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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 January 2025
Reading The Wealth of Nations now, it is hard to get away from the fact that Adam Smith was mired in the presumption of his own racial superiority. This inconvenient truth for Smithian economics can be seen in the ‘Introduction and Plan of Work’ to all five of the books that make up The Wealth of Nations and situates Smith's work in a very different time and, perhaps more importantly, in a very different colonial world view that unflinchingly asserts the author's superiority over the ‘savage nations’:
Among the savage nations of hunters and fishers, every individual who is able to work is more or less employed in useful labour, and endeavours to provide, as well as he can, the necessaries and conveniencies of life, for himself, and such of his family or tribe as are either too old, or too young, or too infirm, to go a- hunting and fishing. Such nations, however, are so miserably poor, that, from mere want, they are frequently reduced, or at least think themselves reduced, to the necessity sometimes of directly destroying, and sometimes of abandoning their infants, their old people, and those afflicted with lingering diseases, to perish with hunger, or to be devoured by wild beasts. Among civilized and thriving nations, on the contrary, though a great number of people do not labour at all, many of whom consume the produce of ten times, frequently of a hundred times, more labour than the greater part of those who work; yet the produce of the whole labour of the society is so great, that all are often abundantly supplied; and a workman, even of the lowest and poorest order, if he is frugal and industrious, may enjoy a greater share of the necessaries and conveniencies of life than it is possible for any savage to acquire.
It is worth considering that Smith is writing over a century before the criminologist Cesare Lombroso expounded the virtues of eugenics for defining criminal classes by race. Lombroso's racist conceit enabled the continued subjugation of black people and colonized nations well into the 20th century, up to and including the most horrific act of genocide when Nazi Germany attempted to exterminate Jews, Roma, ‘asocials’, black people, disabled people, Freemasons, gay people, Jehovah's Witnesses, non- Jewish Poles and Slavic prisoners of war, and political opponents and trade unionists in the Holocaust.
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