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SMITH AT 300: USELESS COMPANIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 February 2023

Emma Rothschild
Emma Rothschild*
Affiliation:
Emma Rothschild: Harvard University. Email: rothsch@fas.harvard.edu
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Extract

This observation is from an obscure backwater of the Wealth of Nations. It is about companies that were archaic even in 1776: the Russian Company, the Eastland Company, the Hamburgh Company, chartered in Britain in the sixteenth century, and trading mainly in the Baltic. But the comments on regulated companies are a revealing epitome of Adam Smith’s thought. There is the artful language, and one can almost hear Smith’s ironic tone as he dictated these sentences. There is the analytic idiom, so characteristic of the Wealth of Nations, in the juxtaposition of large theories with the details of legal and economic history. There is, above all, the subject, which is also the largest object of inquiry in the Wealth of Nations, or the changing relationship between states and markets.

Type
Symposium: Smith at 300
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 45 , Issue 2 , June 2023 , pp. 208 - 210
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the History of Economics Society

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References

REFERENCES

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