 Adam Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) is without question the single most influential tome, both for the early modern period and for the entire history of economics. Smith’s analysis not only unpacked the core features of money and markets, but also provided a dynamic analysis of the “progress of opulence”, sweeping across the globe and reaching back to ancient times (see Rothschild &amp; Sen 2006). He covered the entire range of economics, from price theory to public finance. Significantly—and this may prove his greatest contribution—his first and only other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), developed a moral psychology that served as the foundation for his economics and, arguably, for economics to the present insofar as it still commits to the self-interest axiom (see Davis 2003; Schliesser 2017; Fleischacker 2013 [2020]). Smith’s first book motivated the universal sympathetic regard that binds us to one another, even to strangers, and it established a restless desire for approbation and hence for wealth as the driving force of human betterment. Finally, his essays on the history of science served to elevate the epistemic standing of economics, and by the first half of the nineteenth century the science of political economy, as it came to be known, was widely esteemed (see Redman 1997).