Richard van den Berg delights in puzzles. That is all for the best, since Richard Cantillon’s life and work contain so many of them, and van den Berg is so clever and patient in handling them. Cantillon may have been murdered and burnt in his London home in 1734, or perhaps the headless corpse discovered in the ashes was a decoy that allowed him to slip away to Surinam. Conveniently, no portrait existed to aid identification. But the nature of his demise is not the main mystery that runs throughout this variorum edition of Cantillon’s Essay on the Nature of Trade in General. The real mystery concerns the existence and influence of additional manuscript versions of this great work. These may have been lost to the moist Surinamese climate, or they may be patiently awaiting the right moment to reappear.

So this variorum edition constantly questions its completeness. Van den Berg draws from no less than eleven different sources, some clearly more important than others. Rather than weaving the eleven into one text and relegating variations to an appendix, van den Berg arranges them like puzzle pieces on a tray—in such a way that the reader can scan across the page and take them all in simultaneously. There is no flipping forwards and backwards between a main text and an appendix, because all the relevant information is right in front of you. As the book sits open before you, both the left (verso) and right (recto) pages are in use simultaneously, thus doubling the space upon which the puzzle pieces can be laid out. Consequently, each book opening can accommodate six columns of information, which are referenced and tied together by a clear paragraph-numbering system. This layout urges and allows readers to draw their own conclusions about how the pieces fit together.

The provenance of the sources is discussed in considerable detail in the second chapter, on the historical background to the texts. The text of the 1755 print edition appears in the first of the six columns; this was likely published, according to Antoin E. Murphy (Reference Murphy1986, pp. 306–308), with permission tacit by Pierre André Guillyn. The fifth column reports variations found in two manuscripts at the Archives National and one at the municipal library of Rouen, all closely connected with Honoré-Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau. The manuscript recently discovered at the Archives National by Christine Théré and Loïc Charles has, for instance, both an introduction and running commentary supplied by Mirabeau. Van den Berg (p. 15) strongly suspects that the Archives National manuscripts derive from the “most authentic French source for Cantillon’s ideas that we have”: the Rouen manuscript. Unlike the two manuscripts in the Archives National, the Rouen manuscript contains none of Mirabeau’s interventions. The only differences between the published Essay and the Rouen manuscript lie in the removal of Anglicisms and better grammar. In the few cases where their conceptual content differs due to change in wording, van den Berg demonstrates that the Rouen manuscript contains the more coherent formulation.

Readers of Henry Higgs’s popular translation of the Essay (which helpfully appears in the fourth column) have long known that Malachy Postlethwayt’s Dictionary reproduced considerable parts of Cantillion’s work, but Higgs was content to provide a table of the borrowings and not the text. This edition provides relevant text from the Dictionary alongside selected text from Philip Cantillon’s 1759 The Analysis of Trade and Commerce (in columns two and three). Together, these are van den Berg’s English sources, and the combination of striking similarities, together with important differences, hints at the existence of yet more manuscripts of the Essay, each of which presumably differed in informative ways from the French. The sixth column, containing van den Berg’s comments, proves to be particularly important for the English sources, as it gives the date at which, so far as it can be pinned down, each entry in Postlethwayt’s Dictionary first appeared in print. This is of some importance, as we are informed that the Dictionary first appeared as a serial publication in weekly installments. For example, C338, which is the commentary provided for paragraph 338, informs us that the entry “Money” appeared in issue 108 of the Dictionary, which was “first published around April or May 1754.” Hence, we can very quickly verify that if David Hume somehow came into contact with this aspect of Cantillon’s monetary analysis prior to writing his essay “Of Money,” it certainly wasn’t through this issue. The similarities between the two English versions support van den Berg’s view that both sources draw from authentic Cantillon manuscripts, while the substantial differences suggest, as van den Berg (Reference van den Berg2012) has previously argued, that Philip Cantillon had access to a particularly early manuscript that contains a less subtle monetary analysis—one that had not yet moved much beyond John Locke’s handling of the quantity theory. In contrast, van den Berg gives the impression that the Dictionary may have been drawn from fragments of a manuscript that was even more sophisticated than the 1755 published Essay. Here, van den Berg (p. 34) strikes a similar note to Murphy (Reference Murphy2009, p. 83), and it is worth observing that these authorities appear to be in harmony on this particularly important point, as well as many others. Despite their numerous difficulties, the English texts contain significant variations that carry information not found in the French 1755 edition. Higgs’s reliance upon these versions is brought clearly into view, as one only has to glance between the conveniently neighboring second, third, and fourth columns.

It is characteristic of van den Berg’s scholarship and seemingly relentless archival thoroughness that the volume opens with a hitherto unknown epigraph warning readers of the March 18–22 London Gazette of 1718 that an “unknown Person, who goes by the Name of Richard Cantillon,” has been passing bad bills and should not be trusted, however plausibly he talks of “Matters of Trade.” According to Mirabeau, his knowledge of trade was sufficiently acute that “[he] foresaw the complete course of the famous system of Mr. Law, and compelled by circumstances to take part in it, he quitted the theatre of this astonishing revolution leaving his correspondent with orders in advance as to the different stages of the cycle which this catastrophe would run” (quoted in Murphy Reference Murphy1986, p. 82).

Above all, Cantillon’s Essay is systematic and integrated. According to its tripartite structure, the activity of financial institutions and international financial flows can either be at odds with, or in line with, the economic fundamentals set out in the first of its three parts. Cantillon’s trading strategy is rightly seen as an expression of this systematic analysis, as well as its ringing vindication. The financial turbulence of the past decade underlines the continued relevance of Cantillon’s seminal analysis, so we are very fortunate indeed to have this extremely helpful and clearly authoritative edition to hand.