Glasgow

A growing commercial city on the river Clyde. Adam Smith taught moral philosophy at Glasgow for twelve years and watched its trade transform the economy of a nation, giving him material for his great book.

Glasgow grew rich on tobacco and sugar shipped in from the Atlantic colonies, and its merchants funded a university that took moral philosophy seriously. Francis Hutcheson lectured here on the moral sense and, unusually, did it in English rather than Latin. Adam Smith was his student, then held the chair of moral philosophy himself from 1752, and called those the happiest years of his life. The Wealth of Nations grew out of lectures on jurisprudence he gave a short walk from the counting houses that ran the trade.