The purpose of this essay is to delineate the economic position of Scotland immediately prior to the publication of the first books of the Wealth of Nations in 1776 and to inquire to what extent Scotland in this period was experiencing growth, who (if anyone) was becoming richer, and how was it coming about. To pose these questions in a book of this nature is not to imply that the early Scottish political economists were really writing about Scotland (or mainly about Scotland) when they proposed general models. But it would be wilful not to recognize that part of their intellectual equipment was the experience of the contemporary Scottish economy and recent economic history, and that if we want to understand them it may help to understand this experience also.

It is appropriate to begin by considering the seventy-five years or so that preceded 1750. The conventional picture of this period is one of deep stagnation in which very little economic growth or benevolent change occurred. On the one hand, in the late seventeenth century the economy had been bedevilled by commercial crisis in overseas export markets and by famines which were themselves indicators both of a relatively backward and stagnant agriculture and of the inability of the country to earn sufficient foreign exchange to import enough food to cover a shortfall.