An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (ebook reader with highlighter txt) 📖

countries, afforded some food to the vanity

of the great proprietors, who eagerly purchased them with great quantities

of the rude produce of their own lands. The commerce of a great part of

Europe in those times, accordingly, consisted chiefly in the exchange of

their own rude, for the manufactured produce of more civilized nations. Thus

the wool of England used to be exchanged for the wines of France, and the

fine cloths of Flanders, in the same manner as the corn in Poland is at this

day, exchanged for the wines and brandies of France, and for the silks and

velvets of France and Italy.

 

A taste for the finer and more improved manufactures was, in this manner,

introduced by foreign commerce into countries where no such works were

carried on. But when this taste became so general as to occasion a

considerable demand, the merchants, in order to save the expense of carriage,

naturally endeavoured to establish some manufactures of the same kind in

their own country. Hence the origin of the first manufactures for distant

sale, that seem to have been established in the western provinces of Europe,

after the fall of the Roman empire.

 

No large country, it must be observed, ever did or could subsist without

some sort of manufactures being carried on in it ; and when it is said of

any such country that it has no manufactures, it must always be understood

of the finer and more improved, or of such as are fit for distant sale. In

every large country both the clothing and household furniture or the far

greater part of the people, are the produce of their own industry. This is

even more universally the case in those poor countries which are commonly

said to have no manufactures, than in those rich ones that are said to

abound in them. In the latter you will generally find, both in the clothes

and household furniture of the lowest rank of people, a much greater

proportion of foreign productions than in the former.

 

Those manufactures which are fit for distant sale, seem to have been

introduced into different countries in two different ways.

 

Sometimes they have been introduced in the manner above mentioned, by the

violent operation, if one may say so, of the stocks of particular merchants

and undertakers, who established them in imitation of some foreign

manufactures of the same kind. Such manufactures, therefore, are the offspring

of foreign commerce; and such seem to have been the ancient manufactures of

silks, velvets, and brocades, which flourished in Lucca during the

thirteenth century. They were banished from thence by the tyranny of one of

Machiavel’s heroes, Castruccio Castracani. In 1310, nine hundred families

were driven out of Lucca, of whom thirty-one retired to Venice, and offered

to introduce there the silk manufacture. {See Sandi Istoria civile de

Vinezia, part 2 vol. i, page 247 and 256.} Their offer was accepted, many

privileges were conferred upon them, and they began the manufacture with

three hundred workmen. Such, too, seem to have been the manufactures of fine

cloths that anciently flourished in Flanders, and which were introduced into

England in the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, and such are the present

silk manufactures of Lyons and Spitalfields. Manufactures introduced in this

manner are generally employed upon foreign materials, being imitations of

foreign manufactures. When the Venetian manufacture was first established,

the materials were all brought from Sicily and the Levant. The more ancient

manufacture of Lucca was likewise carried on with foreign materials. The

cultivation of mulberry trees, and the breeding of silk-woms, seem not to

have been common in the northern parts of Italy before the sixteenth

century. Those arts were not introduced into France till the reign of

Charles IX. The manufactures of Flanders were carried on chiefly with

Spanish and English wool. Spanish wool was the material, not of the first

woollen manufacture of England, but of the first that was fit for distant

sale. More than one half the materials of the Lyons manufacture is at this

day foreign silk; when it was first established, the whole, or very nearly

the whole, was so. No part of the materials of the Spitalfields manufacture

is ever likely to be the produce of England. The seat of such manufactures,

as they are generally introduced by the scheme and project of a few

individuals, is sometimes established in a maritime city, and sometimes in

an inland town, according as their interest, judgment, or caprice, happen to

determine.

 

At other times, manufactures for distant sale grow up naturally, and as it

were of their own accord, by the gradual refinement of those household and

coarser manufactures which must at all times be carried on even in the

poorest and rudest countries. Such manufactures are generally employed upon

the materials which the country produces, and they seem frequently to have

been first refined and improved In such inland countries as were not,

indeed, at a very great, but at a considerable distance from the sea-coast,

and sometimes even from all water carriage. An inland country, naturally

fertile and easily cultivated, produces a great surplus of provisions beyond

what is necessary for maintaining the cultivators; and on account of the

expense of land carriage, and inconveniency of river navigation, it may

frequently be difficult to send this surplus abroad. Abundance, therefore,

renders provisions cheap, and encourages a great number of workmen to settle

in the neighbourhood, who find that their industry can there procure them

more of the necessaries and conveniencies of life than in other places. They

work up the materials of manufacture which the land produces, and exchange

their finished work, or, what is the same thing, the price of it, for more

materials and provisions. They give a new value to the surplus part of the

rude produce, by saving the expense of carrying it to the water-side, or to

some distant market ; and they furnish the cultivators with something in

exchange for it that is either useful or agreeable to them, upon easier

terms than they could have obtained it before. The cultivators get a better

price for their surplus produce, and can purchase cheaper other

conveniencies which they have occasion for. They are thus both encouraged

and enabled to increase this surplus produce by a further improvement and

better cultivation of the land; and as the fertility of she land had given

birth to the manufacture, so the progress of the manufacture reacts upon the

land, and increases still further it’s fertility. The manufacturers first

supply the neighbourhood, and afterwards, as their work improves and

refines, more distant markets. For though neither the rude produce, nor even

the coarse manufacture, could, without the greatest difficulty, support the

expense of a considerable land-carriage, the refined and improved

manufacture easily may. In a small bulk it frequently contains the price of

a great quantity of rude produce. A piece of fine cloth, for example which

weighs only eighty pounds, contains in it the price, not only of eighty

pounds weight of wool, but sometimes of several thousand weight of corn, the

maintenance of the different working people, and of their immediate

employers. The corn which could with difficulty have been carried abroad in

its own shape, is in this manner virtually exported in that of the complete

manufacture, and may easily be sent to the remotest corners of the world. In

this manner have grown up naturally, and, as it were, of their own accord,

the manufactures of Leeds, Halifax, Sheffield, Birmingham, and

Wolverhampton. Such manufactures are the offspring of agriculture. In the

modern history of Europe, their extension and improvement have generally

been posterior to those which were the offspring of foreign commerce.

England was noted for the manufacture of fine cloths made of Spanish wool,

more than a century before any of those which now flourish in the places

above mentioned were fit for foreign sale. The extension and improvement of

these last could not take place but in consequence of the extension and

improvement of agriculture, the last and greatest effect of foreign

commerce, and of the manufactures immediately introduced by it, and which I

shall now proceed to explain.

 

CHAPTER IV.

 

HOW THE COMMERCE OF TOWNS CONTRIBUTED TO THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE COUNTRY.

 

The increase and riches of commercial and manufacturing towns contributed to

the improvement and cultivation of the countries to which they belonged, in

three different ways :

 

First, by affording a great and ready market for the rude produce of the

country, they gave encouragement to its cultivation and further improvement.

This benefit was not even confined to the countries in which they were

situated, but extended more or less to all those with which they had any

dealings. To all of them they afforded a market for some part either of

their rude or manufactured produce, and, consequently, gave some

encouragement to the industry and improvement of all. Their own country,

however, on account of its neighbourhood, necessarily derived the greatest

benefit from this market. Its rude produce being charged with less carriage,

the traders could pay the growers a better price for it, and yet afford it

as cheap to the consumers as that of more distant countries.

 

Secondly, the wealth acquired by the inhabitants of cities was frequently

employed in purchasing such lands as were to be sold, of which a great part

would frequently be uncultivated. Merchants are commonly ambitious of

becoming country gentlemen, and, when they do, they are generally the best

of all improvers. A merchant is accustomed to employ his money chiefly in

profitable projects ; whereas a mere country gentleman is accustomed to

employ it chiefly in expense. The one often sees his money go from him, and

return to him again with a profit; the other, when once he parts with it,

very seldom expects to see any more of it. Those different habits naturally

affect their temper and disposition in every sort of business. The merchant

is commonly a bold, a country gentleman a timid undertaker. The one is not

afraid to lay out at once a large capital upon the improvement of his land,

when he has a probable prospect of raising the value of it in proportion to

the expense ; the other, if he has any capital, which is not always the

case, seldom ventures to employ it in this manner. If he improves at all, it

is commonly not with a capital, but with what he can save out or his annual

revenue. Whoever has had the fortune to live in a mercantile town, situated

in an unimproved country, must have frequently observed how much more

spirited the operations of merchants were in this way, than those of mere

country gentlemen. The habits, besides, of order, economy, and attention, to

which mercantile business naturally forms a merchant, render him much fitter

to execute, with profit and success, any project of improvement.

 

Thirdly, and lastly, commerce and manufactures gradually introduced order

and good government, and with them the liberty and security of individuals,

among the inhabitants of the country, who had before lived almost in a

continual state of war with their neighbours, and of servile dependency upon

their superiors. This, though it has been the least observed, is by far the

most important of all their effects. Mr Hume is the only writer who, so far

as I know, has hitherto taken notice of it.

 

In a country which has neither foreign commerce nor any of the finer

manufactures, a great proprietor, having nothing for which he can exchange

the greater part of the produce of his lands which is over and above the

maintenance of the cultivators, consumes the whole in rustic hospitality at

home. If this surplus produce is sufficient to maintain a hundred or a

thousand men, he can make use of it