wunder beta⚖️ The Wealth of Nations
On 9 March 1776 two quarto volumes went on sale at Strahan and Cadell's in the Strand. The first sentence named a nation's annual labour, not its gold.
What you’ll learn
- Annual labour, not bullionPlace the 9 March 1776 two-volume quarto in a London shop and relocate wealth from bullion to annual labour, including imports.£1 16s, Strahan and Cadell, two volumes not five. Annual labour is the fund. Skill before head-count. The woollen coat is already a map of strangers.
- The pin factoryTeach the ten-man shop as an arrangement — eighteen operations, 48,000 pins, three causes — then attach Book V's warning about the worker's mind.Draw, straight, cut, point, head, whiten, paper. One pin or twenty versus 4,800. Dexterity, time, machines. Then: as stupid and ignorant as it is possible to become.
- Exchange, prices, and powerShow trucking as the origin of specialisation, the market as a geographic limit, natural price as a centre that privileges can hold off, and the three-way split as an uneven bargain.Butcher, baker, beggar still trades. Highlands nailer. London–Leith water-carriage. Conspiracy in the trade meeting. Wages, profit, rent; masters combine more easily.
- The mercantile systemAttack the bullion-and-balance story, put the invisible hand back in Book IV Chapter 2, and name Smith's actual exceptions: defence, matching taxes, possible retaliation, slow restoration.A country cannot eat gold. Hand appears once here, about domestic investment. Navigation Act: defence over opulence. Interested sophistry of merchants.
- What the sovereign still must doState the three duties, distinguish parish instruction from Glasgow's college, keep the slavery passages as efficiency-plus-domination rather than a justice treatise, and send the reader after one real price.Defence, justice, public works. Education against the pin. Slave labour the dearest; pride loves to domineer. Follow a receipt back to a rule.
Questions this course answers
What does Smith name as the original fund supplying a nation's necessaries and conveniencies?
Introduction: annual labour supplies what is produced and what is purchased with that produce from other nations.
In the pin manufactory Smith saw, what was the output?
Book I, Chapter 1. About eighteen operations; ten men, about twelve pounds, more than four thousand middling pins to the pound.
What limits the division of labour?
Book I, Chapter 3. A Highland nailer cannot sell a day's work; water-carriage between London and Leith multiplies what land can move.
Where does the invisible-hand sentence in Wealth of Nations actually sit?
Once in this book, in the chapter on import restraints. The metaphor also appears in The Theory of Moral Sentiments and the History of Astronomy essay.
Which three duties does Smith assign the sovereign under natural liberty?
Book V, Chapter 1. After defence and justice, the remaining works are chiefly for commerce and for the instruction of the people.
Match the line to the job it is doing in the book
The slogans people remember are almost all local arguments. Put them back in their chapters before you generalise.
Based on a real book
This course is built from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith — the complete public-domain text, free to read and listen to on Wunder. The book itself is never rewritten or AI-edited; this course teaches its ideas.
Grounded in trusted sources
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Every Wunder lesson is built from real, reputable sources — never invented.
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