===================== HES POSTING ==================== Short answer -- What was the impact of Wealth of Nations on Jefferson and Paine? Very little. Jefferson was a physiocrat. The economic theories that explicitly informed his work were mostly French, not British or Scottish. Paine's most famous pamphlet, Common Sense, was written in the winter of 1775-76, so Smith's work wouldn't have been out yet. Paine's arguments most likely stemmed from his experiences in the anti-monarchist movements within Britain before his migration to America earlier in the '70s. I don't know if it influenced Paine's later work (late 1790s), but I suspect Wealth was never a major influence on either of them if it was an influence at all. There is a connection, however, that is fascinating. Many young Americans went to Scotland for their education -- particularly if they intended to be a doctor or a pharmacist. The coffee houses were reproduced when they came back home -- Dr. Alexander Hamilton's (not THAT Alexander Hamilton) Annapolis coffeehouse being the most explicit imitation. The discussions in the Annapolis newspaper that led me to the impact of the Tobacco Inspection Act of 1747 (JEH article back in 1980) represented an EXPLICIT connection between the Scottish Enlightenment of the mid-1700s and the formation of policy WITHIN America BEFORE the Revolution. But the information went in both directions -- if ideas spread from the Scottish Enlightenment (where Smith reigned as a young professor) to the British American colonies, the EXPERIENCES and INNOVATIONS of the colonial governments and economic practices were also brought back as information to Scotland. Benjamin Franklin's cabals were an excellent breeding ground for this sort of mutual exchange and political innovation. So I would say that many of Smith's nascent theories DID have a great influence on the formation of economic policies within the several American governments during their period of effective independence in the early-mid 1700s, and this is where the influence came out during the revolution, the confederation, the writing and ratification of the Constitution, and the first national policies. There was, if I could say, co-determination here. But if you are familiar with the pamphlets and newspapers and letters of American policymakers (and pundits) through the 1700s, it's obvious that Smith's basic CONCEPT -- that the wealth of nations lies in its trade rather than its capital -- was already well-accepted on this side of the Atlantic. The only place where a strong mercantilist approach was ever popular was New York. Ironically, in the 1760s and into the 1790s a heavy-handed mercantilist theory was re-introduced by educated and/or wealthy British immigrants BACK into the American commonwealths. But frankly, even the Hamilton-Jefferson debates that are taken so seriously by scholars in the present were not very significant at the time. There are disputes that played well in the press -- this was not one of them. [My own conclusion is that each of the commonwealths had developed its own set of working economic policies and accepted views -- there were four or five policy leaders, and the rest were followers -- but the reason for the absence of a strong national developmental policy once the debt was paid off was not the absence of developmental theories in the commonwealths, but rather the absence of ANY type of AGREEMENT among them. And it was not a dichotomous choice. There were different traditions, different expectations, different assumptions, and different realities -- both WITHIN regions such as New England (Mass vs. RI) and BETWEEN regions (NE vs. middle colonies in general). The only national developmental policy that EVERYONE seemed in agreement on was warfare with the nations possessing land between the Appalachians and the Mississippi so as to expand the effective boundaries of European-occupied farmland and hence the opportunities of an intensely agricultural economy. Mary Schweitzer, Dept.of History, Villanova University (on medical leave 1995-?? with Ramsay's Disease, aka chronic fatigue syndrome.) <[log in to unmask]> ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]