https://earlymoderneurope.hist.sites.carleton.edu/files/original/89334af2781851dc243d7855b7e3fcbd.jpeg 3177eb4af6b8537d5ea3d671f745512d Still Image A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Adam Smith Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Cassidy Bins Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1776 Description An account of the resource Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, was an important milestone in the development of capitalism in early modern Europe. His publication advocated for free trade, open markets, and competition, which he argued were essential for a country’s economy to flourish (Wiesner-Hanks, 203). Beginning in the seventeenth century, England adopted “new crops and crop rotation schedules, altered patterns of landownership, selective breeding of stock and plants, and increases in the amount of land under cultivation” (Wiesner-Hanks, 456). As a result, its agricultural yield was higher and farming more efficient. Similar efficiency was also present in the Netherlands, where urbanization, as well as technological and agricultural changes, were ramping up (Wiesner-Hanks, 457). Economic efficiency did not increase in every country, but England and the Netherlands were leaders in increased output and utilization of resources. England’s expanding economy also reflected Adam Smith’s idea of specialization, in which certain groups of society made certain products or provided certain services for sale (Urban Achievement). Thus, Smith’s views represent a move away from subsistence farming to an increasingly specialized and interdependent economy. Capitalist ideas took root in America as well as in England. The sugar trade, in which England took part, ferried slaves across the Atlantic as a source of cheap labor; landowners in the New World exploited slave labor and the sugar plantations as demand for sugar rose in Europe, particularly in England (Moore). As trade became increasingly globalized, so did Smith’s free-market ideas. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Photo: Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. University of Edinburgh. Jason W. Moore, “Sugar and the Expansion of the Early Modern World-Economy,” Review, Research Foundation of State University of New York, 2000. Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe, ed. Patrick O’Brien. Cambridge University Press, 2001. Wiesner-Hanks, Merry. Early Modern Europe: 1450-1789. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Free re-use (CC BY 3.0).