Adam Smith's Politique Coloniale

Abstract

The paper deals with Adam Smith's analysis of and opinions on British colonial policy during the American revolution and its immediate aftermath. Smith was, of course, an opponent of mercantile aims and methods of regu- lating colonial trade. He was equally concerned with the fiscal burdens imposed on Britain by rising public debt and the civil and military costs of maintaining an empire. Unlike many of his contemporaries, therefore, Smith did not regard the loss of empire as disadvantageous from an economic or political perspective ; his « Utopian » proposals for an imperial federation were designed to emphasise to only kinf of empire that could be justified, namely one in which both free trade and fiscal harmonization were achieved. Although Smith's opinions on American economic prospects were as optimistic as thore of Thomas Paine, he refused to make the radical connnection between républicanisme and economic performance and was unsympathetic to colonial constitutional complaints and the neo-Lockean ideas on contract and rights of resistance upon which they were based. Hence the lack of histo- rial basis for those attempts to make Smith an honorary founding father of a « bourgeois » or « liberal » integration of the American national identity.