Adam Smith’s free-market economics rested on a racist claim of African incapacity.

Evidence

To this founding father of capitalist economics, the wealth of nations stemmed from a nation’s productive capacity, a productive capacity African nations lacked. “All the inland parts of Africa,” he scripted, “seem in all ages of the world to have been in the same barbarous and uncivilized state in which we find them at present.” Meanwhile, Smith praised Americans for “contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which … seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.” — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 276

Categorization

• XREF: Direct test of Kendi’s inversion: a foundational liberal-capitalist theorist built racist ideas into his universal economics — the reader can place Smith as assimilationist (racial inequality from Black incapacity, calling for uplift) despite his anti-monopoly stance.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: does The Wealth of Nations elsewhere impute incapacity, or is this one line doing heavy work? How do later free-trade thinkers inherit the premise from Smith’s formative moment?