ABSTRACT

Modern scholarship has shown that the rise of prominence of Adam Smith’s

Wealth of Nations was a slow process.1 In England, it was not until the last years of Smith’s life that his book progressively gained some influence at the

policy level (Teichgraeber 1987). In Germany, too, the Wealth of Nations

passed largely unnoticed before the 1790s (Tribe 1988, 133-48). In France, as

in England, the Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786 marked the begin-

ning of a growing interest from both the public and the government.2 This

movement continued to gain strength during the last decade of the eighteenth

century and, by the end of the Napoleonic wars, the Wealth of Nations had

achieved canonical status in both countries. The delayed reception of Smith’s political economy in Europe contrasts sharply with the quickness with which

David Hume’s Political Discourses penetrated the European public after its

publication in 1752. The Discourses was republished no fewer than seventeen

times in five languages in the next fifteen years.3 The work raised a great deal

of interest among English writers (Hont 2005e [1983]), and also gained a

strong reputation in Continental Europe, in the ‘‘republic of letters,’’ and in

the policy debates of various countries.