Which economic work did Adam Smith publish in 1776?

The Wealth of Nations, and it is quoted far more often than it is read. The invisible hand appears exactly once in nine hundred pages, in a passage about merchants preferring to invest at home; Smith uses it three times in his entire output and never as the slogan it has become.

He was a moral philosopher and considered his other book the more important one. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, seventeen years earlier, argues that human behaviour rests on sympathy - the capacity to imagine yourself into another's position - and he revised it until the year he died. Reading the two together produces a rather different Smith from the one invoked in political argument.

The Wealth of Nations is also frequently hostile to business. Smith warns that people of the same trade seldom meet without the conversation ending in a conspiracy against the public, attacks monopolies and the East India Company at length, supports progressive taxation and public education, and observes that whenever employers and workers negotiate, the law and the ability to hold out are on the employers' side. He is claimed by people who would find large parts of him uncomfortable.