The first appearance of The Wealth of Nations in Spanish, preceding the first complete Spanish translation by two years. The text was translated from an abridgement originally serialised in 1790 in the French periodical Bibliothèque de l’homme public, here mistakenly attributedto the great French philosopher and mathematician Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794).
The Bibliothèque de l’homme summary was, in fact, primarily based on the poet Jean-Antoine Roucher’s (1745-1794) full translation published in the same year, serving as the basis of the book-by-book analysis up through Volume IV, Chapter I, with the earlier translation by Jean-Louis Blavet (1719-1809) used thereafter (presumably owing to Roucher’s translation of Volume IV being at that point unfinished). The source of the misattribution of Condorcet’s authorship is most likely due to his being listed as the General Editor of the Bibliothèque de l’homme public, despite there being little to no evidence of Condorcet actually having contributed any written material. The title page of each of the four volumes of Roucher’s translation proclaimed that there would follow an additional fifth volume containing critical commentary by Condorcet. However, said volume would never appear and it has been suggested “that Condorcet never intended to write them and that he merely loaned him name to the enterprise” for the purposes of added prestige (Carpenter, p. 87).
Problems of authorship aside, the present Spanish translation was undertaken by Don Carlos Martinez de Irujo y Tacon (1763-1824), a diplomat who served for over a decade as Spanish foreign minister to the United States, where he quarrelled with Thomas Jefferson over the Louisiana Purchase and with James Madison over the American claim to part of Florida. Martinez’s Compendio closely follows the Bibliothèque de l’homme summary, albeit paraphrasing in places, with two noteworthy editorial changes. Firstly, Martinez includes his own summary of Smith’s “Digression on the Bank of Amsterdam”, omitted in the Bibliothèque de l’homme public, including here a solitary five-line footnote qualifying the argument for free trade. Secondly, the most considerable omission relates to Smith’s article “Of the Expense of the Institutions for the Instruction of People of All Ages”, containing discussion of religious tolerance, sectarian differences, and clerical sinecures. The article had already been reduced by half in the Bibliothèque de l’homme public, but is here expurgated to merely two paragraphs, surely owing to fears of prohibition by the Inquisition.
Although the first complete Spanish edition of The Wealth of Nations, translated by Josef Alonso Ortiz, would appear two years later in 1794, Martinez’s Compendio remained an important introductory source, with second and third editions appearing in 1803 and 1814 respectively.
Rare. OCLC list only three copies in North America (Harvard, Duke, and University of Texas at Austin) along with three copies in the UK (BL, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh University). RareBookHub / ABPC list only one copy to have sold at auction, appearing in 1999.
Mizuta, A Critical Bibliography of Adam Smith, 47; Kress B.2408.
See: K. Carpenter, The dissemination of The Wealth of Nations in French and in France, 1776-1843; R.S. Smith, ‘The Wealth of Nations in Spain and Hispanic America, 1780-18’, Journal of Political Economy.
