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Adam Smith was born in the small Scottish port town of Kirkcaldy in the county of Fife in 1723. His family, whose background lay in a mixture of minor gentry and farming, was connected by patronage to many of the powerful families of eighteenth-century Scotland. His father, also Adam Smith, died before he was born. Smith senior was a comptroller of customs at Kirkcaldy and a writer to the signet (solicitor) who was attached to the Whig and Presbyterian cause that formed the backbone of the new Scottish establishment that arose after the Union of Parliaments between Scotland and England in 1707 and the Hanoverian succession to the throne after the death of Queen Anne. Smith’s father served a number of influential politicians, including the Earl of Loudon, who were supporters of the Union. Smith senior played an active role in opposing the first Jacobite rising, an attempt to restore the Stuart family to the British throne in 1715, and his reward for this was a steady advancement through the patronage network of government positions that dominated life in Scotland.

Smith’s mother, Margaret Smith, née Douglas, was related to several of the most prominent families in Fife, so the young Adam was born into a very particular set of social and political connections. The death of his father left him in his mother’s care, and this seems to have built a particularly strong bond between them that lasted until Margaret’s death a mere six years before his own.

Kirkcaldy had developed as a port which traded with the Baltic States and the Low Countries. In addition to fishing, it depended on coal and salt production. Both of these had begun to decline by the time Smith was born, and there was a significant level of smuggling along the Fife coast – an activity that Smith’s father was expected to help to police. Smith was born into a respectable, but by no means wealthy, family and received a first-rate education at the Burgh school in Kirkcaldy. Here the forward-thinking school master, David Miller, taught the young Smith the usual mixture of Latin, arithmetic, geometry, and rhetoric that passed for the standard Scottish curriculum, but he did so in a manner that stressed the practical value of the often abstract knowledge. One of Miller’s key innovations was his stress on polite learning and public speaking. Pupils like Smith were required to read a passage, often from The Spectator (a popular collection of ‘polite’ essays by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele), and then present its content in their own words. The exercise was designed to aid both comprehension and rhetorical skill. Smith was a gifted student and he seems to have thrived in an environment that sought to produce confident and articulate young men able to occupy the leading places in society.

With the support of his father’s political and family connections, Smith was accepted into the University of Glasgow in 1737 at the age of 14. Glasgow was just beginning its spectacular growth into one of the industrial powerhouses of Britain. At this time it was small, relatively quiet in political terms, and had a reputation of being a safe, Protestant, and Hanoverian city. But more than that, it was beginning to develop a reputation as one of the most innovative centres of learning in Europe. Glasgow had recently reformed its teaching practices to abandon the regenting system, where students were taught all subjects by one generalist tutor, in favour of a system of specialist professors. Among these were Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), Smith’s beloved teacher of moral philosophy, who was central in encouraging the practice of teaching in English rather than Latin, and in introducing modern philosophical texts to the classroom. Another was Robert Simson (1687–1768), whose classes on mathematics and geometry quickly became a favourite of Smith’s.¹

Smith’s early education had provided him with a level of skill in Latin that allowed him to bypass the remedial first year and move directly into the higher-level classes in Latin, Greek, Natural Philosophy, Logic, and Moral Philosophy. He spent the next three years proving himself to be a brilliant student and was able to secure a Snell Exhibition to fund further study at Balliol College, Oxford. We know very little about how Smith spent his six years at Oxford, but we do know that he found the unreformed nature of the colleges and the lack of attention to teaching to be a sore disappointment after the rigour of his early training at Glasgow. Most accounts suggest that he spent his time in private reading and research and continued to develop a broad range of interests across the arts and sciences. It was also likely that this period saw Smith first come across the work of the man who would later be his closest intellectual friend, David Hume (1711–76). Indeed, Smith’s poor health at this time, which he attributed to excessive study, paralleled the experience of his friend Hume in the composition of his Treatise of Human Nature (1739/40): a book whose arguments clearly shaped much of Smith’s thinking from this time onwards.

Smith was safely, if (given anti-Scottish prejudice) uneasily, ensconced at Oxford during the political upheavals of 1745–6, which saw the final attempt to restore the Stuart family, led by Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) at the head of a force largely drawn from the clans of Highland Scotland. The defeat of this uprising at Culloden in 1746 marked the end of the Stuart cause as a serious threat to the political stability of the new Great Britain, but it also reinforced the fragility of the political institutions with which Smith and his family identified themselves. If the city of Edinburgh itself could fall to a poorly armed clan uprising, then nothing was certain. Smith returned to Scotland, and his mother’s home in Kirkcaldy, in 1746. As the political situation stabilized, he began to cast about for a suitable career. The Snell Exhibition had originally been intended for those training to become priests in the Episcopalian Church, but this condition had lapsed by Smith’s time and it seems that he never seriously entertained an ecclesiastical career.

In 1748, Smith began his professional career as an academic. Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), the acerbic doyen of Edinburgh society, arranged for him to give a series of freelance lectures in Edinburgh. The lectures proved to be highly successful and he repeated them in the following two years. Kames hoped that Smith’s erudition and eloquence, honed during his time at Glasgow and Oxford, would find a ready audience among the emergent public intellectuals of polite Edinburgh society. Smith took as his topics rhetoric and jurisprudence and delivered his lectures in competition to those of the University of Edinburgh. That said, the material that he covered and the way in which he covered it meant that it was unlike anything then taught at the University. His theories of rhetoric and law, which we will cover later in this volume, have their genesis at this time.

The popularity of the lectures led to Smith being appointed to the Chair of Logic at the University of Glasgow in 1751. His inaugural address, De Origine Idearum (On the Origin of Ideas), does not survive, but the title is intriguing as it points us towards the theory of ideas, which would become central to his conceptions of how the human mind operates. On arriving at Glasgow, Smith revised the curriculum to make it more to his own taste. The old medieval logic syllabus was discarded in favour of one that centred on rhetoric, or, to be more accurate, argument and speech in modern English. The focus on plain ordinary language is a key feature of Smith’s thinking.

In 1752, soon after his employment at Glasgow, Smith was faced with something of a professional and personal dilemma. The death of the Professor of Moral Philosophy prompted him to move from the Chair of Logic to that newly vacant post, and the idea was mooted that David Hume should be considered for the Logic Chair. This proved too controversial an appointment for many, as Hume’s supposedly radical anti-religious views did not sit well with the rest of the faculty. Smith was forced to admit that, though he would have loved to have Hume as a colleague, his appointment would have been too contentious and may have harmed the institution. Smith’s earliest publications, including a letter to the short-lived Edinburgh Review of 1755–6, appear at this period.

Smith was a popular professor who took his educational role very seriously. Many of the personal reminiscences that his contemporaries have about him suggest that he approached the stereotype of the absent-minded professor: talking to himself, wandering out of doors in his nightgown, accidentally trying to make tea from rolled-up pieces of bread. While these images are endearing, they sit in more than a little tension with the reality of Smith as a gifted and professional teacher and a skilled university administrator whose roles included complicated tasks involving the finances of the University and the development of the library. In addition to his university duties, Smith was able to publish his first great book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in 1759.

As his reputation grew, Smith was able to attract students from as far afield as Russia, Geneva, and the American colonies. Among those who attended Smith’s classes were the future biographer James Boswell (1740–95) and the gifted legal scholar John Millar (1735–1801), who would himself become a Glasgow Professor and later educate Smith’s heir David Douglas (1769–1819). Smith’s reputation attracted the attention of the politician and future Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Townshend (1725–67). Townshend was the stepfather to the young Henry Scott, the 3rd Duke of Buccleuch (1746–1812), one of the wealthiest landowners in Scotland. Townshend persuaded Smith to resign his position at Glasgow after 13 years and become a travelling tutor to the young Duke. Though initially reluctant to leave his professorship at Glasgow, Smith was persuaded by the fact that the position would not only allow him to travel to the Continent, but would also come with a lifetime pension that would allow him to devote himself to study and writing.

Smith spent the years 1764–6 chiefly in France, basing himself in Toulouse and then Paris. He met many of the leading figures of the French Enlightenment, the so-called ‘philosophes’. Among these were Voltaire (1694–1778), Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot (1727–81), François Quesnay (1694–1774), and several of the French economic thinkers known as the Physiocrats. Smith’s time in France was cut short by the tragic death of the Duke’s younger brother, and he returned to London with his pupil. Smith remained in London in 1766 and 1767 and used the time to produce a revised third edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. He would remain close to Buccleuch throughout his life and acted as an adviser on the Duke’s financial matters and on his improvements to his vast estates.

Returning to Scotland in 1768, Smith retired to Kirkcaldy and began work on what was to become his most famous book, the Wealth of Nations. His friend Hume complained of his infrequent visits to Edinburgh during this period, but Smith assured him that he was making progress with his studies away from the distractions of the city. Smith travelled to London in 1773 and remained there until 1776, when the Wealth of Nations was published to great acclaim, and was soon followed by a second edition in 1778 and a third, significantly revised edition in 1784. The London of the 1770s was dominated by the dispute with the American colonies, and this context surely shaped Smith’s thinking on international trade (as we will see below). But 1776 also brought a personal blow with the death of Hume. Smith penned a memorial to his friend that was published along with Hume’s own autobiographical essay. He was later to observe that this memorial caused more personal attacks on him than the far more, as he saw it, controversial economic arguments of the Wealth of Nations. There is a certain irony in this as Smith had informed Hume that he was uncomfortable in acting as his literary executor as it would involve publishing the highly controversial, and now classic, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1779). The Dialogues is a sustained attack on many of the most popular philosophical arguments for belief in God, and Smith clearly feared this would attract the ire of the religious. In the end, Hume’s essay was published, but to little abuse, while Smith’s memorial produced sustained criticism.

In 1778, Smith’s influential political contacts secured him a position as one of Commissioners of Customs for Scotland and he moved his mother and cousin, Janet Douglas, to Edinburgh and his new residence at Panmure House in the Canongate. By all accounts, Smith was as assiduous in his customs office duties as he had been in his professorial duties. One anecdote from the time tells how he read the list of smuggled goods, realized that he owned many of them himself, and promptly burned these to avoid any accusation of impropriety. He soon became a well-known figure walking up the High Street of Edinburgh from his home to the Customs House opposite St Giles’ Cathedral. One of the very few images we have of Smith is a sketch by the artist John Kay (1742–1826) of him walking up the street holding a posy of flowers to his nose to block out the stench of eighteenth-century Edinburgh. Smith also became an integral part of the Edinburgh social scene and was a leading light in the Oyster Club, a group that met for intellectual debate in a tavern in the Grassmarket. In addition, he hosted Sunday evening dinners for close friends and visitors to the city.

Smith was troubled by poor health in his later years and shaken by the death of his mother in 1784 and by that of his cousin and housekeeper Janet Douglas in 1788. He had never married, and we have almost no evidence of him having any kind of romantic engagement. So his household was gradually reduced to a few loyal servants and the son of his cousin, the young David Douglas, whose education Smith was directing and who would become his heir.

Smith’s late career as a civil servant was complemented by his growing reputation as a policy adviser to government. The success of the Wealth of Nations meant that his ideas were taken seriously at the highest levels. His opinion was sought on the American crisis, on free trade with Ireland, and on the changes to banking regulations. During a trip to London in 1787, many of the leading figures of the government, including the Prime Minister, William Pitt the Younger (1759–1806), attended a dinner in his honour where Smith’s influence on economic policy and free trade was acknowledged. Also in 1787, Smith was elected Rector of Glasgow University. He was particularly delighted by the honour as it reflected the good opinion in which the students at his old university held him. He travelled to Glasgow with his friend the Irish philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–97) for the installation ceremony and gave a talk on the Imitative Arts which he intimated elsewhere was part of an unfinished new book.

By 1790, ill health had set in while Smith was working to produce a final revised edition of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Although he managed this task, he did not manage to complete unfinished books on jurisprudence and on the arts and asked his executors, the scientist Joseph Black (1728–99) and the geologist James Hutton (1726–97), to help him destroy his papers. On his death, the bulk of Smith’s estate passed to David Douglas, later Lord Reston, an influential judge. Smith left small bequests to his friends and gave significant amounts to charitable causes. All of the evidence we have of his character is that he was a modest and unassuming man who was a loyal friend. Beyond that he seems to have been a very private man who sought to avoid public controversy. Indeed, the care with which he revised his two great books suggests that he wanted them, rather than any details of his personal life, to stand as his reputation to posterity.²