BrewerDP. Pdf

 

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was little or no cultivation of the ground, and cattle was the principle part of their property’ 

(LJ(B) 31–2).  

The concentration of authority in the hands of chiefs (or kings) in Homeric times was so close 

to that in pastoral societies that Smith cited Homer to illustrate his argument about authority 

in pastoral societies: ‘at the time of the Trojan wars there were severall nations who were led 

on by different chiefs. 

…

  But this was not an infringement of the democraticall form of 

government, as these persons had not any authority more than was acquired by their private 

influence’ (LJ(A) iv.11–12). Smith was perhaps not wholly consistent, since elsewhere (in 

the Early Draft of the Wealth of Nations) he emphasized the extent to which the Greeks had 

already surpassed the pastoral stage: ‘Homer paints the actions of two nations who, tho’ far 

from being perfectly civilized, were yet much advanced beyond the age of shepherds, who 

cultivated lands, who built cities 

…

’ (ED 27). 

Smith gave a rather similar account of the Germanic tribes on the north-eastern frontiers of 

the Roman empire more than a thousand years later. ‘[T]he northern nations which broke into 

Europe in the beginning of the 5 century 

…

 were arrived at the state of shepherds, and had 

even some little agriculture’ (LJ(A) ii.97). They ‘had better notions of property [than Tartars] 

and were a little more accustomed to the division of lands’ (LJ(B) 50), but, like the Tartars, 

they could advance as a mass to devastating effect.  

‘The fall of the western empire is the third great revolution in the affairs of mankind of 

which ancient history has preserved any distinct or circumstantial account. It was brought 

about by the irresistible superiority which the militia 

…

 of a nation of shepherds has over 

that of a nation of husbandmen, artificers, and manufacturers.’ (WN V.i.a.36)  

The age of agriculture  and the gro wth of commerce 

In Smith’s account of history, agriculture came after pastoralism, but its origins were still 

beyond the limits of the evidence available to him. Modern archaeologists would put the first 

agriculture many thousands of years before the earliest (written) evidence available in the 

eighteenth century. Smith had a shorter (conjectural) history in mind – it is possible that he 

thought of the beginnings of agriculture as only just before the Homeric age of Greece, and 

therefore only just beyond the reach of his earliest sources.  

The main case study discussed in Smith’s lectures deals with the origins of Greek city-states, 

and particularly of Athens. The basic story is quite simple. On the steppes (Tartary) it was 

impossible to develop beyond the pastoral stage, but when Tartars (or people in that stage of 

development) arrived in Greece, they found conditions favourable for settled agriculture. 

Attica (the territory around Athens) was not the richest part of Greece, but it was particularly 

well placed for defence, since ‘[t]wo thirds of Attica are surrounded by sea, and the other side 

by a ridge of high mountains. By this means they have a communication with their 

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neighbouring countries by sea and at the same time are secured from the inroads of their 

neighbours’ (LJ(B) 31). ‘As the country was so much securer than the others, people flocked 

into it from all hands’ (LJ(A) iv.58) and ‘Attica was the country which first began to be 

civilized and put into a regular form of government’ (LJ(A) iv.57). 

The  claim that Attica was the first ‘which began to be civilized’ is striking. In the context, 

which deals with early Greece, that may only mean that it was first in Greece (though Greek 

tradition made Argos the first city). If it were intended as a more general claim (the first 

anywhere) it would be more surprising, reflecting perhaps both the real lack of evidence of 

earlier periods and Smith’s blind spot for the Middle East. Even the Greeks themselves 

thought of Egyptian civilization as older than their own. 

Given suitable geographical conditions, progress follows. Thus he considered a people with a 

‘Tartarian’ government who  

came from thence to settle in towns and become republican (in many parts of Greece, and 

the same was the case in Italy, Gaul, etc.).We may easily conceive that a people of this 

sort, settled in a country where they lived in pretty great ease and security and in a soil 

capable of yielding them good returns for cultivation, would not only improve the earth 

but also make considerable advances in the severall arts and sciences and manufactures, 

providing they had an opportunity of exporting their sumptuous produce and fruits of their 

labour. (LJ(A) iv.60) 

The two necessary conditions are that the soil be improvable, and that there should be 

opportunities of transporting and trading their products. In Greece, but not in Tartary, ‘all the 

necessary circumstances for the improvement of the arts concurred’ (LJ(A) iv.62). 

In its simple form, the agricultural stage refers to ‘nations of husbandmen who have little 

foreign commerce, and no other manufactures but those coarse and household ones which 

almost every private family prepares for its own use’ (WN V.i.a.6). Smith, however, treated 

this stage as no more than a starting point. Given the conditions summarized above, a more 

extensive division of labour will emerge and commerce will grow correspondingly. ‘When 

the division of labour has been once thoroughly established 

…

 the society itself grows to be 

what is properly a commercial society’ (WN I.iv.1).  

As society progressed through Smith's first three stages, each transition added a new source 

of food to what went before (though there is no reason to think that hunting was entirely 

abandoned in later stages, and animal husbandry certainly continued in the agricultural 

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