Adam Smith’s pulls back the mercantile and colonial curtain

Thus far this past week (see here, here, here, here, and here), we have done a deep dive into paragraphs 1 to 53 of Part #12 of the pamphlet “Additions and Corrections to the First and Second Editions of Dr. Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations” (Smith 1784, pp. 23-46). But I have saved the best for last: the closing paragraph of Part #12 (paragraph 54). It is here, in this concluding paragraph to Part #12 of his 1784 pamphlet, that Adam Smith pulls back the green curtain, so to speak — like Dorothy’s dog Toto in The Wizard of Oz — to reveal the true villains of his story: “It cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interest has been entirely neglected; but the producers, whose interest has been so carefully attended to; and among this latter class our merchants and manufacturers have been by far the principal architects. In the mercantile…