Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations is one of history's most revolutionary works on economics, with basic principles that remain applicable to today's business world. Smith wrote it in an effort to transform the way Europeans created and sold products and to promote the concept of a free market. The book was a catalyst for change, quickly spreading revolutionary new methods around the world to improve Europe's financial systems by making them more productive. He promoted the concept of specialization in products conducive to a country's resources and skills. This period, known as the Industrial and Agricultural Revolution, was marked by an economy that had both positive and negative aspects. The Industrial Revolution brought certain benefits, such as longer life expectancy and new technologies. It also led to changes that Smith had not anticipated, such as the rise of the bourgeoisie as the leading power, extremely poor living conditions for the working class, and horrible working conditions for women and children. . , the industrial revolution begins to take shape. Smith's idea of ​​an assembly line led to the creation of factories or actual buildings used solely for production tasks. This replaced the use of homes as workplaces, freeing up homes to serve solely as family housing. At the time of the Industrial Revolution, the only way to power these factories was through hydropower or burning coal. Since energy sources were very limited, factories were only built in rural areas in order to be close to energy sources, such as rivers or coal mines (Engels: Industrial Manchester, 1). What did this lead to? Factories and m......middle of paper......isiie and the creation of monopolies. Unlike the aristocrats, who seemed to work together to ensure that they all possessed wealth, the bourgeoisie competed fiercely with each other. Employers, as previously noted, paid workers virtually no wages. They understood that lowering their prices by lowering wages was the best way to compete with each other. They also began to internalize the idea of ​​monopolies, which put all new small business owners out of work and made entrepreneurship very difficult. Overall, Smith could not have predicted the many effects that occurred after the publication of The Wealth of Nations. He focused primarily on how factory manufacturers would be "destined to meet the great wants of the great mass of the people." The good of his work truly outweighs the harmful effects of the revolution. Works Cited Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations