TUCKER, Josiah.

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Four Letters on Important National Subjects, First edition of the author's tract advocating that Britain should allow the American colonies to secede on economic grounds. Josiah Tucker (1713-1799), economist, political writer, and Dean of Gloucester, furthers his contention that growing American self-interest would make any further participation in the British Empire impossible, and that, moreover, both parties stood to gain more as independent trading partners than as members of the same union. As H. T. Dickinson notes, Adam Smith himself was reluctantly forced to accept Tucker's analysis in the Wealth of Nations (Dickinson, p. 9). Tucker, who had criticised the long-term consequences of Britain's control of the American colonies as early as 1754, is now "increasingly recognized as an important and original eighteenth-century theorist" (ODNB).

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