To what extent did Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations shape the modern discipline of economic history?

In 1776, amidst the intellectual fervour of the Scottish Enlightenment and the economic

upheavals of the early Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations (1776). Commonly hailed as the foundational text of modern economics, the book is frequently acknowledged for its rejection of mercantilist orthodoxy and its embrace of liberal commercial principles. Yet this canonical status belies the complex legacy of The Wealth of

Nations, which—while undeniably influential—does not present a unified theory of economic history, nor does it fully articulate the capitalist ideology it has come to represent. This raises a central historiographical problem: To what extent did Smith’s text shape the modern

discipline of economic history, and how much of that legacy was constructed by those who came after him? Building from this question, this essay investigates how The Wealth of

Nations helped inaugurate a new epistemic space in which ‘the economy’ became narratable as a historical object—an operation that, following the framework of French historian Michel Foucault, can be understood as a transformation in the conditions of economic knowledge itself. Rather than treating Smith as the originator of modern economics, the essay situates

The Wealth of Nations within broader Enlightenment frameworks, including conjectural history, moral philosophy, and Newtonian science, before tracing how its legacy was refracted through successive thinkers including Dugald Stewart, Thomas Malthus, David Ricardo, Karl Marx, and 20th-century neoclassicists and cliometricians. These reinterpretations did not merely apply or misread Smith, but used his text as a generative site for constructing divergent historical logics. The essay argues that while The Wealth of Nations did not dictate

the direction of economic history, it enabled its very possibility as a field for economic ‘knowledge’ to be freely contested. By rendering economic activity intelligible through secular, law-bound narratives, Smith’s text created the intellectual conditions under which

economic history could be imagined, formalised, and redefined. The essay ultimately suggests that the significance of The Wealth of Nations lies not in its doctrinal authority, but in its epistemological role as a threshold text, which continues to structure the terrain upon which

regimes of economic knowledge, power, and historical truth struggle to define themselves.

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“Adam Smith was preaching in the economic world the same gospel of individual rights and individual liberty which in one form or another was the burden of eighteenth-century social thought” — Glenn R. Morrow, American historian and philosopher.

The emergence of economic history as a modern discipline cannot be understood without tracing the epistemic transformations that rendered ‘the economy’ a legitimate and narratable object of historical inquiry–—a shift inaugurated, though not completed, by Adam Smith’s

The Wealth of Nations (1776). Following French historian Michel Foucault (1926–1984), the term ‘episteme’ constitutes the historically contingent structure of knowledge that determines what can be thought, known, and said within a given era, while a ‘genealogy’ investigates the contested and layered emergence of these structures over time. Smith’s work, written at the later stage of the Enlightenment, performed a profound epistemic operation: it historicised

economic relations, naturalised the market as a quasi-organic force, and posited economic activity as a principal driver of historical change. By doing so, WoN enabled a ‘new historical consciousness’ that allowed economic behaviour to be systematically studied and narrated

across time, shaping the intellectual conditions under which economic history would eventually crystallise as a scholarly field.

However, WoN did not single-handedly invent economic history, but rather drew upon Enlightenment frameworks—conjectural history, liberal anthropology, and Newtonian science—that had already begun to naturalise social processes and political analysis. The immediate reception of the text, signified by Dugald Stewart (1753-1828) and Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) and coupled by later movements such as Marxist materialism and institutionalist critiques, both built upon and ruptured Smith’s initial formulations. By examining these ruptures and then tracing the genealogy of economic history after Smith, this essay argues that WoN shaped the modern discipline not simply through its content, but by helping to define the very possibility of economic history as a field governed by historically contingent regimes of truth. Further, while WoN laid foundational epistemic ground for economic history, the subject’s subsequent evolution, owing to post-Enlightenment

developments that reinterpreted and repurposed Smith’s ideas, reveals a genealogy of knowledge that both draws from and transcends Smith’s original intentions.

I. Smith and the Birth of Economic History

 

For Smith, the study of history constituted a “basic necessity for the science of man and society.” His historical method was neither doctrinaire nor linear: WoN constructs a narrative of Europe’s “entirely inverted” economic trajectory, in which commercial societies emerged not in a natural sequence but through disrupted, uneven developments. This framing privileged Western commercial progress while relegating subsistence and communal

economies to the “pre-modern” past, thereby inscribing capitalist development into a universal arc of human advancement. In doing so, Smith positioned capitalist development as the endpoint of history—a move that would shape the normative arc of modern economic historiography. He critiqued mercantile monopolies like the East India Company through structural analysis, rather than moral condemnation (“They acted as their situation naturally directed”), and openly conceded the fantasy of a perfectly free market, likening it to “establishing Oceana in Great Britain.” These passages prefigure what economist Robert Solow called the “necessary incompleteness” of economic models, born of their

entanglement, contingent to their social contexts. As American economic historian John Nef observed, economic history gains meaning only when it reveals “the essence of history” through “interrelations” of economic life, not isolated abstractions. To that end, Smith marks not the origin of economic history as a discipline, but the point of inflection that made its historicisation possible—rendering ‘the economy’ both intelligible and narratable within

successive configurations of knowledge and power. In this light, the significance of Smith lies not only in what he wrote, but in how historians have continued to read, reframe, and reconstruct his work within shifting power relations that create different regimes of truth.

II. The Genealogy of Economic History After Smith

The first major reinterpretation of Smith in the immediate reception of WoN came from Dugald Stewart, his student and early biographer, who enshrined Smith as the Enlightenment’s great theorist of human development. In his Account of the Life and Writings of Adam Smith (1793), Stewart reframed WoN as part of a conjectural history tradition—a method that deduced historical trajectories from abstract principles rather than empirical observation. He wrote that Smith’s work offered a “theoretical delineation of successive

stages of social improvement” rooted in the natural progress of opulence, positioning Smith as a historian of universal civilisational advancement. Stewart’s assertion that “unlimited freedom of trade” was “the chief aim of [Smith’s] work to recommend” condensed Smith’s historical inquiries into a doctrine of developmental liberalism, which would structure the unfolding field of economic historiography. Where Smith’s political economy was marked by methodological eclecticism and moral caution, Stewart imposed coherence: any deviation from this model, he suggested, was merely the result of “obscurities” or the “inconclusiveness of [Smith’s] reasonings.” As such, Stewart’s figure of Smith became a ‘regime of truth’—a “system of ordered procedures for the production, regulation, distribution, circulation and operation of statements” that transformed Smith into a strategically constructed discursive subject through which liberalism could speak with scientific authority and historical inevitability. Crucially, Stewart disconnected Smith’s economic reasoning from broader constitutional questions, declaring that political economy had no role in designing the “ideal constitution of political society” but should instead serve “to enlighten those who are destined for the functions of government.” As Milgate and Stimson observe, this move “stamped such opinions with the authority of Smith’s name” and was essential to establishing the disciplinary autonomy of economics. Stewart not only insulated economic knowledge from politics, but also rendered that knowledge applicable across historical contexts—historicising the market while depoliticising its study. The very initial idea of economic history as a story of liberal progression—rather than, say, one of contingency or domination—was built on Stewart’s reformulation. Stewart thus begins the genealogical entrenchment of Smith: a

process by which Smith becomes a symbolic authority of a historical science. The figure of Smith that stands at the centre of modern economic history is not Smith himself, but a statue erected by Stewart, chiseled into the shape most serviceable for the formation of a disciplinary episteme——one that elevated liberal political economy to the status of scientific truth, enabled the institutional separation of economics from politics, and naturalised capitalist development as the telos of historical progress.

English economist Thomas Malthus took this further by reconfiguring Smith’s original framing of economic progress, which was embedded in Enlightenment ideals (such as liberty, democracy, and improved governance), into a deterministic model driven by demographic pressure. Instead of following Smith’s metaphor of the economy as an “imaginary machine” that celebrates free markets, Malthus characterised economic development as bounded by historical inevitabilities: famine as a predictable outcome of unregulated growth; pauperism

as a structural byproduct of market society; and demographic crisis as a permanent limit to human improvement. Claiming that population operates as “the master-spring and moving principle of society,” Malthus restructured economic history into a biopolitical discourse; that is, economic regularities could no longer be read as moral or teleological, but as historically observable constraints on human welfare. This shift contributed to the development of economic history by introducing new historical objects like famine as a permanent limit to human improvement. It then refined them as recurring patterns within a law-governed system. As such, Malthus both extended Smith’s scientific aspirations and undermined his Enlightenment optimism, transforming the conditions under which WoN could function as historical knowledge and advancing a vision of economic history grounded not in liberty, but in limit.

If Malthus problematised Smith’s optimism by historicising scarcity, then Ricardo and Marx had re-entered the Smithian field from opposing poles, turning WoN into a contested site for competing historical logics. Ricardo, in particular, developed a rigid theory of distribution based on land, labour, and capital—radically abstracted from Smith’s historical and moral grounding. In Principles (1817), he famously noted: “To determine the laws which regulate this distribution is the principal problem in Political Economy,” signaling a departure from Smith’s institutional and ethical concerns. As Hont notes, Ricardo’s formalism “eviscerated Smith’s concern with jurisprudence, moral philosophy, and historical contingency” and replaced it with “an axiomatic model of economic behaviour.” The result was a vision of

economic history no longer embedded in evolving political institutions or civic life, but driven by universal laws. These laws included “the diminishing returns of land,” the tendency of

profits to fall as “rent increases on inferior soils”, and the idea that “labour, not institutions, determines value”, reconstructing WoN’s framework to produce a deductive model of value

and distribution applicable to the writing of economic history. Marx, by contrast, radicalised Smith’s labour theory into a historical materialist critique. While praising Smith for uncovering that “labour is the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities”, Marx condemned the classical episteme as mystified ideology, writing that “the bourgeois

economists are the scientific representatives of the ruling class”. For Marx, Smith’s political economy was not the science of wealth, but the consciousness of capital, in which economic categories appeared “as eternal laws of nature” rather than as historically contingent forms.

Thus Ricardo and Marx engaged WoN not simply as a historical text, but as a foundational site of epistemic authority which made possible “a field of scientificity” that “participates in a rationality, a given form of co-ordination.” Ricardo sought to distil Smith’s framework into a deductive science governed by formal economic laws, while Marx reinterpreted it as an ideological expression of capitalist society. Despite their opposing aims, both treated Smith’s text as a necessary reference point to construct broader narratives of economic development, where in this process their respective “economic analyses” never “escape[d] from the epistemological space” established by Smith. In this way, WoN became the intellectual anchor around which an emerging discipline of economic history could gradually take shape.

By the late 19th and early 20th century, the legacy of WoN began to fragment, primarily caused by the emergence of neoclassical economics. Seeking to establish itself as a deductive science separate from historical study, neoclassicists adopted a formalised vision of human behaviour rooted in marginal utility and rational optimisation, “generalis[ing] [Smith’s] utilitarian calculus within the model of isolated exchange.” This generalisation reified Smith’s metaphor of the “invisible hand” into a formal assumption, replacing Smith’s “socially constructed self” with “a rational calculator of exclusively private costs and

benefits.” This division between the mathematical and the historical approaches to the writing of economics intensified in the 1960s with the rise of cliometrics, or new economic history, which imported econometric methods into the study of the past. Led by Robert Fogel and Douglass North, new economic history reclaimed the past as a laboratory to test economic hypotheses through counterfactual models. Fogel’s study of American railroads demonstrated the power of “explicit counterfactual measurement,” showing that economic history could yield “social savings” estimates using formalised economic logic. This arguably reconfigures narrative-based inquiry into a statistical mode of knowledge using the

“econometrics apparatus”— an administrative tool embedded, as Foucault suggests, “in a  play of power” that determines what counts as legitimate historical explanation. North, meanwhile, recognised the limits of neoclassical theory and introduced institutional variables, such as property rights and transaction costs, as causal agents in long-run growth. Such reduction of history to testable models arguably risks flattening its complexity, with critics lamenting the loss of “the humane interest of old British political economy” in the wake of cliometric formalism and warning that quantification had come “at the perceived expense of [history’s] humanity.”

Yet, even these methodological innovations echoed Smith’s original gesture: the desire to make economic processes visible, narratable, and governed by intelligible rules. While neoclassical and cliometric approaches may have abandoned Smith’s moral philosophy and

institutional sensitivity— arguably driven by a rise of positivism and a growing scepticism of ‘grand narratives’ since early 20th century— they continued, however selectively, to work within the epistemic framework WoN made possible. Cliometrics “replaces the economic approach to history” but not its narrative aspirations; it “provides answers to historical

questions” using economic tools, preserving a genealogical link to Smith’s historicising impulse in WoN— “Commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order and good

government…[They were] the most important of all their effects.” Neoclassicists, for their part, arguably appropriated Smith, refashioning the pluralism of WoN into a coherent framework that could legitimise economics as a predictive, “pure” science like physics. According to the Foucauldian thesis, this reflects how “history has been abused” through “the doctrine of continuity,” turning contingent social realities into economic laws. On one hand, this divergence in the discipline appears to reveal the limits of WoN in directly shaping modern economic history. Yet on the other hand, it affirms WoN’s foundational role: by making economic activity intelligible as a historical object governed by knowable relations,

WoN created the very intellectual space within which such deviations could occur. Although the narrative traditions of economic history appeared marginalised by neoclassicists and

cliometricians who sought to divide the field into distinct realms of ‘economics’ and ‘history’, it is precisely this epistemic deepening—rooted in the radical reinterpretation of Smith——that has sustained the evolution of historical-economic discourse. This was evident after the 2008 GFC, when the failure of economic models to foresee systemic breakdown in

subprime mortgages and housing markets prompted a return to narrative economic history. Adam Tooze portrays the crisis in Crashed as “a dramatic caesura of global significance” that exposed the limitations of prevailing economic paradigms, which then marked a

“narrative turn” in economics, where storytelling regained prominence in explaining complex economic phenomena through reintegrating contingency, moral consequence, and institutional complexity. It is thus not WoN’s historical imagination that survives into neoclassical and

new economic history, but the structural possibility it introduced: Smith’s description of the economy as a lawful and self-contained object of historical knowledge became a framework through which power and knowledge of economic activity could be quantified and contested by neoclassicists and cliometricians, enabling shifts in methodology to produce economic history.

III. Conclusion

Just as in The Birth of the Clinic, in which Foucault shows that language is no longer a transparent medium containing meaning but a site of structural discontinuity, so too in economic history has attention turned to the “hidden, unrepresented concept[s],”occurring through the conceptual apparatus arguably inaugurated by WoN. Smith’s articulation of

economic behaviour as law-like, predictable, and subject to empirical observation positions

‘the economy’ as something no longer “visible at the surface level of exchange”, but located within what Foucault might call the “dark, concave, inner side of representation.” This ‘representation’ was then challenged by Malthus’s biologisation of scarcity, formalised by Ricardo’s theory of distribution, and historicised by Marx, reconstituting the very terms of

economic ‘knowledge’ that shifted incessantly from moral philosophy to positivist science to materialist critique. Economic history ceased to be a descriptive taxonomy of economic

phenomena and became, instead, an analytic of hidden causes—tendencies, incentives,

instincts—comprehensible only through specialised discourse. The epistemic focus turns, then, to a realm beyond visibility “in a sort of behind-the-scenes world,”leading to the dissolution of any possibility of “observing straightforward representation.” Malthus’s realisation that overpopulation brings with it the threat of death through famine and mortality, for example, exemplifies a “human-centric” and “death-bound” consciousness that becomes what Foucault calls ‘the analytic of finitude,’ where history functions as a horizon of constraint. In this sense, what WoN inaugurates is not a fixed doctrine of economic truth, but a shifting conceptual architecture within which economic life becomes ‘knowable’ through hidden regularities, calculable risks, and historical constraints—an epistemic terrain that

continues to shape the boundaries of economic history long after Smith’s original formulations have been challenged or abandoned.

The historicity of WoN is therefore not only thematic but structural; its nature not only chronological but epistemological. In other words, its legacy in economic history lies not just in the continuation of its ideas, but the fact that it made those ideas possible as historical objects—commerce, labour, and ‘the economy’—that could be contested and reformulated within shifting regimes of truth. By positioning economic activity within a secular narrative of progress, yet haunted by disorder, inequality, and crisis, Smith’s text set the stage for a

discourse in which economic history becomes— just like “man” and all objects of “recent

invention” in history—a historically contingent construct which, with the next epistemic shift, is liable to be “erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.” In other words, WoN has shaped the space of possibility for economic history, with ‘mortal’ truths, with ‘subjective’ truths, with ‘discursive’ truths, that continuously define what economic knowledge can be. The modern discipline of economic history, shaped by this discourse, thus belongs to a never-ending dialectic: it continually returns to WoN not because it contains eternal truths, but because it stands at the threshold of modern thought, the point where history, knowledge, and power begin to intersect in new and distinctly modern ways.

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Author: Kevin Chen