Richard Cantillon's Essay on the Nature of Trade in General
A Variorum Edition
Routledge Studies in the History of Economics Series

The Essay on the Nature of Trade in General was written in the early 1730s by Richard Cantillon, a speculator and banker who had made a vast fortune during the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles of 1719-20. The work remained unpublished for about two decades, but when it appeared posthumously in Paris in 1755 the book was immediately recognised as a brilliant genre-defining contribution to the then emerging intellectual discipline of political economy.

A degree of mystery has always surrounded the publication of the Essay. Cantillon died under mysterious circumstances in 1734, but the work survived in various manuscript forms. This edition offers an innovative mode of presentation, displaying for the very first time all print and manuscript versions of the Essay in parallel. This allows the reader to appreciate different formulations of Cantillon?s seminal contributions to a range of topics, including his circular flow analysis, monetary theory, theories of value and distribution, the role of the entrepreneur, spatial economics and international trade.

Richly annotated and accompanied by a detailed study of the historical background of Cantillon?s writings, this new scholarly edition offers many new insights into this early masterpiece of economic theory.

Preface 1 Introduction2 Historical backgrounds to the texts 2.1 The French versions 2.1.1 The print editions 2.1.2 The French manuscript versions 2.1.3 Variations between the French versions 2.2 The English versions 2.2.1 The Fragments in Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary 2.2.2 Philip Cantillon’s Analysis 3 The Higgs translation4 The uses of this edition Presentation of the texts

Richard van den Berg is Associate Professor of Accounting, Finance and Informatics at Kingston University, UK.