A week into the job, he burned his own neckcloths.

Adam Smith's father died in Kirkcaldy in January 1723, the winter before his son was born. The bill for the funeral survives. The day the boy arrived was never written down.

He grew up in a customs town that lived on coal, salt, nails and smuggling, where the law said one thing and the harbour did another. At Oxford he found professors paid out of an endowment who had stopped teaching, and thirty-six years later he explained why: pay a man the same whether he works or not, and he will not. In Glasgow he watched a city grow rich on a trade the law had closed to everybody else - tobacco, credit and slavery.

Those three places are the argument. A nation's wealth is what it makes and uses in a year, not what it has put away. A monopoly is a trade closed by law. And proposals from the men who profit by the rules of trade ought to be heard, he wrote, with the most suspicious attention.

Made a Commissioner of Customs at fifty-five, he checked his own wardrobe against the list of prohibited goods and burned what failed it - then spent twelve years administering the machinery his book had taken eleven hundred pages to dismantle.