ABSTRACT
In the history of Scottish economic thought, John Rae must be regarded as an outlier. Although born in Aberdeen in 1796 and educated at Aberdeen and Edinburgh Universities, Rae emigrated to Canada in 1822. Despite travelling extensively in North and Central America and to Hawaii, Rae never returned to his native land and died in the United States, in 1872. Although he lived and worked in the Scottish expatriate society of eastern Canada for a number of years, he had no personal involvement with the milieu of the Scottish Enlightenment. The only ‘Scottish’ political economist with whom he is recorded as having corresponded was John Stuart Mill. Nor is there any record of correspondence with contemporary North American economic luminaries. Indeed, after the publication in 1834 of his Statement of Some New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy Exposing the Fallacies of Free Trade and Some Other Doctrines Maintained in the ‘Wealth of Nations’, Rae turned to other pursuits, including gold prospecting (he took part in the California gold rush of 1848), geology (his publications were highly regarded by contemporary geologists), philology (John Stuart Mill thought highly of his work), law (he was a land court judge in Hawaii) and the practice of medicine (he was a public health official in Hawaii and rendered medical services to the Hawaiian royal family).
