The ‘rich country–poor country’ debate in Scottish classical political economy

Abstract

‘where the Necessaries of Life are cheap, there also will Labour and Art be cheap’ This is disputed (Jonathan Swift's marginalia to John Browne's Essays on the Trade and Coin of Ireland , 1729) There would be no novelty in arguing that the eighteenth-century Scottish ‘inquiry into the origin and causes of the wealth of nations’ can a posteriori be seen as a series of considerations on why certain countries were rich and others were poor, whether the rich were getting richer while the poor were getting poorer or whether they were all marching together into some common future of ‘abundance’. The thesis of this paper is both more specific and more historical than that. It argues that there was a distinct debate in eighteenth-century Scottish political economy about the relationship of rich and poor countries as they coexisted and fought for international markets in historical time. While only the bare outlines of this debate can be presented here, these alone may serve to indicate how crucial this debate was to the shaping of classical political economy in the Scottish Enlightenment. The terminal dates of this Scottish debate are 1752 and 1804. It was provoked by the publication in 1752 of David Hume's Political Discourses , and came to an end in the last major work of eighteenth-century Scottish political economy, Lord Lauderdale's Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Public Wealth .