Joyce James

1797 · Best.-Nr. AQ20001 — Cambridge: Printed by Benjamin Flower: for J. Deighton et al. 1797. 4 290pp 2. With a final publisher's advertisement leaf not recorded by ESTC. Contemporary dark green calf-backed marbled boards ruled and lettered in gilt. Extremities worn loss to head of spine. Head of title page shaved sadly to remove an early ownership inscription foxed. The rare first edition of the first work of economics in English consciously intended for use as a textbook. As the author himself notes in a preliminary 'advertisement' which heaps justifiable praise on the magnum opus of Adam Smith the work was designed to be 'found convenient as a text book in those institutions of liberal education in which the "Wealth of Nations" makes an essential branch of their letters'. A lucid abridgement by English radical Jeremiah Joyce 1763- 1816 of Scottish philosopher Adam Smith's monumental Wealth of nations it condensed the two thick quartos of the original edition London 1776 - or the by then well-known bulky triple-decker octavo editions of the late eighteenth-century - into a single convenient octavo volume. As Joyce himself notes in a footnote to the final page of text the developments suggested by Smith relating to alleviating the national debt by introducing the British system of taxation to 'all provinces of the empire' were superseded by events in America during the 1770s and any hope for the 'discharging of the national debt' brought even more into doubt by the 'present melancholy situation of Ireland'. ESTC locates only 11 copies in the UK and just 12 further elsewhere. ESTC T95379. First edition. 8vo. Printed by Benjamin Flower: for J. Deighton et al. hardcover