Sir James Steuart

author

Sir James Steuart

1712–1780

Best known for a major 1767 work on political economy, this Scottish thinker is often remembered as an early system-builder in economics. His life also included years of exile after the Jacobite rising, giving his writing an unusually wide European perspective.

2 Audiobooks

An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (Vol. 1 of 2) Being an essay on the science of domestic policy in free nations. In which are particularly considered population, agriculture, trade, industry, money, coin, interest, circulation, banks, exchange, public credit, and taxes

An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (Vol. 1 of 2) Being an essay on the science of domestic policy in free nations. In which are particularly considered population, agriculture, trade, industry, money, coin, interest, circulation, banks, exchange, public credit, and taxes

by Sir James Steuart

An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (Vol. 2 of 2) Being an essay on the science of domestic policy in free nations. In which are particularly considered population, agriculture, trade, industry, money, coin, interest, circulation, banks, exchange, public credit, and taxes

An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (Vol. 2 of 2) Being an essay on the science of domestic policy in free nations. In which are particularly considered population, agriculture, trade, industry, money, coin, interest, circulation, banks, exchange, public credit, and taxes

by Sir James Steuart

About the author

Born in Edinburgh in October 1712, Sir James Steuart was a Scottish baronet, lawyer, and political economist. He studied at the University of Edinburgh and became involved in Jacobite politics, which forced him into long exile on the Continent after the 1745 rising. Those years abroad helped shape the broad, comparative outlook that later appeared in his writing.

He is chiefly known for An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (1767), a large and ambitious study of trade, money, population, and government. The book appeared before Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations and is often treated as one of the earliest attempts in Britain to present economics as a connected system rather than a set of separate arguments.

Steuart eventually returned to Scotland and died in 1780. Readers who come to him now usually find a writer standing at an interesting turning point: still close to older ideas about state guidance and commerce, yet clearly trying to explain how a modern commercial society works.