Richard Cantillon

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.

It is a remarkable story, and the complexities of Cantillon's affairs are unravelled by Antoin Murphy with marvellous lucidity. Read it as an account of high finance in an age when financial sophistication was galloping ahead of the appropriate codes of business ethics. It must surely establish Cantillon's biographer as a master of this difficult genre of historical writing.

• 1: Introduction 2: Richard Cantillon's Background 3: Cantillon's Early Career 4: Cantillon's Début as a Banker in Paris, 1714-17 5: John Law and Richard Cantillon: The First Mississippi Fortune-Phase One 6: Bernard Cantillon's Expedition to Louisiana, 1719 7: Lady Mary Herbert and Joseph Gage: Two of the Great Speculators of the Age 8: The Mississippi System-Phase Two 9: London and Amsterdam: The Great Crashes in these Cities in 1720 10: The Rich Mississippian and his Wife Mary Anne 11: Debt Collection and its Legal Consequences 12: The Strange Accusations of Christopher Balfe 13: The Writing and Contents of the Essai sur la nature du commerce en général 14: The Demise of Richard Cantillon 15: The Publication of the Essai in 1755 Concluding Note