Richard Cantillon

Richard Cantillon was an 18th-century economist whose posthumously published writings analyzed entrepreneurship, money, prices, and international trade. His work helped shape early political economy.

Essai sur la nature du commerce en général: Cantillon’s posthumously published treatise on commerce, money, production, and economic organization. This is the work through which Cantillon’s economic system is chiefly known.
Cantillon effect: The uneven redistribution of purchasing power and prices as new money enters an economy at particular points. Later economists named this process after Cantillon’s account of money’s changing effects.
Essai sur la nature du commerce en général (1755): The first printed edition of Cantillon’s economic treatise, published in French in 1755. Its publication introduced Cantillon’s work to a wider European intellectual audience.
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot: A French statesman and economist associated with physiocracy and reforms of taxation and trade. Turgot developed arguments about capital and interest within a tradition Cantillon helped shape.
Entrepreneurship: The activity of organizing resources and bearing uncertainty to create or exchange goods and services. Cantillon made the entrepreneur’s exposure to uncertain prices central to economic life.
Price-specie flow mechanism: A process by which international payments shift specie and thereby alter domestic prices and trade flows. Cantillon described how monetary outflows and inflows can correct trade imbalances.
John Law: A Scottish financier whose monetary experiments in France culminated in the Mississippi Bubble. Cantillon operated amid Law’s financial system and later analyzed the dangers of monetary expansion.
Adam Smith: A Scottish moral philosopher and political economist, author of The Wealth of Nations. Smith’s analysis of markets and economic coordination followed a generation influenced by Cantillon.
Market price: The price at which a good is exchanged in a market at a particular time and place. Cantillon distinguished fluctuating market prices from prices grounded in production costs.
Entrepreneurial risk: The uncertainty entrepreneurs face when committing resources before knowing future revenues or costs. Cantillon defined entrepreneurs by buying at known costs while selling at uncertain prices.

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