Adam Smith: Forebear of Development Studies

For the subject of this address I have taken my cue from my predecessor, Tony Killick. Two years ago in his Presidential Address in Birmingham he noted that among current students of development problems there was now less interest in and discussion of history; he noted this with some regret and expressed a hope for some revival of interest. In trying to rise to his challenge, I had a second cue: speaking in Glasgow in the bicentenary year of the death of Adam Smith it is tempting to go back a little further in history than the conventional starting point of Bretton Woods and the postwar Keynesian consensus — in fact to go back to Adam Smith.