We are living through an era of imperial polycrisis much like the one Smith tried to make sense of.
Here at @uofgsocsci.bsky.social, our program of conferences, exhibits and interactive experiences on “The World in 1776/2026” begins in June: www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/briti...
Cover page, Wealth of Nations, First Edition 1776
250 years ago today, Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Contrary to popular belief, it is not a proto-libertarian paean to free markets, but a blistering critique of vested interests, corporate power and the British Empire. Some favorite bits:
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Read our early reflections on Smith for our time here: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
And more in two forthcoming books, "Adam Smith at 300" (Edinburgh UP) and "When Companies Rule" (Columbia UP), both out later this year.
We are living through an era of imperial polycrisis much like the one Smith tried to make sense of.
Here at @uofgsocsci.bsky.social, our program of conferences, exhibits and interactive experiences on “The World in 1776/2026” begins in June: www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/events/briti...
Book IV, Chapter 7: "The monopoly of the colony trade, besides, by forcing towards it a much greater proportion of the capital of Great Britain than what would naturally have gone to it, seems to have broken altogether that natural balance which would otherwise have taken place among all the different branches of British industry. The industry of Great Britain, instead of being accommodated to a great number of small markets, has been principally suited to one great market. Her commerce, instead of running in a great number of small channels, has been taught to run principally in one great channel. But the whole system of her industry and commerce has thereby been rendered less secure; the whole state of her body politic less healthful than it otherwise would have been. In her present condition, Great Britain resembles one of those unwholesome bodies in which some of the vital parts are overgrown, and which, upon that account, are liable to many dangerous disorders, scarce incident to those in which all the parts are more properly proportioned. A small stop in that great blood-vessel, which has been artificially swelled beyond its natural dimensions, and through which an unnatural proportion of the industry and commerce of the country has been forced to circulate, is very likely to bring on the most dangerous disorders upon the whole body politic."
Headline from Al Jazeera: "Trump's tariffs may end up blowing up the US dollar hegemony. Some of the US president's most daring policies to 'Make America Great Again' may inflict irreparable harm to the US economy.
The book was a bestseller in part because it explained, four months before the American Revolution, that Britain was at risk of losing all her colonies if she kept setting trade policy to suit giant companies and the oligarchs who controlled them. This too feels depressingly current.
![Excerpt from Atal, "When Companies Rule," forthcoming Columbia University Press: 'As Smith wrote, the East India Company had just completed its conquest of Bengal. In The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, Smith reviewed the Company’s record as a territorial ruler. He found it both politically oppressive and economically unproductive. The Company’s monopoly restricted the ability of people under its rule in India to sell their own goods on the global market, while its position as the only buyer for Indian products pushed down prices. Being able to buy cheap and sell dear increased the Company’s profitability, but it hurt India’s prosperity. Company trading barriers caused shortages of key goods and contributed to famine, while pushing Indians into poverty. It was because of the “mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies,” Smith argued, that in the “fertile country [of Bengal], which had before been much depopulated, three or four hundred thousand people die of hunger in one year.” In this respect, the Company’s interests as a profit-seeking enterprise conflicted with its duties as a sovereign, to maximize the prosperity of its subjects. “A company of merchants,” he concluded, was “incapable of considering themselves as sovereigns, even after they have become such.” '](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:suyoaoxi6xrmanrp3q3bf5ub/bafkreif5byd25ct4tfp6pvs3w4secz5sv3xgcs5yrzqrgzxiznaqkqpkgi)
Excerpt from Atal, "When Companies Rule," forthcoming Columbia University Press: 'As Smith wrote, the East India Company had just completed its conquest of Bengal. In The Wealth of Nations, first published in 1776, Smith reviewed the Company’s record as a territorial ruler. He found it both politically oppressive and economically unproductive. The Company’s monopoly restricted the ability of people under its rule in India to sell their own goods on the global market, while its position as the only buyer for Indian products pushed down prices. Being able to buy cheap and sell dear increased the Company’s profitability, but it hurt India’s prosperity. Company trading barriers caused shortages of key goods and contributed to famine, while pushing Indians into poverty. It was because of the “mercantile company which oppresses and domineers in the East Indies,” Smith argued, that in the “fertile country [of Bengal], which had before been much depopulated, three or four hundred thousand people die of hunger in one year.” In this respect, the Company’s interests as a profit-seeking enterprise conflicted with its duties as a sovereign, to maximize the prosperity of its subjects. “A company of merchants,” he concluded, was “incapable of considering themselves as sovereigns, even after they have become such.” '
Excerpt from Atal, "When Companies Rule," forthcoming Columbia University Press: 'Moreover, Smith argued that corporations would inevitably enforce their political rule in militaristic ways. Given the authority to monopolize an area of trade, they would require, as the East India Company did, their own warehouses, naval patrols and judicial systems to enforce their monopoly. These, in turn, would require militarized defense: “With the right of possessing forts and garrisons in distant and barbarous countries, is necessarily connected the right of making peace and war,” Smith argued. “The joint stock companies, which have had the one right, have constantly exercised the other, and have frequently had it expressly conferred upon them. How unjustly, how capriciously, how cruelly they have commonly exercised it, is too well known from recent experience.” Chartered monopolies, in other words, turned any economy they governed into a tyranny, rather than a free market based on consensual exchange. Yet the expense of such tyranny meant these companies were rarely commercially profitable, deriving, as the East India Company did, much of their revenue from their direct taxation of natives. Smith concluded that “if the trading spirit of the English East India Company renders them very bad sovereigns, the spirit of sovereignty seems to have rendered them very bad traders.” '
Smith particularly lambasted the regulatory capture of the British state by companies like the East India Company. These companies could never govern colonies well, because the needs of the people they ruled would always conflict with their motive to extract as much or as cheaply as possible.
Book I, Chapter 8 (paraphrase of long quotation): "We rarely hear, it has been said, of the combinations of masters, though frequently of those of workmen. But whoever imagines, upon this account, that masters rarely combine, is as ignorant of the world as of the subject. Masters are always and everywhere in a sort of tacit, but constant and uniform, combination, not to raise the wages of labour above their actual rate...Masters, too, sometimes enter into particular combinations to sink the wages of labour even below this rate...Such combinations, however, are frequently resisted by a contrary defensive combination of the workmen, who sometimes, too, without any provocation of this kind, combine, of their own accord, to raise the price of their labour...But whether their combinations be offensive or defensive, they are always abundantly heard of. In order to bring the point to a speedy decision, they have always recourse to the loudest clamour, and sometimes to the most shocking violence and outrage. They are desperate, and act with the folly and extravagance of desperate men, who must either starve, or frighten their masters into an immediate compliance with their demands. The masters, upon these occasions, are just as clamorous upon the other side, and never cease to call aloud for the assistance of the civil magistrate, and the rigorous execution of those laws which have been enacted with so much severity against the combination of servants, labourers, and journeymen. The workmen, accordingly, very seldom derive any advantage from the violence of those tumultuous combinations, which, partly from the interposition of the civil magistrate, partly from the superior steadiness of the masters, partly from the necessity which the greater part of the workmen are under of submitting for the sake of present subsistence, generally end in nothing but the punishment or ruin of the ringleaders."
Smith understood that workers would form unions to counter-veil managers, but he warned that bosses would always call the state in on their side, a dangerous and violent form of regulatory capture.
Excerpt from Book II, Chapter 3: "The proportion between capital and revenue, therefore, seems everywhere to regulate the proportion between industry and idleness. Wherever capital predominates, industry prevails; wherever revenue, idleness. Every increase or diminution of capital, therefore, naturally tends to increase or diminish the real quantity of industry, the number of productive hands, and consequently the exchangeable value of the annual produce of the land and labour of the country, the real wealth and revenue of all its inhabitants."
Chart from Bloomberg: Big Tech's Cash Hoard Remains Huge
Headline from Bloomberg: Tech giants may plow $500 billion cash hoard into more buybacks
Smith warned that economies in which managers hoard profits—rather than reinvesting in their businesses—will stagnate too. I wonder what he would make of our cash-rich tech and finance behemoths today…
From Book I, Chapter 8: "Is this improvement in the circumstances of the lower ranks of the people to be regarded as an advantage, or as an inconveniency, to the society? The answer seems at first abundantly plain. Servants, labourers, and workmen of different kinds, make up the far greater part of every great political society. But what improves the circumstances of the greater part, can never be regarded as any inconveniency to the whole. No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable. It is but equity, besides, that they who feed, clothe, and lodge the whole body of the people, should have such a share of the produce of their own labour as to be themselves tolerably well fed, clothed, and lodged."
Smith felt real anxiety about the inequality that would result from the expansion of “commercial society.” That anxiety was as much practical as moral. Economies in which workers cannot afford to share in the wealth their labor creates will stop growing.
Cover page, Wealth of Nations, First Edition 1776
250 years ago today, Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
Contrary to popular belief, it is not a proto-libertarian paean to free markets, but a blistering critique of vested interests, corporate power and the British Empire. Some favorite bits:
Carmen Sandiego from the 90s cartoon
Happy International Women's Day to the original International Woman
What will the overall factional balance on the HEC be now?
I regret to inform you that Ryan Grim is actually stupid enough not to understand this:
Odysseus had his crew lash him to the mast to keep him from doing an interview with Chotiner.
Is there a link rather than a screenshot? This is not a very accessible format...
"Government goes to war by deleting the risks section of the pro-con intelligence analysis" is literally the plot of In The Loop.
"I had to punch that guy because I could tell he was going to hit me back once we jumped him" is just a description of jumping a guy
When assessing threats from fascism, the most important thing is not to assess how ridiculous those threats seem, but to assess the scale of the resources - both military and financial - that the fascists can use to carry out those threats. What seems ridiculous today can be executed tomorrow.
Yeah for sure - I was thinking he meant "official state *agency* like army/navy/intelligence services." Not a lot of cases that meet that definition.
Oh no, I think he'd count despite that but Yair's criterion was assassination by another *state* and the Rwandan suspects were all non-state actors.
Often leaders are deposed before they are killed, so they are no longer a head of state at the time of assassination: e.g. Patrice Lumumba.
Some Pakistan experts think the Zia plane crash was assassination by foreign state, but no consensus on which state - the man had many enemies.
Praying no. But she posted something herself of visiting a mosque after a racist attack. She's also been to a few iftars in the community while campaigning. It's not inconceivable there will be footage of her at an actual service, though it'd have to be a mixed one. www.instagram.com/p/DVMFf91CtQi/
article 8bis of the rome statute of the international criminal court
continuation of article 8bis
posting, once again, the well-established definition of the crime of aggression in the rome statute for the ICC
Sssh Charlotte, we were planning to keep this a secret until after Ramadan.
UK followers: I'll be on BBC News sometime between 4:30 and 5pm talking tariffs that were, tariffs that are, and tariffs to come.
Yeah me too, but we can't have everything, alas
The opera AU fan fiction where Rigoletto and Figaro are lads on tour in Egypt and meet Aida who is besties with Madama Butterfly is maybe of niche interest but it is so my niche. God bless the Italians for this gift. #milanocortina2026
Will I make it past the montage scored to "Con Te Partiro" without tearing up? No, no I will not. #milanocortina2026
Gotta put a crash test dummy in a bobsled and push it down the hill so we can get a better sense of what exactly the bobsledders are doing besides hanging on.
My other half had one in Zone 2 but had it instead of microwave, coffeemaker or any other countertop appliance. It was also 12 years ago so I'm recalling vaguely.
