ABSTRACT
The contemporary global significance of Adam Smith’s masterwork in economics is seldom more vividly illustrated than in the story behind the book under review. By the author’s telling, he had researched and written an essay on the French translations of the Wealth of Nations (WN) which appeared in Japanese for a bicentennial facsimile edition in Japan in the 1970s, but had then abandoned that research after leaving his post as curator of the Kress Collection of early works on economics in 1980. A Taiwanese scholar named Cheng-chung Lai visited him at his office in the Harvard library in the early 1990s about the possibility of publishing that essay (and one on Smith’s broader Continental influence) in English. ‘I agreed to do so’, Carpenter tells us, ‘primarily because Professor Lai’s enthusiasm was contagious. Indeed, the cliché that he would not take no for an answer was almost literally true’ (pp. x-xi). If so, then we are all in Professor Lai’s debt, because the result a decade later is a study that will be of considerable interest to historians and students of Adam Smith, not unlike Ian S. Ross’s On the Wealth of Nations: Contemporary Responses to Adam Smith (Thoemmes 1998).
