Richard Cantillon was an 18th-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 20 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...