Riches and Poverty

In Riches and Poverty, Donald Winch explores the implications of a fundamental and influential idea in political economy. Adam Smith’s science of the legislator provided a key to studying the rich and poor in commercial societies, transformed an ancient debate on luxury and inequality, and furnished a basis for assessing the American and French revolutions. Against this background, Britain embarked on its career as the first manufacturing nation, and Malthus made his first contributions to a debate which concluded with the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. Malthus provoked fierce opposition from the Lake poets, opening an intellectual rift that persisted throughout the nineteenth century and continues to influence our perceptions of cultural history. Donald Winch has written a compelling and consistently-argued narrative of these developments, which emphasises throughout the moral and political bearings of economic ideas.

• No comparable work dealing with this subject in depth • The author is a leading authority on the subject • Links between some of the most significant ideas and events of the period - Smith, Malthus, revolutions, romantic period of literature

1. After Adam Smith: prologue; Part I. Adam Smith’s Science of the Legislator: 2. An excessive solicitude for posthumous reputation; 3. The secret concatenation; 4. The wisdom of Solomon; Part II. Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and Factious Citizens: 5. Contested affinities; 6. The loss of regal government; 7. Burke’s creed: politics, chivalry, and superstition; 8. The labouring poor; Part III. Robert Malthus as Political Moralist: 9. Imminence and immediacy: initial bearings; 10. New and extraordinary lights; 11. Rather a matter of feeling than argument; 12. A manufacturing animal: things not persons?; 13. The bountiful gift of providence; 14. Last things and other legacies; Part IV: 15. Epilogue.

‘Riches and Poverty is a powerful, innovative and magesterial survey. Large swathes of it are virtually definitive.’ Boyd Hilton, Times Higher Education Supplement