Whereas most of his contemporaries described historical evolution in terms of the romance of natural law, Steuart (ibid., 1:237) was willing to investigate the real forces that caused “men… to submit to labour.” His sophisticated application of the classical theory of primitive accumulation made his work an embarrassment to the mainstream political economists who pretended that capitalist development was a voluntary affair. In this respect, he was far more truthful than the rest of the classical political economists combined.
