{"title":"SMITH AT 300: USELESS COMPANIES","authors":"E. Rothschild","doi":"10.1017/S1053837222000578","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"This observation is from an obscure backwater of the Wealth of Nations. It is about companies that were archaic even in 1776: the Russian Company, the Eastland Company, the Hamburgh Company, chartered in Britain in the sixteenth century, and trading mainly in the Baltic. But the comments on regulated companies are a revealing epitome of Adam Smith’s thought. There is the artful language, and one can almost hear Smith’s ironic tone as he dictated these sentences. There is the analytic idiom, so characteristic of the Wealth of Nations, in the juxtaposition of large theories with the details of legal and economic history. There is, above all, the subject, which is also the largest object of inquiry in the Wealth of Nations, or the changing relationship between states and markets.","PeriodicalId":45456,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the History of Economic Thought","volume":"45 1","pages":"208 - 210"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2000,"publicationDate":"2023-02-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of the History of Economic Thought","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1053837222000578","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This observation is from an obscure backwater of the Wealth of Nations. It is about companies that were archaic even in 1776: the Russian Company, the Eastland Company, the Hamburgh Company, chartered in Britain in the sixteenth century, and trading mainly in the Baltic. But the comments on regulated companies are a revealing epitome of Adam Smith’s thought. There is the artful language, and one can almost hear Smith’s ironic tone as he dictated these sentences. There is the analytic idiom, so characteristic of the Wealth of Nations, in the juxtaposition of large theories with the details of legal and economic history. There is, above all, the subject, which is also the largest object of inquiry in the Wealth of Nations, or the changing relationship between states and markets.
期刊介绍:
The mission of JHET is to further the objectives of the History of Economics Society. These are to promote interest in and inquiry into the history of economics and related parts of intellectual history, facilitate communication and discourse among scholars working in the field of the history of economics, and disseminate knowledge about the history of economics. JHET therefore encourages and makes available research in the fields of history of economic thought and the history of economic methodology. The work of many distinguished authors has been published in its pages. It is recognised as being a first class international scholarly publication. All articles are fully peer reviewed.