Opening of the book
Editor’s Introduction
The first edition of the Wealth of Nations was published on the 9th of March,1 1776, in two volumes quarto, of which the first, containing Books I, II and III, has 510 pages of text, and the second, containing Books IV and V, has 587. The titlepage describes the author as “Adam Smith, LL.D. and F.R.S. Formerly Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Glasgow.” There is no preface or index.
The whole of the Contents are printed at the beginning of the first volume. The price was £1 16s.2
The second edition appeared early in 1778, priced at £2 2s.,3 but differing little in appearance from its predecessor. Its pages very nearly correspond, and the only very obvious difference is that the
Contents are now divided between the two volumes. There are, however, a vast number of small differences between the first and second editions. One of the least of these, the alteration of “late” to
“present,”4 draws our attention to the curious fact that writing at some time before the spring of 1776 Adam Smith thought it safe to refer to the American troubles as “the late disturbances.”5 We cannot tell whether he thought the disturbances were actually over, or only that he might safely assume they would be over before the book was published. As “present disturbances” also occurs close to
“late disturbances,”6 we may perhaps conjecture that when correcting his proofs in the winter of 1775 – 6, he had altered his opinion and only allowed “late” to stand by an oversight. A very large proportion of the alterations are merely verbal, and made for the sake of greater elegance or propriety of diction, such as the frequent change from “tear and wear” (which occurs also in Lectures, p. 208) to the more ordinary “wear and tear.” Most of the footnotes appear first in the second edition. A few corrections as to matters of fact are made, such as that in relation to the percentage of the tax on silver in Spanish America (vol. i, pp. 169, 170). Figures are corrected at vol. i, p. 327, and vol. ii, pp. 371, 374. New information is added
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