William Smart (1853–1915) was a British economic historian. Public information on his full name and life is limited, and his scholarly identity is known mainly from bibliographic records in the history of economics. One work by him is held in this collection, Women's Wages, which examines the wages of working women in nineteenth-century Britain and relates wage levels to economic conditions such as employment structure and living costs; it belongs to empirical writing at the intersection of economic history and labour questions. Smart's prose emphasizes the ordering of historical facts and data rather than abstract argument, and his plain, restrained account offers chronicle-style material useful to later research on women's pay in the nineteenth century. He is also known for a chronicle of nineteenth-century economic history, indicating that his scholarly focus lay in recording and organizing British economic history of that century.
