Richard Cantillon
Entrepreneur and Economist

This is a study of Irish-born Richard Cantillon, eighteenth century banker and economist whose Essai sur la Nature du Commerce en General (1755), published twenty-one years after his death, remains a significant contribution to the development of monetary theory. Cantillon's life was an exciting story of involvement in high-level international banking, and speculation in foreign exchanges, commodities and stocks at the time of the South Sea Bubble. His death occurred in mysterious circumstances.

Antoin E. Murphy is a retired Professor of Economics and Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin. He was a visiting scholar at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard, the Institut d'Études Démographiques in Paris, the Hoover Institution, and the Department of Economics at Stanford University. His special interests are in macroeconomics, monetary economics, and the history of monetary thought. He was one of the founding and joint managing editors of the European Journal of the History of Economic Thought.