Why Smith Became a Commissioner of Customs

All quiet on the Adam Smith front today for Blogging. A couple of uninteresting asides using Smith’s name were not worth commenting upon. So I haven’t.

Maybe because I have been working steadily through my manuscript and these items seem to be rather unimportant. Certainly, they didn’t require me to think through what Smith actually said and meant, instead of the nonsense spouted about him, which would hardly help us understand he legacy.

Instead, I was writing a short note to a chapter detailing the issues involved in Adam Smith choosing to apply for the vacant post as a Scottish Commissioner of Customs and the Salt Duties in 1777, a year after he had guided his first edition of Wealth Of Nations through the press. I have never been happy with the apparent silence among his biographers about this episode and decided to develop some ideas I included in my earlier book, Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy (Palgrave Macmillan 2005) about this strange decision of Smith’s.

I decided to go through the entire episode in detail from the source materials, the biographical accounts (Stewart, 1793; Rae, 1895; Scott, 1937; and Ross, 1995) and what authors of articles had written about it (not much in the latter case).

It seems clear to me that Smith’s actions were deliberate, calculated and well executed. He also called upon a very strong alliance of powerful interest (in the 18th century meaning of this word; basically people well placed to use their influence on the decision-makers, in this case, including the Prime Minister, Lord North).

Basically, the coincidence of the colonial rebellion (1776-83) with publication of Wealth Of Nations posed serious problems to Adam Smith. He was actively seeking to influence decision-makers and influential members of the British political establishment to dismantle the mercantile economy of Britain through Wealth Of Nations, which included a sharp polemic against the American colonial trade under mercantile monopoly laws, which, added to his critique of the Chartered Trading Companies, and the high cost of unproductive European Wars, and his taking sides on the American rebellion, they began to have a cost on his influence. Friends, including David Hume, warned him to desist.

Reflecting on this, he realised the dangers of being identified too publicly with those that most of parliament regarded as ‘traitors’, no matter how right he believed his stance to be, was likely to undo the work he had put into his inquiry into the British economy. Hence, he chose to make himself ‘too busy’ by applying for the Commissioner’s post and absenting himself from new scholarly work.

Thus, despite promises, first published in Moral Sentiments in 1759, and repeated as late as 1759, he did not progress his manuscript on Jurisprudence for 31 years, and in a final act, he ordered all papers to be burned just before he died in Edinburgh in 1790. That’s the gist of my work today, writing up my final version of this episode for my new book.

A small issue, I know, but in the details we learn a lot more about Smith than some of the bland, anecdotal, and lazy acceptance of conventional accounts of his life. At least that’s my considered opinion.