“The mean rapacity, the monopolising spirit of merchants and manufacturers”
Adam Smith on Colonial Capitalism and Slavery
On June 27, 1772, David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, penned a letter from his home in Edinburgh to his friend Adam Smith, a former professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow University, who he knew was working on a book about the economy. “We are here in a very melancholy Situation: Continual Bankruptcies, universal Loss of Credit, and endless Suspicions,” Hume wrote. “Do these Events any-wise affect your Theory? Or will it occasion the Revisal of any Chapters?”1 A couple of weeks earlier a Scottish financial house known as the Ayr Bank had collapsed, setting off a financial panic that rattled the money centers in Edinburgh, London, and Amsterdam.2 The financial troubles of the East India Company, and its request for a government bailout, were also in the news.
There is no record of what Smith replied to Hume. When he received the letter, he was living in his hometown of Kirkcaldy, Fife. Some years earlier, he had taken leave of his professorship for a better-paid post: tutoring the young Duke of Buccleuch. Approaching fifty, Smith had already published one highly acclaimed book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he examined the basis of morality. The new book he was working on addressed the question of why some countries got rich while others stayed poor. Despite his reputation as an absent-minded professor, Smith followed current events closely, and he was politically connected. During the previous decade, he had acted as an informal adviser to Charles Townshend, who had served as president of the Board of Trade and was then chancellor of the exchequer in the Whig government of William Pitt the Elder. It was Townshend who had imposed hefty import duties in the American colonies, including tariffs on tea that the East India Company transported from Asia, a policy that was causing great ruptures. Smith didn’t have anything to do with the tariffs, but he remained close to the Whigs.
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