Cantillon was an Irishman of Norman origins and Jacobite connections who spent much of his life in France. He took over the bankrupt banking business of an uncle of the same name in Paris and made a fortune from the collapse of John Law’s Mississippi Scheme (a colonial development project whose profits could not match the expectations stirred up by speculators). He operated as a financier in a number of centres, including Amsterdam, where his transactions were on a large scale.
Cantillon was murdered by a dismissed cook who then robbed and set fire to his house. Cantillon’s fame rests entirely on the one work which survived the blaze, his Essai sur la nature du commerce en général, written about 1730–34 and published by the Marquis de Mirabeau in 1755. Its treatment of population influenced Mirabeau and Adam Smith and, through the latter, Malthus. It contained a theory of relative wages which was used by Smith; the famous Tableau économique of the Physiocrats was probably inspired by the Essai, and the treatment of the theory of money was of pioneering importance. The Essai also contains his theories of wages, prices, and interest, the workings of currency circulation, the role of precious metals in the international economy, and other subjects.