"the Beauty of That Arrangement": Adam Smith Imagines Empire (Critical Essay‪)‬

1 IN THE OPENING LECTURE FOR TWO COURSES LATER PUBLISHED AS THE EXPANSION of England (1906), J. R. Seeley tells his students, the sons of empire, that there is "something very characteristic in the indifference which we show toward this mighty phenomenon of the diffusion of our race and the expansion of our state." (1) "We seem," Seeley continues, "to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind. While we were doing it, that is in the eighteenth century, we did not allow it to affect our imaginations or in any degree change our ways of thinking" (8). Adam Smith's writings call Seeley's claim about the eighteenth-century imagination into question. Smith makes the interaction of imagination and empire an explicit object of his analysis, concluding that the imagination plays a constitutive role in conceiving and constructing new forms of empire. Elaborating a model of an active imagination whose functioning is secured by an economy of exchange, Smith uses this faculty to explain the specific form of global empire that the British are building.