Contributor

Adam Smith

(1723 - 1790)

Adam Smith was briefly kidnapped by Roma at the age of four. A biographer observed, “He would have made, I fear, a poor gypsy.” Publishing his first book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in 1759, Smith was later elected to the Royal Society of London and became acquainted with Edward Gibbon, who published the first volume of his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in February 1776. Less than a month later, Smith published The Wealth of Nations. “I am a beau in nothing but my books,” Smith once said about his library.

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Voices In Time

1776 | Kirkcaldy

Mutual Benefit

Adam Smith on the division of labor.More

Miscellany

“The contempt of risk and the presumptuous hope of success are in no period of life more active than at the age at which young people choose their professions,” wrote Adam Smith in 1776. “How little the fear of misfortune is then capable of balancing the hope of good luck.”