This is the first edition of Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Wealth of Nations, a landmark book in the field of economics that is still influential to this day.

Smith spent his childhood in Kirkcaldy, situated across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh, and later studied at Balliol College, Oxford. He returned to his home in 1746 and came to be involved in the dynamic series of lectures in Edinburgh arranged by Henry Home, Lord Kames. It was through these lectures that Smith came to be associated with the leading figures of Edinburgh academia, most notably David Hume who would be a close friend for many years.

In 1776, Smith published The Wealth of Nations. It explored the reasons why some nations were wealthy, why others were not and why yet more had appeared to stagnate. He came to the conclusion that those nations whose wealth was free to be exploited through self-regulation, as opposed to strictly controlled economies, could continue to prosper, resilient to changes in prices and the availability of goods. While in more feudal societies, where wealth would concentrate at the top, self-regulating economies allowed for even the poorest people to have access to luxuries that would otherwise be out of reach. These ideas, though replaced by other theories in the late nineteenth century, helped lay the foundations for modern market economics and philosophies by figures such as John Stuart Mill.