The Mercantilist School never presented a common front but is associated with a common outlook: the idea of specie or bullion as the essence of wealth and the notion that a positive balance of trade is an index of national welfare. It i...
This volume presents critical writings on the work of the later mercantilists. Sir Josiah Child was elected a governor of the East India Company in 1681. His reputation as an economist rests on his book ‘A New Discourse of Trade’ publis...
Charles Davenant was one of the leading economic pamphleteers of the 1690s. He frequently developed general principles, some of which sound almost like the early writings of Adam Smith. He was, however, a Mercantilist in the sense that...
Pierre le Pesant Boisguilbert was considered by Marx as one of the founders of classical political economy. His writings contain a large number of concepts and ideas that reappear in the writings of Quesnay, Cantillon and Adam Smith. G...
John Law was one of those extraordinary personalities in which the 18th century seemed to abound. He held a demand-and-supply theory of value and treated the value of money or the determination of the average level of prices as only a s...
Richard Cantillon was an Irish refugee who fled to France after the defeat of James II. As a business associate of John Law he sold stock on a rising market and made a fortune from the Mississippi Bubble. His one great book ‘Essay on t...
Francois Quesnay is best known for the Tableau Economique, the proposition that only agriculture generates a positive ''net product'' and that industry is ‘sterile’. He recommended a ‘single tax’ on ground rent and invented the slogan ‘...
David Hume is best known for his work on political philosophy. However, he wrote a series of essays on money, population and international trade which must rank among the major economic writings of the 18th century. Certainly they infl...
Until comparatively recently, Adam Smith was known mainly as the author of a single book, The Wealth of Nations. Modern scholarship and the greater availability of his other work has thrown new light on Adam Smith suggesting that he was...
Henry Thornton’s Inquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain (1802) is the repository of much of what is the best and most clear in modern monetary theory. However, it is only in recent years, largely throug...
Ricardo’s intellectual appeal, both amongst his contemporaries and more recently, rested on his remarkable gift for heroic abstractions: he seized hold of a wide range of significant problems with a simple analytical model and yielded, a...
Between the death of Ricardo in 1823 and the publication of J.S. Mill’s Principles of Political Economy (1848) there flourished a generation of minor but occasionally highly original English economists. Chief amongst these were Ramsay M...
