Adam Smith lifted contemporaneous economic thinking from the minutia into which it had fallen and he was able to re-state the function and role of commerce in a nation's economic life in the context of broader issues. His seventeenth-century predecessors had been concerned with questions that had a vital bearing on domestic and international prosperity. However, as the cycles of misery wrought by wars, pestilence, and economic depressions gradually receded in the face of the stabler conditions of the eighteenth century, the writers of pamphlets and tracts settled down to the discussion of largely recondite matters. This intellectual heritage pursued even Adam Smith and his most-quoted and fundamental statement on trade followed on from a discourse on the monetary practices of the Cossacks, Merovingian kings and Saxon princes. According to Smith two distinct benefits were associated with trade. ‘It carries out that surplus part of the produce of their land and labour for which there is no demand among them, and brings back in return for it something else for which there is a demand. It gives a value to their superfluities, by exchanging them for something else, which may satisfy a part of their wants, and increase their enjoyments. By means of it, the narrowness of the home market does not hinder the division of labour in any particular branch of art or manufacture from being carried to the highest perfection. By opening a more extensive market for whatever part of the produce of their labour may exceed the home consumption, it encourages them to improve their productive powers and to augment its annual produce to the utmost.’