📍Panmure House, 129 Canongate, Edinburgh EH8 8BW, UK
1778 – 1790“I was born in Kirkcaldy, a little port across the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh, and raised by my mother, Margaret Douglas, for my father had died before I was born. Kirkcaldy's harbour, its nail-makers and its small trades gave me my first lessons in how work and commerce shape a community. I studied at Glasgow and Oxford, taught moral philosophy at Glasgow, travelled in France, and in 1776 published The Wealth of Nations. In 1778 I was appointed a Commissioner of Customs for Scotland and took the lease on Panmure House, a substantial seventeenth-century house off the Canongate in Edinburgh's Old Town. My mother came with me, and my cousin Janet Douglas kept house for us. It was an unexpected end to my career, for the man who had argued for freer trade was now responsible for collecting duties; but I did the work diligently, and walked each day to the Customs House. Panmure House became a centre of the Scottish Enlightenment. On Sunday evenings my friends gathered there for supper and conversation, among them the chemist Joseph Black and the geologist James Hutton, and with them I founded the Oyster Club, which met weekly in the town. In this house I revised The Wealth of Nations through several editions and The Theory of Moral Sentiments. I asked Black and Hutton to burn most of my unfinished papers, for I would not have half-formed work survive. Today Panmure House has been restored by Edinburgh Business School as a place for debate and ideas, a fitting use for a house built on conversation.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today