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It was 250 years ago that Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations. In it, he looked back on the contact that various distant peoples had had with Europeans, following the discoveries of Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama. The results, by Smith’s time in 1776, had been tragic.
Smith writes:
To the natives…all the commercial benefits which can have resulted from those events have been sunk and lost in the dreadful misfortunes which they have occasioned.
Contact can and should, Smith says, be mutually advantageous:
By uniting, in some measure, the most distant parts of the world, by enabling them to relieve one another’s wants, to increase one another’s enjoyments, and to encourage one another’s industry, their general tendency would seem to be beneficial.
Why was contact with Europeans, in fact, tragic?
Smith explains that Europeans had far superior tools of force. As a result, unwholesome Europeans were able to abuse many of the peoples of the world. Smith writes:
At the particular time when these discoveries were made, the superiority of force happened to be so great on the side of the Europeans, that they were enabled to commit with impunity every sort of injustice in those remote countries.
Smith condemns European imperialism with a broad brush. About the first forays to the Americas, Smith says that “the principles which presided over and directed” them were “folly and injustice”:
[T]he folly of hunting after gold and silver mines, and the injustice of coveting the possession of a country whose harmless natives, far from having ever injured the people of Europe, had received the first adventurers with every mark of kindness and hospitality.
Smith may have felt some hope that European elites would become more wholesome. He helped people to become more wholesome by learning, teaching, and writing.
But also, Smith anticipated another development, which might mitigate the tragedy perceived as of 1776. Smith anticipated the equalization of “courage and force.”
“Hereafter, perhaps,” Smith writes, “the natives of those countries may grow stronger, or those of Europe may grow weaker, and the inhabitants of all the different quarters of the world may arrive at that equality of courage and force which, by inspiring mutual fear, can alone overawe the injustice of independent nations into some sort of respect for the rights of one another.”
Smith teaches that, until elites grow more wholesome, nations must develop their “courage and force” to protect themselves from injustice. And Smith foresaw that the weaker countries would, in time, learn to do just that.
Smith explains a delayed effect of contact:
Nothing seems more likely to establish this equality of force than that mutual communication of knowledge and of all sorts of improvements which an extensive commerce from all countries to all countries naturally, or rather necessarily, carries along with it.
Contact with Europeans brought misery, but, in time, it would bring the means of mitigating that misery.
The natives of distant lands have not been the only victims of unwholesome European elites. Europeans, too, are victims.
And other individuals, such as Adam Smith, from Europe and all around the world, offer a better way forward for the Earthly human whole.
