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this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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The BBC sure seems to think so
Steam engines - primitive ones - were first used in 1712, and The Wealth of Nations was written in 1776. Based on that timing I'd say industrialization caused capitalism, not the other way around.
Tell me you never read beyond cherry-picking a headline without telling me. Often regarded as the founder of the field of Economist, Adam Smith was a philosopher who wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, which was the culmination of decades of studying the relationships between labor, capital, and markets (among other things.) This was during the early days of the industrial revolution.
Claiming he invented capitalism is like saying clouds bring rain. I am no historian, so I don't claim one caused the other and I don't really care all that much. But I DO know things are rarely so black and white as to have a single cause. And I know for damn sure Smith didn't invent capitalism. Capitalism had to already exist for him to write a book studying it.
Trade and markets have existed for a long time, but prior to Hume and Smith the dominant economic model was mercantilism which asserted that there was a finite amount of money in the world and you could only get richer at the expense of others.
They looked at this and re-interpreted it, subverting the dominant paradigm. That sounds like invention to me.
Much ink has been spilled by historians on the roots of capitalism, and while there isn't a true consensus on precisely where or when capitalism properly emerged, there is a consensus that capitalism existed long before Adam Smith, before the Industrial Revolution, before the field of economics existed, and before the rise of industrial capitalism which you seem to have conflated with capitalism more broadly.
Industrialization may or may not have been "caused" by capitalism, better minds than I will have to answer that. That said, if you can't understand how capitalism and the cost of labor were likely factors in the rise of automation and industrialization, then I guess we have nothing more to say to one another.