Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations excerpt) attacks the Navigation Acts 1776 (primary source document with reading questions)

Adam Smith navigation acts primary source with questions

The Navigation Laws, as perfected in the eighteenth century, bore most harshly on the southern colonies, with their staple enumerated products. To strengthen the Royal Navy, the London government paid bounties for the production of pitch, tar, rosin, turpentine, hemp, masts, yards, and bowsprits, but the northern colonies came off with the lion’s share of the bounty payments. The whole system was reviewed in 1776, the year the colonies declared independence, by the Scottish philosopher-economist Adam Smith in his monumental Wealth of Nations. As a declaration of independence from current mercantilist restrictions, it ranks as one of the great books of all time. Smith, who has been dubbed the father of modern economics, was a liberal-minded exponent of the greatest good to the greatest number.