linguistic:paraphrasing, information:classification
Intellectuals, critics, and reviewers

The first edition of the book sold out in six months. The printer William Strahan wrote on 12 April 1776 that David Hume said The Wealth of Nations required too much thought to be as popular as Edward Gibbon 's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Strahan also wrote: "What you say of Mr. Gibbon's and Dr. Smith's book is exactly just. The former is the most popular work; but the sale of the latter, though not near so rapid, has been more than I could have expected from a work that requires much thought and reflection (qualities that do not abound among modern readers) to peruse to any purpose." Gibbon wrote to Adam Ferguson on 1 April: "What an excellent work is that with which our common friend Mr. Adam Smith has enriched the public! An extensive science in a single book, and the most profound ideas expressed in the most perspicuous language". The review of the book in the Annual Register was probably written by Whig MP Edmund Burke. In 1791, the English-born radical Thomas Paine wrote in his Rights of Man that "Had Mr. Burke possessed talents similar to the author 'On the Wealth of Nations,' he would have comprehended all the parts which enter into, and, by assemblage, form a constitution."

In 1800, the Anti-Jacobin Review criticized The Wealth of Nations. In 1803, The Times argued against war with Spain:

She is our best customer; and by the gentle and peaceable stream of commerce, the treasures of the new world flow with greater certainty into English reservoirs, than it could do by the most successful warfare. They come in this way to support our manufactures, to encourage industry, to feed our poor, to pay taxes, to reward ingenuity, to diffuse riches among all classes of people. But for the full understanding of this beneficial circulation of wealth, we must refer to Dr. Adam Smith's incomparable Treatise on the Wealth of Nations.

In 1810, a correspondent writing under the pseudonym of Publicola included at the head of his letter Smith's line that "Exclusive Companies are nuisances in every respect" and called him "that learned writer". In 1812, Robert Southey of the Quarterly Review condemned The Wealth of Nations as a "tedious and hard-hearted book". In 1821, The Times quoted Smith's opinion that the interests of corn dealers and the people were the same. In 1826, the English radical William Cobbett criticised in his Rural Rides the political economists' hostility to the Poor Law: "Well, amidst all this suffering, there is one good thing; the Scotch political economy is blown to the devil, and the Edinburgh Review and Adam Smith along with it". In 1829, Thomas Carlyle named Smith as one of the philosophers of the age who taught that "our happiness depends entirely on external circumstances" and to whose eye "all is well that works quietly."

The Liberal statesman William Ewart Gladstone chaired the meeting of the Political Economy Club to celebrate the centenary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations. The Liberal historian Lord Acton believed that The Wealth of Nations gave a "scientific backbone to liberal sentiment" and that it was the "classic English philosophy of history".