One of the defining features of the modern world is the way we take economic growth for granted. We worry, of course, but we worry about a slow down in growth, or about falling behind in the race to grow. It was not always so. Before the late eighteenth century, economic growth in its modern sense, that is, continuing growth in income and output over indefinitely long periods of time, was simply not on the intellectual map. The ‘classical’ theory of economic growth, magisterially set out in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations in 1776, marked an epochal change in the way we think about economic life and, indeed, about human society.
This collection of Professor Anthony Brewer’s essays focuses on the critical developments in thinking that put the study of economic growth on the agenda. It includes essays on David Hume and on Smith’s debt to him, on A. R. J. Turgot’s achievement and on his relation to Smith, on various controversial aspects of Smith’s theory, and on Edward West’s neglected contribution to developing the theory further in the generation after Smith. It was Smith’s contemporary, Adam Ferguson, who hinted at a role for technical change (‘invention’) as a source of growth and it was John Rae, two generations afterwards, who was the first to present a coherent account in which invention plays the primary role. This aspect of the story is covered by essays on Ferguson, on Rae’s critique of Smith, and on his treatment of invention.
This collection is tied together with a rigorous introduction and a new chapter on capital accumulation and will be of interest to postgraduates and researchers focusing on the History of Economic Thought and Economic Growth.
