Linen manufacturing was an essentially rural, domestic industry, relying on cotters who could be induced to learn the spinning and weaving trades, and on entrepreneurs to supply them with raw materials and a market for their goods. The lairds of Fife were to play a crucial part in developing the industry in their part of the country in the early years of the century. Some, like the Oswalds of Dunnikier, the Adams of Maybole and the St Clairs of Dysart, were Edinburgh-based families who had made their money from the professions or the army and found in Fife a promising and reasonably priced land-market in which to invest. By the 1730s, these local lairds had turned themselves into an effective entrepreneurial class. They imported flax from Holland, Riga and St Petersburg and they encouraged their tenants to take up spinning and weaving, sometimes equipping them with wheels and looms at their own expense. They launched a determined campaign to produce cloth for the highly competitive export market by encouraging the recruitment of skilled flax workers and weavers from abroad and by lobbying the Board of Trustees for more and better stamp-masters to guarantee the quality of local cloth. By the 1740s they were exporting checks and tickings and napkins to England and the colonies. The Oswalds, whose estates abutted the town, were conspicuous in this enterprise, feuing (a Scottish form of leasing) most of their lands in the nearby village of Dunnikier to tradesmen engaged in the linen, woollen and nail-making businesses. In the neighbouring burgh of Dysart, General St Clair had ensured that its ‘active and diligent people’ were making linen goods for the home and English markets.8 Kirkcaldy became the focal point of this activity both as a centre of production and as a market. In 1739 the town council, doubtless under pressure from local lairds, set up an annual market for linen cloth on the first Wednesday of July to encourage the local linen trade.9 In 1733, it was producing 177,740 yards of stamped linen per year for England and the home market; by 1743 production had nearly doubled, and by the time of Smith’s death in 1790, output was running at about 900,000 yards, worth around £45,000. This acted as a stimulus to further economic activity in the town. Stocking manufacturing began in 1773, cotton manufacturing in the 1780s and shipbuilding in 1788.10 By then the population of the town was growing fast and its housing stock was increasing rapidly. It was, in short, turning into a small but prosperous town with an expanding system of commerce, ready for the much larger transformations which would follow during the Industrial Revolution. We need to think of Smith, then, growing up in a town and a region of Scotland that was undergoing a profound revolution as a result of the Union and the political and economic changes that were transforming contemporary Europe. And we need to think of his family as part of the landed and professional elite that was intent on regenerating, or, as contemporaries liked to put it, ‘improving’ their estates and the local economy.
As a boy, Smith’s life was securely rooted in the social, economic and political world of Kirkcaldy and south Fife. Several of his father’s family worked for the customs. His half-brother Hugh worked in the customs house at Kirkcaldy. His cousin Hercules Smith, one of those named as his guardian in his father’s will, was Collector of Customs at Kirkcaldy before being promoted to Inspector General of the Outports in Scotland in 1740 with the task of managing the collecting of customs revenues at all the smaller Scottish ports. Another cousin, also called Adam Smith, who had been his father’s clerk, was to become Comptroller and later Collector of Customs at Kirkcaldy. His mother’s family was rather more patrician. The Douglases of Strathendry had estates on the outskirts of the town, in easy reach of Margaret Smith’s two sisters who had married into the Fife gentry. The family was and remained in contact with the formidable, wealthy and intelligent General St Clair, one of David Hume’s friends and patrons, who controlled the burgh of Dysart and much of the politics of south Fife, and with the Fergusons of Raith, whose pretty and improved estate butted onto the burgh. They were close neighbours of one of the interesting newer families, the Adams of Maybole, who had moved into the region early in the century. William Adam had made his fortune as a fashionable architect with a lucrative practice, an activity he coupled with the equally lucrative posts of Clerk and Storekeeper of the King’s Works in Scotland, and Mason to the Board of Ordnance in Scotland. He built Gladden House in Kirkcaldy in 1711 and began acquiring large estates in Kincardineshire in the 1730s. His two sons, Robert and John, were not only to become two of Scotland’s greatest architects but were to remain Smith’s lifelong friends.
But by far the most important of the local landed families, for the burgh and for Smith himself, were the Oswalds of Dunnikier. Like William Adam, Captain James Oswald was new to district. He bought Dunnikier in 1703, built himself the house he needed to acquire burgess rights and to hold office in the town, and had himself elected Provost in 1717. He was now the largest landed proprietor in the town and its most powerful local politician. Given the family’s wealth, power and interest in economic improvement, it seems certain that Oswald and his family played a significant part in engineering the town’s economic recovery. He was a close friend of Smith’s father and was named Adam Smith’s tutor, or legal guardian in his father’s will. Oswald’s son, another James Oswald, was eight years older than Smith and became one of his closest friends. This James Oswald was a remarkable man. Like Smith, he lost his father as a child and like him was bought up by a formidable mother who, according to her grandson, ‘cultivated James’ talents with the most assiduous care and the best education which Scotland could then afford’.11 He became an improving landlord and a much-admired MP for the Fife Burghs and the county from 1741–68. In fact, he was to develop as the sort of modern politician Smith most admired – an intelligent, literate and independently minded man, who steered clear of party politics and applied himself to studying the business of government, impressing David Hume by his understanding of naval finance. As he once put it, ‘the surest way of becoming remarkable here [in the House of Commons] is certainly application to business, for whoever understands it must make a figure’.12 Oswald kept in close contact with Scottish intellectual life and remained another of Smith’s lifelong friends. As his son wrote:
It is well known that an uninterrupted friendship and intercourse existed betwixt them for the greater part of their lives. In his early days [the author] remembers well to have heard Dr. Smith dilate, with generous and enthusiastic pleasure, on the qualities and merits of Mr. Oswald; candidly avowing, at the same time, how much information he had derived, on many points, from the enlarged views and profound knowledge of that accomplished statesman. In their frequent discussions on the science of political economy, Mr. Oswald brought his practical knowledge and experience in aid of the Doctor’s theoretical deductions, and afforded him much valuable assistance in the laborious investigations in which he was so long engaged.13
Indeed, Dugald Stewart thought that Oswald had played a decisive part in persuading Smith to develop his interests in political economy.14
In the Wealth of Nations, Smith was to pay close attention to the role of small towns in shaping the commerce and culture of the regions of a commercial state. A small town was ‘a continual fair or market’ in which ordinary men and women were able to learn the meaning of fair prices and wages and would in time begin to appreciate more general truths about the meaning of liberty and order.15 But Smith also knew how important prudent, intelligent and independent country gentlemen were in generating economic improvement in the countryside. As a class they were least likely to be corrupted by great wealth or poverty, or by ‘the wretched spirit of monopoly’ which Smith regarded as the cancer that threatened the economic, political and moral health of most modern states.16 It is hard to read Smith’s thinking about the progress of society in a commercial state without thinking of Kirkcaldy, Fife and the activities of energetic and ambitious incomers like the Oswalds, the St Clairs and the Adams; and although he never explicitly drew on the experience of Fife to ‘illustrate’ his theory of progress, it was, nonetheless, remarkably apposite.
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nbsp; Smith was by all accounts a sickly child, and it may be that the slight confusion about his birth day arises from his having been baptized on the day of his birth – a common enough practice in the case of infants not expected to survive. He grew up in his mother’s house, which is said to have been in Rose Street at the fashionable west end of the High Street, not far from the Adams at Gladney House, the Oswalds at Dunnikier and only seven miles or so from his maternal uncle’s house at Strathendry. Indeed it was at Strathendry that Smith first comes to life biographically with a curiously suggestive contemporary story that he was snatched by a tinker woman and rescued by his uncle; if true it must surely have helped to lay the foundations of the extraordinarily close relationship which this sickly only child enjoyed with his widowed mother. Unlike his half-brother Hugh, who was sent to board at school in Perth, Adam was sent to the local burgh school in Hill Street, a short walk from his mother’s house which would have taken him through the local market. To be sure it was an essentially medieval market, hedged around by guild restrictions and designed to protect local traders from unwelcome competition from outsiders. Nevertheless, Smith would have grown used to watching what he famously called the ‘higgling and bargaining of the market’ that was to seem to him as natural a form of social intercourse as ordinary conversation and one of the forms of social exchange on which sociability and society depended.17
Smith was a pupil at the burgh school from 1731 or 1732 until 1737 at a remarkable moment in its history. The school had been transformed in 1724 as the result of the appointment of a new master, David Miller. Miller was the highly successful master of the burgh school at Cupar and he had at first been reluctant to move.18 What made him change his mind is not clear, though the formidable Lady Oswald must surely have had something to do with it; after all, she had her son James to educate and a family position in the burgh to keep up. Perhaps she put pressure on the town council to increase his salary, more probably she offered to pay Miller a tutor’s fee to give her son private classes. Be that as it may, Miller threw himself into the business of reorganizing the school with considerable energy. The town council agreed to build a new schoolhouse, and to increase fees to 2s. 6d. per quarter, although Miller was told ‘to consider the necessity of such as cannot pay the half crown’.19 It also agreed to Miller’s proposals for a new curriculum. The school was to provide a classical education based on translation and exposition so as to ‘exercise [the pupils’] judgements, to teach them by degrees to spell rightly, to write good write [handwriting], good sense and good language’.20 Miller was a good classicist and Ian Ross is surely right to suggest that Smith left school in 1737 well versed in the standard authors; certainly he knew enough Latin and Greek to be exempted from the first year of Glasgow University’s curriculum, which was largely devoted to remedial classical education. His copies of two of the history textbooks Miller used have survived. The first, Trogus’ De Historiis Philippicis, was a well-known introduction to the history of the ancient world, much used as a source of exemplary stories about prudent military and political leadership. The second, Eutropius’ Breviarum Historiae Romanae, which is inscribed ‘Adam Smith his book May 4th 1733’ in that large, slow, neat hand which would never change, was the work of a senator who had lived in the age of the Emperor Julian. The story of the rise and progress of the Roman Empire was told as a story of war and conquest, which demonstrated the dignity of war and the disgrace of making peace without honour. It was a singularly appropriate text for boys living in a militaristic age.21
However, the most striking glimpse into the character of Miller’s teaching is to be found in a contemporary account of his use of theatre as a vehicle of civic education. This was a relatively common humanist technique in the more avant-garde schools of central Scotland. The High School of Dalkeith staged Julius Caesar and a comedy of Aesop in 1734 and, even more adventurously, performed Allan Ramsay’s charming Scots pastoral, The Gentle Shepherd. Perth Grammar School performed Joseph Addison’s Cato at much the same time. Miller wrote and staged his own play in 1734 while Smith was still a pupil; it was called ‘The Royal Command for Advice: or the regular education of boys the foundation of all other national improvements’. It seems to have been about the business of a council of twelve senators who debate petitions from a tradesman, a farmer, a country gentleman, a nobleman, two schoolmasters and, last of all, ‘a gentleman who complimented and congratulated the council on their noble design and worthy performance’.22 It was clearly a play which starred middle-ranking officials rather than kings and grandees and dealt with the routines of government rather than high politics. Interestingly the boys seem to have been expected to play the parts of petitioners as well as senators. If so, it was an admirable device for giving the sons of enterprising Whig gentlemen a feeling for ordinary public life. No wonder the press reported that the performance ‘was said to have given high satisfaction to the audience’.
Miller’s sophisticated, politically correct curriculum strongly suggests that his teaching had a solid ethical core; the texts used in similar avant-garde classical schools in Scotland suggest that it was probably he who introduced Smith to the classical moralists and their modern admirers. A standard classical diet of this sort would have included Epictetus’ Enchiridion and Cicero’s De Officiis, and quite probably Addison and Steele’s Spectator essays.23 Smith’s signed but undated copy of a 1670 edition of the Enchiridion bound with the Tabula of Cebes is generally assumed to have been bought for use at university, but it could equally well have been acquired a year or two earlier for use at Kirkcaldy.24 And even if Miller did not make use of the Spectator in class, we may be sure that it would have been read at home in the edition Smith’s father had once possessed.25 Its charming, thought-provoking moral fables and ethical and aesthetic reflections were part of the staple literary diet of the middling ranks’ homes. These texts provided a Stoic or, in the case of Cicero and Addison, a quasi-Stoic view of the world, inviting young people to think about the duties they owed themselves, their fellow-citizens and the deity. They taught them how to square their private interests with those of the public. They taught them how to understand and enjoy the peace of mind and sense of self-respect that comes from knowing that one is able to live an active social life at ease with one’s self and with others. Above all, they taught young people the value of philosophy to public life and of public life to philosophy. Ethically and sociologically these were matters which were to interest Smith for the rest of his life. If Miller really did introduce him to these classics, he must go down as a seminal influence on his intellectual development.
These authors provided Smith with a way of looking at the moral world and a language for discussing the problems of learning to live within it. The Enchiridion had long been regarded as a valuable ethical primer for intelligent and well-born schoolboys. It was one of the foundation texts of Stoic ethics. Epictetus had been a slave and had written for those who feared that they were becoming slaves to their passions and victims of circumstances over which they had no control – a situation with which many schoolboys could easily sympathize. He had taught generations of schoolboys to think of liberty as a matter of learning the arts of self-command, by which he meant learning to distinguish between those aspects of life we could and could not control. ‘Not up to us are body, property, reputation, office and, in a word, whatever is not in our own action,’ Epictetus observed, commenting that these were indifferentia, things to be endured and despised. On the other hand, passions, opinions, judgements ‘and, in a word, whatever is in our own action’ were things we could control, sources of moral energy which could be regulated and mastered with the help of brainpower and reason. Indeed it was only when reason had established control over the passions that we could hope to live rationally as nature and the deity intended.26 But learning the art of self-command was far from easy. It meant cultivating a philosophical detachment from the world and its transient attachments, disappointments and resentments. It meant learning
to look beyond the indifferentia to the evidence that the moral and natural worlds provided of order and design. Above all, it meant cultivating a love of its benevolent Creator. Only then would the budding Stoic begin to feel at one with nature and experience that state of apathaeia that could only be enjoyed when mind and reason had established their dominion over the body and the passions. Under these circumstances, he would be free. As Epictetus put it, ‘Anytus and Meletus can kill me, but they cannot harm me.’27 Epictetus had shown how an anxious, virtuous-minded young man could learn ‘to act well that part that is assigned to you’ in a play that had been written and was being directed by others. But learning to act well meant learning to become a spectator of the works of the great author of nature,
and not only [to be] a spectator, but an interpreter of them. It is therefore shameful that man should begin and end where irrational creatures do. He ought rather to begin here, but to end where nature itself had fixed our end; and that is in contemplation and understanding and a way of life in harmony with nature. Take care then, not to die without ever being spectators of these things.28
In learning to become a spectator, the Stoic would earn his liberty.
This image of the moral agent faced with the problem of learning how to distance himself from the uncertainties and resentments of daily life, learning to cultivate the moral and intellectual skills he needed to live rationally, at ease with himself and the world, was to attract Smith profoundly. Such men were not only happy and capable of virtue; they were also likely to be more sociable and efficient. To be sure, he found Epictetus’ system unduly severe and thought that he had placed too much faith in the ethical value of contemplation, but he put that down to the fact that Epictetus had been brought up in a semi-barbarous slave society. Smith admired and exploited the spirit of Epictetus’ ethics for sociological as well as ethical purposes. He was to argue that it was on our ability to master our disappointments and resentments that our capacity for sociability ultimately depended. And he believed that being able to feel that ‘how untoward soever things might be without, all was calm and peace and concord within’ was the mark of the truly sociable agent.29
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