Everyone has to eat, so those who produce food must produce enough to feed themselves and to feed all those who do not produce their own food. Once stated. this is trivially obvious but, I will argue, making that simple relation between agriculture and the rest of the economy explicit and, at...

Despite their differences on other questions, Hume and Steuart had almost identical theories of long-run economic development. In their story, agriculture can produce a surplus of food to support urban manufacturing (and other things), but will not do so unless farmers want to trade the surplus...

<italic>Everyone has to eat, so agriculturalists must produce enough to feed themselves and the rest of the population. This statement is trivially obvious but making it explicit mattered to the early development of economic thinking. Many important economic writers of the period (Petty, Cantillon,...</italic>

The purpose of this paper is to examine Smith's four stages theory of history as an account of economic and social development, with an emphasis on the arguments and evidence he used to support it. In his biographical account of Smith's life, his friend Dugald Stewart described Smith’s method...

The invisible hand as it appears in the Theory of Moral Sentiments is commonly treated as an afterthought in discussions of the version in the Wealth of Nations, but it deserves attention in its own right. I will argue that there is an entirely coherent (if not entirely plausible) economic...

David Hume thought that a taste for luxury was desirable because it promoted economic and political development (it brought down feudalism, among other things). Adam Smith's early works follow a very similar line though, unlike Hume, he saw a taste for luxury as rather contemptible despite its...

This paper draws attention to two relatively neglected features of Adam Smith's analysis of rent and profit. First, he assumed that all land is used for something and that there are many agricultural products. There is no zero rent margin in David Ricardo's sense but the decision to invest in...