The Wealth of Nations
First edition of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is published
View full image ↗ How was this image made?
The creative brief sent to the image model. These are instructions, not a record of what actually happened.
Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗A book now mined for famous quotations reached its first readers without a preface or an index — nearly 1,100 quarto pages, priced at £1 16s.
9 March 1776: two volumes from Strahan and Cadell
The first edition of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published in London on 9 March 1776 by W. Strahan and T. Cadell. It came as two quarto volumes: Books I–III filling 510 pages, Books IV–V running longer at 587.
The title page advertised Smith not as an economist but as an LL.D., fellow of the Royal Society, and former professor of moral philosophy at Glasgow. The date comes from Edwin Cannan's bibliographic introduction and is widely accepted, though the title page itself prints only the year.
No preface, no index
Unlike later editions, the first had neither preface nor index; its complete table of contents sat at the beginning of volume one. An index was added only in Smith's substantially revised third edition.
The print run is uncertain: modern bibliographic descriptions estimate either 500 or 750 copies. Four further editions appeared in Smith's lifetime, in 1778, 1784, 1786 and 1789.
What actually changed that day
The dated change was bibliographic: a finished five-book system of political economy entered public circulation after roughly a decade of composition. No identifiable overnight shift in British economic policy followed.
One detail of timing is worth holding onto: Smith published his analysis of colonial policy and the 'American disturbances' less than four months before the Declaration of Independence.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 4 sources 3 audit passes
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
What the sources leave uncertain
- The exact first-edition print run is uncertain. Modern bibliographic descriptions commonly estimate either 500 or 750 copies, so no single figure is treated here as verified.
- The 9 March date is reported by Edwin Cannan's bibliographic introduction and is widely accepted, although the original title page itself prints only the year 1776.