The Wealth of Nations

The Wealth of Nations was published March 9, 1776, during the Scottish Enlightenment and the Scottish Agricultural Revolution. It influenced several authors and economists, such as Karl Marx, as well as governments and organisations, setting the terms for economic debate and discussion for the next century and a half. For example, Alexander Hamilton was influenced in part by The Wealth of Nations to write his Report on Manufactures, in which he argued against many of Smith's policies. Hamilton based much of this report on the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and it was, in part, Colbert's ideas that Smith responded to, and criticised, with The Wealth of Nations.
The Wealth of Nations was the product of seventeen years of notes and earlier works, as well as an observation of conversation among economists of the time concerning economic and societal conditions during the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and it took Smith some ten years to produce. The result was a treatise which sought to offer a practical application for reformed economic theory to replace the mercantilist and physiocratic economic theories that were becoming less relevant in the time of industrial progress and innovation. It provided the foundation for economists, politicians, mathematicians, biologists,[citation needed] and thinkers of all fields to build upon. Irrespective of historical influence, The Wealth of Nations represented a clear paradigm shift in the field of economics,[8] comparable to Sir Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica for physics, Antoine Lavoisier's Traité Élémentaire de Chimie for chemistry, or Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species for biology.

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