Richard Cantillon: Pioneer of Economic Theory

Richard Cantillon was an eighteenth century merchant. His only surviving work, the Essai sur la nature du commerce en general was an astonishing achievement: the first analysis of the economy as an interrelated whole. Simply to sketch such a theory would have been a major advance, but Cantillon worked out the implications of his model with a rigour unmatched for a century or more. Although it was not published until twenty years after his death, and never widely known, it was a formative, if unacknowledged, influence on classical economics. This book is a study of Cantillon’s economics. In the first part, Anthony Brewer sets out Cantillon’s theory concluding with an examination of his mercantilist views. Mercantilism has been regarded as irrational ever since Smith’s attack on it, but Cantillon’s views are shown to be a logical consequence of his pioneering analysis of the workings of the international economic system. The second part of the book sets Cantillon in the context of the development of economic thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and shows that he took less from his predecessors than has been thought, and gave more to his successors than they were willing to admit.