Everyone has to eat, so those who produce food must produce enough to feed themselves and to feed all those who do not produce their own food. Once stated. this is trivially obvious but, I will argue, making that simple relation between agriculture and the rest of the economy explicit and, at...

Among other innovative and important contributions to the formation of political economy, William Petty is the originator of the concept of an economic or social surplus, a vital element in the formation of classical economics. It therefore is a natural and intriguing question, how Petty came to...

Both William Petty (1623 to 1687) and Adam Smith (1723 to 1790) were concerned with the question of how to increase productivity. In this connection, they both addressed the issues of technological invention and the organisation of the production process, but in very different ways. Petty...

The R. Cantillon’s Essai sur la nature du commerce en général (1755) is considered a major work in the context of the economic literature of the European Enlightenment, and, therefore, its analytical and normative aspects have been widely studied. However, the characteristics of its...