ABSTRACT
This chapter reports the discovery of hitherto undocumented manuscript materials for a translation of Smith’s The Wealth of Nation (WN) undertaken by the Scottish Catholic priest John Geddes while serving as rector of the Royal Scots College, Valladolid, in the late 1770s. Of particular interest is a polished draft of Geddes’s translation of the opening pages of “Of Colonies”, itself clearly a fragment of a longer manuscript. As the manuscripts exist in various states, they allow for analysis of Geddes’s working method; and as the drafts overlap, they further allow for analysis of the translation as process. Geddes privileged the source-text and source-culture, producing an (at times) foreignising translation. This chapter also considers the wider question of Geddes’s place in Campomanes’s circle in relation to his ability and efforts to circulate English print and, in particular, Enlightenment scholarship, in the Spain of the 1770s, among a small number of English-knowing Spaniards.
