A complete analysis or abridgement of dr. adam smith's inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. By Jeremiah joyce

SMITH, Adam. JOYCE, Jeremiah [editor]

Published by Printed by Benjamin Flower: for J. Deighton et al., Cambridge, 1797

About this Item

[4], 290pp, [2]. With a final publisher's advertisement leaf (not recorded by ESTC). Contemporary dark green calf-backed marbled boards, ruled and lettered in gilt. Extremities worn, loss to head of spine. Head of title page shaved (sadly, to remove an early ownership inscription), foxed. The rare first edition of the first work of economics, in English, consciously intended for use as a textbook. As the author himself notes in a preliminary 'advertisement' which heaps justifiable praise on the magnum opus of Adam Smith, the work was designed to be 'found convenient as a text book in those institutions of liberal education, in which the "Wealth of Nations" makes an essential branch of their letters'. A lucid abridgement by English radical Jeremiah Joyce (1763- 1816) of Scottish philosopher Adam Smith's monumental Wealth of nations, it condensed the two thick quartos of the original edition (London, 1776) - or the by then well-known bulky triple-decker octavo editions of the late eighteenth-century - into a single convenient octavo volume. As Joyce himself notes in a footnote to the final page of text, the developments suggested by Smith relating to alleviating the national debt (by introducing the British system of taxation to 'all provinces of the empire') were superseded by events in America during the 1770s, and, any hope for the 'discharging of the national debt' brought even more into doubt by the 'present melancholy situation of Ireland'. ESTC locates only 11 copies in the UK, and just 12 further elsewhere. ESTC T95379. Size: 8vo.

Seller Inventory # AQ20001

Bibliographic Details

• Title: A complete analysis or abridgement of dr. adam smith's inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. By Jeremiah joyce
• Publisher: Printed by Benjamin Flower: for J. Deighton et al., Cambridge
• Publication Date: 1797
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First edition.