*An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations*, the product of about a decade of Adam Smith's work, appeared in London in 1776 — the same year as the American Declaration of Independence. Smith was a professor of moral philosophy; his earlier *Theory of Moral Sentiments* (1759), with its account of sympathy as the basis of human conduct, is the often-ignored background to the *Wealth of Nations*. The old myth of 'two Smiths' has been largely dismantled by recent scholarship.

The book's famous opening is a pin factory. A solitary worker might make a handful of pins per day; a workshop of twelve, dividing the eighteen operations among them, can produce forty-eight thousand. The *division of labour* multiplies human productivity, and the division of labour is in turn limited by the extent of the market — wider commerce permits deeper specialisation. Smith formulated this relationship in a way that has held up to the present.

The second great thesis is the self-coordinating capacity of markets. The baker sells us bread not from concern for our hunger but *from his own interest* — yet in a competitive market that pursuit of private interest brings production into rough alignment with consumer demand. Smith uses the metaphor of the 'invisible hand' only once in the *Wealth of Nations*, but it has since taken on an ideological life of its own. His own deployment is restrained: he repeatedly warns against the distortions produced by monopolies, the colonial trade system, and the organisation of employers against workers.

Smith's political-economic conclusion is not laissez-faire but a **justified state**. He explicitly endorses public education, infrastructure, the rule of law, and fair taxation. Reading him only as a free-market apostle misreads the book; painting him as a radical critic of capitalism overcorrects in the opposite direction. The accurate reading is of a theorist of commercial society lodged within moral philosophy. The history of economics after 1776 is, in large measure, a sequence of answers to questions that Smith first posed.