Richard Cantillon was the first to see the economy as an interrelated whole and to give a coherent account of how it works. This is the first comprehensive study of his economic theory & of his place in the history of the subject.

Richard Cantillon, writing fifty years before Adam Smith, was the first to see the economy as an interrelated whole, and the first to give a coherent account of how it works. This is the first comprehensive study of his economic theory and of his place in the history of the subject.

`The comprehensiveness of Brewer's coverage of Cantillon's Essai, and his very clear and illuminating discussion of Cantillon's relationships to his predecessors and his successors, will ensure that this book becomes, alongside Murphy's biography, one of the standard works on someone who must rank as one of the greatest economic theorists of all time.' - Roger E. Backhouse, THES, Jan '93