# All Servants and Labourers — The Wealth of Nations character guide

> All Servants and Labourers in The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.

**Role:** supporting

**Also known as:** all servants and labourers, their

**First appearance:** 0011-viii-of-the-wages-of-labour

## Snapshot

The vast collective of workers — menial, professional, and public — whose labour sustains the nation but does not always enlarge its capital.

## Who they are

Smith gathers servants, soldiers, lawyers, musicians, and labourers into one sweeping category to make a hard analytical point: not all work is productive in the sense of replacing and augmenting capital. Their maintenance draws on the same annual produce that funds everyone else, so the proportion of such hands matters enormously. This distinction underpins the book's middle chapters on accumulation, where the line between productive and unproductive labour quietly decides a nation's growth.

## Relationships

### [The Employer](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_wealth_of_nations_se/characters/the_employer)

_professional_

All servants and labourers have a clear employer-employee relationship with the employer.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_wealth_of_nations_se/characters/all_servants_and_labourers
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_wealth_of_nations_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_wealth_of_nations_se/characters