ABSTRACT
Any brief account of the classical economists’ ideas about so wide-ranging and complex a subject as industrialization and poverty must necessarily be highly selective. Even on a restricted definition, the category ‘classical economics’ embraces ten or a dozen individuals, most of whom were prolific authors.1 Moreover, their collective life-span extended over a century and a half of significant economic and social transformation, from 1723 to 1875, and only the most abstract and speculative of philosophers could have been entirely unaffected by contemporary events.
