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...
Thomas Tooke was the founder of the contra-quantity theory of money – the view that monetary policy is powerless to influence prices because the supply of money depends on the flow of money expenditure and hence is the result and not the...
The importance of Whewell, Lardner and Babbage to the history of economic thought is as dependent upon the retrospective reading of their work as it is upon their contemporary significance. However, their individual reactions to the ind...
George Scrope was a prolific anti-Ricardian Tory economist, Member of Parliament and Fellow of the Royal Society. However, this was a highly eccentric toryism. Scrope opposed the Malthusian theory of population, favoured free trade and...
Mill, Rae, West and Joplin were, until recently, relegated to the footnotes of the history of economic thought. In particular, Rae’s New Principles on the Subject of Political Economy was not reprinted until the 1960s and John Mill has...
