Smith must have learned from a very early age that ethical systems have to be adapted to the needs of different peoples and places. He would almost certainly have been introduced to Cicero’s ethics at much the same time as Epictetus’, and would have learned how Cicero had adapted the ethics of the Greek slave for the needs of the free citizens of the Roman Republic. Cicero did not share Epictetus’ contempt for the world or his belief that the only path to virtue lay in contemplation. He was interested in the ethical value of learning to perform the offices of ordinary life skilfully, honestly and with an eye on the public good. Indeed, Smith was to regard the cultivation of these ‘imperfect, but attainable virtues’ as the core of Cicero’s thinking, and the useful heart of ‘the practical morality of the Stoics’.30
Reading the Spectator essays would have shown Smith how the teaching of the ancients could be adapted for use by moderns living in a free commercial society, a form of civilization completely unknown to antiquity. Addison’s title – The Spectator – was deliberately borrowed from Epictetus and drew attention to the central ethical skill Addison wanted his readers to cultivate: the ability Robert Burns was to characterize so brilliantly as seeing ourselves as others see us. Like Cicero, Addison wrote for a free citizenry – in this case, the citizenry of a great commercial city, London. Indeed, a large part of his enduring appeal lay in the fact that his essays provided young men and women from the provinces with their first view of the mightiest city in the kingdom, a city which dazzled by virtue of its wealth, power and glamour. His essays allowed his readers to glimpse life as it was lived in the city and to share vicariously in the ethical hopes and fears of its citizens. His London was a commercial city in the widest sense of the term, a theatre of life, as some writers put it, in which men and women were constantly engaged in the exchange of goods, services and sentiments. But it was also a world that was fragmented by party-political divisions, by religious sectarianism, by rank, profession, trade, age and gender (it was as important to Addison as it would be to Smith that modern ethics should pay attention to the needs of women as well as men). It was a world ruled by the vagaries of opinion and fashion, a world in which people looked in vain for fixed and settled standards of taste, morality, politics and religion. As one of the Spectator’s ever-popular fictional heroes, Sir Roger de Coverley, put it, it was a world in which a man would find himself ‘hopping instead of walking’, and would never be in ‘his entire and proper motion’.31
This world of politics, religion, business and fashion was Addison’s world of indifferentia, a world over which ordinary citizens had little control, a world from which they would have to distance themselves if they were ever to aspire to a life of virtue and peace of mind, a world which was in need of moral reform. Like Cicero, Addison had little time for the ‘severer’ Stoics and thought that those who tried to cultivate the more austere Epictetan virtues would end up as ridiculous social misfits. He wanted to show that life in the modern city could foster virtue as well as corruption, if only citizens would pay attention to the way in which they performed the offices of everyday life and were willing to exchange the company of cronies for the friendship of strangers who belonged to different walks of life. In the last resort it was simply a matter of cultivating good manners and politeness, of learning to be a spectator as well as an actor in the theatre of the world. The company of strangers would teach one to moderate one’s own prejudices and would give one more ‘extensive’ views of the world. It would encourage tolerance, taste, judgement and a respect for that sense of propriety that played such an important part in securing the decencies and pleasures of ordinary life. It was a form of sociable Stoicism that would release the sort of apathaeia which, the polite Addisonian citizen thought, would encourage religious and political moderation and active Christian citizenship.
These ancient and modern classics provided Smith with a simple but sophisticated way of looking at the social world. They gave him a way of viewing human beings as agents whose lives and happiness depend on their ability to cultivate the moral and intellectual skills they need to live sociably, at ease with themselves, with others and with the world. They encouraged him to think of self-command as the essential skill on which sociability, success and personal happiness depends. Addison’s charming and deceptively simple moral essays had a special value. They gave Smith his first glimpse of the modern commercial city as a complex pluralistic entity, which had the power to improve as well as to corrupt human nature. They showed the importance of conversation as the social skill on which the exchange of sentiments and the creation of social and moral norms depended, and presented it as a skill that could be ‘improved’ and cultivated in the name of fostering good manners and ‘politeness’. They provided him with the first rudiments of a language of sociability which suggested that in fostering the cause of self-improvement the modern citizen would, more or less unintentionally, be fostering the good of society at large. All of this he was to glimpse from the narrow but distinctive perspective of Kirkcaldy, a town which, in its modest way, was on the road to improvement. As a Glasgow student Smith was to see how these Stoic and quasi-Stoic ethics, these insights into society, sociability and public life, could be developed philosophically and applied to the analysis of the political systems of the ancient and modern world. Eventually he was to develop an analysis of his own on very different principles.
2
Glasgow, Glasgow University and Francis Hutcheson’s Enlightenment
Smith left school in the summer of 1737 and matriculated at Glasgow University in October. He was fourteen. He spent the next nine years at university, as a Glasgow student from 1737 to 1740 and as a Snell exhibitioner at Balliol College, Oxford from 1740 to 1746. His student life at Glasgow and Oxford is almost completely undocumented, nevertheless it is clear that these were crucial years in his intellectual development. By the time he returned to Scotland in 1746, fed up with Oxford, in search of a job and ready for the sophisticated intellectual life of Edinburgh, his own philosophy would be well enough developed to justify invitations to deliver public lectures on rhetoric and on jurisprudence that were to establish his intellectual credentials and to play an important part in launching his career.
The groundwork for Smith’s philosophical career could not have been laid down in two more different universities. In the 1720s and 30s Glasgow became one of the most sophisticated and interesting of the tiny Protestant universities of northern Europe. Oxford was notorious – at least in the Whig Presbyterian circles to which Smith belonged – for being an intellectually stagnant, High Church and high Tory institution. Glasgow could offer Smith a distinctive philosophy curriculum and the teaching of two of the most charismatic and intellectually creative university professors in northern Europe – Robert Simson, Professor of Mathematics, and Francis Hutcheson, Professor of Moral Philosophy. Hutcheson introduced Smith to the moral philosophy of the ancient and modern world and to the problems involved in placing the study of human behaviour on what contemporaries liked to describe as ‘experimental’ foundations. Simson taught him to appreciate the importance of mathematics in placing moral philosophy on scientific foundations. Neither Oxford nor Balliol could hope to extend, question or supplant the teaching Smith had received at Glasgow. But it did have the Snell exhibitions, which were reserved for former Glasgow students and allowed the exhibitioners to spend up to eleven years in private study in the hope that they would enter the ministry of the Episcopal Church in Scotland. Whether Smith ever seriously intended to take that latter path is not known, though the formal requirement that Snell exhibitioners should do so had fallen into disuse by his time. But what the Snell exhibitions could and clearly did offer was unlimited time for private study, which Smith appears to have used to distance himself from the highly structured philosophical education he had received at Glasgow. His six years at Oxford gave him a unique opportunity to broaden his education and to lay the foundations of the formidable erudition which, like his love of sys
tem, was to become a distinctive characteristic of his philosophy. What is more, it is probable that it was at Oxford that he first encountered the philosophy of David Hume. The young philosopher, then, who made his first appearance in Edinburgh in 1748 as a lecturer on rhetoric and jurisprudence, was one whose development had been shaped in the two highly distinctive worlds of Glasgow and Oxford, and, above all, by his encounters with his two great mentors, Hutcheson and Hume.
Glasgow must have seemed a striking contrast to Kirkcaldy. It was a boom town that had been transformed in the course of the previous century and was to undergo an even more spectacular transformation in the 1750s and 60s during Smith’s years as a professor. Its population was growing rapidly, its overseas trade expanding to the point that it now rivalled that of Bristol and Liverpool, and its manufacturing, which had previously been restricted to commodities for local consumption, now featured flourishing sugar refineries, rum (or ‘Glasgow brandy’) distilleries, and linens, plaids, soap, rope, snuff and refined tobacco for export. For Daniel Defoe writing in 1724–5, this evidence of progress was epitomized in the physical appearance of a city that had been almost completely rebuilt in the wake of two disastrous fires in 1652 and 1677.
Glasgow is indeed, a very fine City: the four principal Streets are the fairest for Breadth, and the finest built that I have ever seen in one City together. The Houses are all of Stone, and generally equal and uniform in Height, as well as in Front; the lower story generally stands on vast Square Dorick Columns, not round Pillars, and Arches between give Passage into the Shops, adding to the Strength as well as Beauty of the Building; in a Word, ’tis the cleanest and beautifullest, and best built City in Britain, London excepted.1
Characteristically, Defoe was not much interested in Glasgow’s history; as always what interested him was what was new, modern and favourable to the progress of trade, commerce and civility. But, like Kirkcaldy, modern Glasgow was heavily indebted to its medieval past.2 A royal charter of around 1175 had placed city government in the hands of the archbishop and an oligarchic town council, and although the abolition of episcopacy in 1690 had freed the council from episcopal control and given it the right to elect the Provost and bailies who governed the city, that had merely ensured that henceforth city government would be controlled by the Crown and local magnates. It was to turn Glasgow into a city with a reputation for unquestioning loyalty to the 1688 Revolution, the Hanoverian succession and the Act of Union. And it made it possible for the Earl of Islay, the future 3rd Duke of Argyll and one of Sir Robert Walpole’s closest political advisers, to take effective control of city government and the management of the university from 1725 to 1761. He was to play a crucial part in laying the foundations of the academic culture that shaped Smith’s education and his academic career.
The city’s population was expanding rapidly. In the middle of the seventeenth century its inhabitants numbered around 10,000, much the same population as that of Aberdeen or Dundee. By the end of the century it was probably around 14,000, compared with Edinburgh’s 30,000. By the mid-eighteenth century it would be 31,000. By the end of Smith’s life it was nearly 81,000 and still expanding.3 Economically and politically, it resembled the other royal burghs of Scotland. Its charter gave those fortunate enough to possess burgess rights a monopoly of trade within the burgh, the right to hold markets and fairs and to hold a court to regulate its general commerce and industry. These privileges were exercised through fourteen guilds or ‘incorporations’, of which the merchants’ incorporation was by far the most important. By the late seventeenth century Glasgow had a merchant community of between four and five hundred, about a hundred of whom were engaged in overseas trade. This tiny group of ‘sea adventurers’, as Christopher Smout calls them, were the driving force behind the city’s remarkable economic expansion in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.4 In the sixteenth century most of Glasgow’s mercantile trade had been confined to coastal trade in the west of Scotland. In the early seventeenth century, its business began to expand. Merchants began trading wine and salt with France, luxury goods and foodstuffs with Holland, and timber with Norway. Pedlars from the west of the country hawked linens and yarn down the west coast of England and even to London. In 1656 it was even reported that one merchant had made an unsuccessful attempt to start trading tobacco and sugar with Barbados. Most important of all, the plantation of Ulster led to its colonization by Presbyterians from the west of Scotland, thus making Glasgow and its university the focal point of the new province’s commercial and academic life.
During the century after the Restoration of 1660 Glasgow’s economy took its decisive leap forward, expanding faster than that of any other Scottish burgh. Glaswegians began trading with the Canaries, the Azores and Madeira, with the English colonies in the Caribbean and with their plantations in the Carolinas, Virginia, New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts. At the same time trade with Norway and the Baltic expanded and intensified, before being interrupted and finally annihilated by the wars of 1689–1713. This trade took the form of an exchange of primary commodities such as cattle, hides, leather, herring and coal for luxury goods such as wines, brandies and fine textiles and raw materials like sugar, flax and hemp, all commodities that were unobtainable at home. But it was the tobacco trade which became the city’s flagship enterprise and the source of its enormous wealth in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Before the Union the tobacco trade had been entirely illegal and possible only because the Glaswegians were skilful smugglers who were good at evading the trade restrictions imposed on them by the English Navigation Acts, which had placed swingeing controls on the importation of various types of colonial produce. However, even after these had been removed with regard to Scotland by the Act of Union, the tobacco trade took some time to build up strength. By the 1710s, the Glaswegians were still only legally importing 1.4 million lbs per year, and less than 3 million lbs in the 1720s, compared with the 8 million lbs landed in 1741 and the 21 million lbs landed ten years later; the huge, unquantifiable volume of illegal imports was to be the subject of endless complaint in London and Edinburgh. By 1751, when Smith returned to Glasgow as a professor, the Glasgow tobacco lords were importing more tobacco than London and all the English outports combined.
The key to the Glaswegians’ success in the tobacco trade lay in the simple fact that they concentrated on small planters with whom they could deal directly, rather than the great planters with whom the London and Bristol merchants preferred to deal. The English preferred to act as agents, selling on American tobacco to English and continental suppliers on commission, an often intricate and time-consuming business that generated high prices for the planter at the cost of long periods of waiting for payment. The Glasgow merchants’ preference for buying directly from the small planters allowed them to pay lower prices in exchange for quick payment. What was even better was that the Glaswegians’ planters often accepted payment in kind in the form of staple goods and luxuries, as well as in cash. This method of trading was flexible and profitable. It meant that Glasgow prices were generally lower than those of England; it gave the merchants a greater degree of control over the planters; and it stimulated manufacturing as well as the warehousing of tradable goods. For all that, the tobacco trade, like all overseas trade, was an expensive and risky activity. In spite of the enormous profits to be made from importing and re-exporting a lucrative and fashionable narcotic to England and Europe, tobacco merchants constantly ran the risk of overstocking the market and causing prices to slump in a trade that inevitably carried high overheads. Ships had to be bought or hired and provisioned for long journeys; there was always the problem of maintaining cash flow on unsold cargoes; and customs duties could have a ruinous effect on liquidity. This last was an open invitation to merchants to rig the market. By 1737, the leading tobacco lords had intermarried and had turned themselves into large, well-integrated syndicates with their own rules and protocols and ways of dealing with the peculiarities of Scots merca
ntile law. Indeed, by the 1760s more than half the tobacco imported into Glasgow was controlled by three giant syndicates headed by Alexander Speirs, John Glassford and William Cunninghame.
The development of such family syndicates established the tobacco lords not only as the dominant elite in the city’s trading economy but as the dominant force in the development of the city’s manufactures. Between the 1660s and 1740s families like the Bogles began sugar refining, soap manufacturing, whaling and tanning, the Montgomeries began sugar refining, soap-making and bottle-making, the Dinwiddies became involved in tanning and rope-making, and so on. It was only a matter of time before they, their friends and relations began to run the city.5 It is striking, for example, that between 1740 and 1790 nearly every Provost of Glasgow was a tobacco lord and that the merchant oligarchy went out of its way to make sure that the city kept on the friendliest terms with the reigning ministry. In other words, the city Defoe admired in 1724, the city Smith discovered in 1737, was a remarkable place at a remarkable stage of its development. Its expansion was being engineered by the skill and enterprise of a closely knit merchant oligarchy that knew how to exploit the possibilities and limitations of the old, medieval burgh system, the hazards of the Navigation Acts and the opportunities created by the expansion of Atlantic trade in an age of war and empire. It was a monument to a spirit of enterprise that flourished in spite of, or even because of, the mass of protectionist regulations that controlled the workings of the local economy. When Smith spoke so famously of ‘the mean rapacity, the monopolizing spirit of merchants and manufacturers’ he could perfectly well have been talking about the spirit of the merchants he knew best, the merchants whose business practises he had watched most carefully, the tobacco lords of Glasgow.6
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