On the Wealth of Nations (11 page)

Adam Smith didn't live to see the French Revolution. But he witnessed a revolution of a very different kind: 'When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another …' This wasn't really a revolution at all. It was a provincial flare-up between freeborn Englishmen. But it would change human life more, and more hopefully, than all the radical and fanatic revolutions that were to come.

Smith was interested in the American colonies and the 'present disturbances' there. The index to
The Wealth of Nations
contains more than a hundred entries under 'America'. Smith devotes a long chapter in book 4 of
Wealth
to the political philosophy of colonies in general and to the causes of the rebellion in a particular thirteen of them. In book 5, where the ways and means of government were considered, Smith returns to the subject. The last pages of
The Wealth of Nations
are given over to a consideration of Britain's colonial empire.

Something should be said about Smith's use of the word
empire
. Sadly for the history of meaning in language, we owe
our present-day definition of
imperialism
to Lenin. Frustrated by capitalism's continued failure to impoverish its proletariat and then collapse, Lenin decided that capitalism had been 'transformed into imperialism'
¹
in order to 'plunder the whole world'
²
instead of just the local working class.

Adam Smith's name for this was mercantilism. Smith knew the classics, as did his readers. In Latin,
imperator
simply means the holder of a chief military command. In the Roman republic it was an honorary title, bestowed on a victorious general by acclamation of his troops. The Roman Empire, as originally conceived, was supposed to have an
imperator,
not a
rex
. Julius Caesar accepted the political appointment of emperor but refused the hereditary office of king. There were no 'evil empires' extant in Smith's time, only a couple of decaying and ineffective ones, the Chinese and the Holy Roman. Smith was free to employ the term
empire
in a neutral or even an optimistically figurative sense, as his friend David Hume did in his essay 'The Sceptic': 'The empire of philosophy extends over a few.'
³

Albeit Smith was not philosophically optimistic about the British Empire, especially not about the colonial American part of it. The ruling classes, he warned, must either understand the proper nature of an empire in North America or suffer the consequences 'in the case of a total separation from Great Britain, which … seems very likely'.
⁴

Smith was considered enough of an expert on America that in 1778 the British government sought his advice. General John Burgoyne had surrendered at Saratoga the previous fall, and the American war was going poorly or, as an American would
say, well. Smith wrote a detailed memorandum to a member of Lord Frederick North's cabinet, Alexander Wedderburn, who had been a friend of Smith's for thirty years.

Historians did not discover this document until the 1930s. By the time it came to light Smith's comments seemed more pertinent to the too feeble Britain of the twentieth century than the too masterful Britain of the eighteenth:

'Rage and indignation' at the governing classes is probably as good an explanation as any for how Britain, the original laboratory of the obvious and simple system of natural liberty, got itself into the socialist pickle from which it has yet to be fully extracted. But another, larger lab experiment was about to be conducted on the other side of the ocean.

Smith predicted to Wedderburn that the Americans would reject the type of conciliation with the parent country that Edmund Burke had proposed in 1775. And Smith predicted that if Britain continued the American war it would lose, even if it won: 'A military government would naturally be established there; and the … Americans … will, for more than a century
to come, be at all times ready to take arms in order to overturn it.'
⁶
Smith predicted the war's outcome: 'The submission or conquest of a part, but of a part only, of America, seems … by far the most probable.'
⁷
That is, Britain got to keep Canada. And Smith predicted the outcome's outcome: 'yet the similarity of language and manners would in most cases dispose the Americans to prefer our alliance to that of any other nation.'
⁸

None of these predictions, except the last, pleased Smith. But he had a cool and detached – one might say an Impartial Spectator's – view of the conflict.

In
The Wealth of Nations,
Smith expressed moral and utilitarian objections to what our modern, more ostentatiously moral (if less useful) thinkers call colonialism:

Smith was unmodern in applying the pejorative 'harmless' to Native Americans. He was more so in his opinions that 'the present grandeur of the colonies of America'
¹⁰
was an improvement on pre-Columbian conditions despite 'the savage injustice of the Europeans … ruinous and destructive to several
of these unfortunate countries'.
¹¹
Smith was also unmodern in crediting colonial accomplishments to Western civilization instead of, say, Pocahontas: 'the colonies owe to … Europe the education and great views of their active and enterprising founders.'
¹²
But Smith gave Western civilization negative as well as positive credit: 'It was, not the wisdom and policy, but the disorder and injustice of the European governments, which peopled and cultivated America.'
¹³
The lack of opportunities at home, not the abundance of opportunities overseas, caused the colonies to grow.

Smith was critical of the British government with its 'mean and malignant expedients of the mercantile system'
¹⁴
whose trade restrictions were 'impertinent badges of slavery'
¹⁵
imposed on the Americans 'without any sufficient reason, by the groundless jealousy of the merchants and manufacturers of the mother country'.
¹⁶

Smith was so infuriated by the trade restrictions on the American colonies that, uncharacteristically, he indulged himself in a protracted jeremiad – his 'nation of shopkeepers' tirade.

The slur that Britain was nothing more than that is often attributed to the diminutive Corsican who was soon to give the British more trouble even than the Americans. But it was a common phrase, used to describe any commercial nation. Louis XIV is supposed to have said it about the Dutch. Note that Smith didn't think the leaders of his country rose anywhere near to the level of being shopkeepers:

The inspiration for this philippic was, however, the only thing about the American Revolution that Smith found inspirational. We Americans are stirred by the political thinking of our national patriarchs. Adam Smith was not.

Smith was an idealist but he did not have the Romantic's faith in pure ideas, the faith which was beginning to take hold in France and, indeed, in America. Smith did not think
so highly of ideas that when he saw a good thing he automatically thought a good idea had caused it. God moves in a mysterious way, let alone Massachusetts.

Smith was critical of the colonists. He considered them to be not so much sterling patriots as skinflints with their sterling: 'The English colonists have never yet contributed any thing towards the defence of the mother country, or towards the support of its civil government. They themselves, on the contrary, have hitherto been defended almost entirely at the expence of the mother country.'
¹⁸

In Smith's memorandum to Wedderburn the brilliance of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, et al., was dismissed in one sentence: 'In their present elevation of spirits, the ulcerated minds of the Americans are not likely to consent to any union even upon terms the most advantageous to themselves.'
¹⁹

Smith detected the ordinary self-seeking – 'by no means the weak side of human nature' – behind America's revolutionary idealism. In
The Wealth of Nations
he debunked the Founding Fathers:

Smith did not regard that new form of government as an opportunity for mankind to achieve splendid new social ideals. Smith saw America as a practical problem. We Americans, the most practical of people, might pay attention to Smith's perspective on the American Revolution. We might doff some of our idealistic trappings, look in the political mirror, and see ourselves for what we are, a practical solution.

Even in the heady days leading up to the Declaration of Independence there was a prosaic and businesslike aspect to the American Revolution. The French Revolution did not get its start in a tiff over customs duties. The sans-culottes were not middle-class entrepreneurs like Paul Revere and Sam Adams, and running around without pants they weren't likely to become so. The Jacobins didn't put on feather bonnets to stage a commercial protest. If there ever had been a Paris Tea Party, the revolutionaries wouldn't have been dumping oolong, they would have been scalping everyone in sight and then each other. No beer is named after Dr Guillotin.

To the practical problem of America, Adam Smith had a practical solution – get out of there. 'Great Britain should voluntarily give up all authority over her colonies, and leave them to elect their own magistrates, to enact their own laws, and to make peace and war as they might think proper … It might dispose them … to favour us in war as well as in trade, and, instead of turbulent and factious subjects, to become our most faithful, affectionate, and generous allies.'
²¹
(Which, though Smith's advice was not followed, America has turned out to be,
except in 1812, and during the Civil War, and when we were feeling neutral about Germany in the nineteen-teens and the nineteen-thirties, and in the Suez crisis, and anytime a question of Ireland has been involved.)

Smith didn't think his practical solution was practical. He called it 'a measure as never was, and never will be adopted, by any nation in the world'.
²²
Smith's perceptions about why 'Peace Now' always falls on deaf ears still apply. The current political reality in Tibet, Chechnya, the West Bank, and maybe, alas, Baghdad was accurately described by Adam Smith:

Smith had another even less practical solution to the American problem, a merger with Great Britain. Benjamin Franklin had proposed such an idea in the 1750s, but tempers had been
cooler then. Smith seemed to feel that he was now almost the only person in favor of it. He told Wedderburn that political agglomeration 'seems scarce to have a single advocate … if you except here and there a solitary philosopher like myself'.
²⁴

Nonetheless in
The Wealth of Nations,
Smith wrote that he thought making America part of Great Britain 'can at worst be regarded but as a new Utopia, less amusing certainly, but not more useless and chimerical than the old one'.
²⁵
He was citing the same work of visionary fiction that he'd earlier mocked. There's something about America, prosaic as the place and its populace may be, that makes people dream. Smith told Wedderburn, 'The plan … would certainly tend most to the prosperity, to the splendour, and to the duration of the empire.'
²⁶
Smith argued the advantages of Anglo-American union in book 4 of
Wealth
and again in book 5, making a total of a dozen references to the subject. He thought that his concept could be extended 'to all the different provinces of the empire inhabited by people of either British or European extraction'.
²⁷
(Lest this be thought racist, he favored including the Irish.) He even foresaw, without wincing, the Bush/Blair relationship: