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Cantillon, acknowledged by many historians as the first great economic "theorist", is an obscure character. This much is known: he was an Irishman with a Spanish name who lived in France and reputedly made a fortune of some twenty million livres under John Law's schemes before moving to England. He died in London - murdered by his discharged cook. His remarkable treatise, Essai Sur la Nature du Commerce en Général was written in French and published anonymously in England some twenty years after his death (some claim that what we have today is actually a French translation of a lost English original). Although his work was well-known to the Physiocrats, Cantillon fell into obscurity until resurrected and popularized by William Stanley Jevons in the 1880s.

Cantillon was one of the first to recognize the circular flow of income and set the foundations both for Physiocracy as well as Classical Political Economy.

Cantillon's system was is clear and simple and absolutely pathbreaking. He developed a two-sector general equilibrium system from which he obtained a theory of price (determined by costs of production) and a theory of output (determined by factor inputs and techology). He was also among the first to reduce labor to the amount of necessities needed to sustain it - and thus, made employment a function of the land absorption necessary to produce the necessities to feed labor and the luxuries to feed landlords. In short, he derived a "land theory of value".

As a consequence, Cantillon arrived at a quasi-Mercantilist policy conclusion for a favorable balance of trade but with a twist: he recommended the importation of "land-based products" and the exporting of "non-land-based" products as a way to increase national wealth. Cantillon was also one of the first (and among the clearest) articulators of the Quantity Theory of Money and attempted to provide much of the reasoning behind it.