almost hear Smith’s ironic tone as he dictated these sentences. There is the analytic idiom, so characteristic of the Wealth of Nations , in the juxtaposition of large theories with the details of legal and economic history. There is, above all, the subject, which is also the largest object of inquiry in the Wealth of Nations , or the changing relationship between states and markets

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• The Market and the State. Essays in Honour of Adam Smith

  Walter Eltis, W A Eltis et al.•The Economic Journal•1977

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• An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations

  Adam Smith, Edwin Cannan et al.•An inquiry into the nature and…•1977

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