Over and above the fact that “work” described exactly what steam engines were designed to do, the French word for work, travail, has a poetic quality that is absent in many other languages. It connotes not just effort but also suffering, and so evoked the recent tribulations of France’s Third Estate—the lower classes—that had labored for so long under the yoke of wigged aristocrats and monarchs with a taste for grandeur. And in linking the potential of machines to liberate the peasantry from a life of labor, he invoked an embryonic version of the dream, later taken up by John Maynard Keynes, of technology leading us to a promised land.

When it came to matters like hunting, some important knowledge could be transmitted using words—like where one might find some diamphidia larvae to poison an arrowhead, or which animal sinews made the best bowstrings. But the most important forms of knowledge could not. This kind of knowledge, they insisted, could not be taught because it resided not just in their minds but also in their bodies, and because it found expression in skills that could never be reduced to mere words.

The Wealth of Nations has a biblical quality to it, not least because Smith had a particular genius for presenting complex ideas in the form of neat parables similar in structure to those that were issued from church pulpits across the land every Sunday.

And so the Africans speak. The book’s impulse to get on with the real discovery of some truth by allowing peoples to speak for themselves is emblematic of Morrison’s editorship in many ways. She and the editors made no effort to limit the texts to those written to a white audience or to those that could be easily understood in a Western context. Rather, the tales, fiction, poetry, drama, and non-fiction alike were informed by social, political, and cultural experiences and traditions that challenged the primacy of Western ideals as universal. Ideally, this approach would prompt readers to understand that there were multiple worldviews, that Western ways of thinking and being were one among many.

What Morrison’s decision to publish the book revealed was her willingness if not determination to rewrite history more honestly in the tradition of the Black Studies movement, which challenged dominant narratives that mischaracterized, marginalized, and erased African and African diaspora contributions to world history. The look beyond the domestic and accepted histories of civilization held a unique appeal to Morrison. The interplay between culture-shifting books, literary books, and commercially successful ones exemplified her innovative approach to editing.