Biography | Adam Smith — The High Street House Where He Finished The Wealth of Nations

People point at a London imprint and forget where the pages were written.

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was composed in his mother's house on this Kirkcaldy High Street.

After the continental tour with the Duke of Buccleuch ended in 1766, Smith came home to Margaret Douglas and his cousin Janet Douglas.

From 1767 he settled here to turn two decades of notes into a book.

David Hume, writing from Edinburgh, complained that the work was cutting Smith off from human society.

In the spring of 1773 Smith took the manuscript to London.

William Strahan and Thomas Cadell issued the two quarto volumes on 9 March 1776.

The first edition sold out within six months.

The house that held the desk did not survive the next century.

The 1953 plaque at 220 High Street states that the home of his mother stood on this site, that he lived here from 1767 to 1776 and completed the book, and that the house was removed in 1834.

The present Category B tenement went up on the same frontage after that demolition.

What the visitor reads is a bronze sentence on a later wall.

What happened here was a long, indoor labour: division of labour, the market as a system of prices, the argument against exclusive companies, the chapters on colonies written while America was sliding toward a break.

John Rae's 1895 life records a payment of £500 from Strahan for the first edition, with later editions on half profits.

Five editions appeared in his lifetime.

The pin is not London's Strand, where the sheets were sold.

It is the demolished Fife house in which the inquiry was finished.

Photo: James Eaton-Lee, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait etching after James Tassie's 1787 medallion, public domain.