From ‘the Planting of People’ to the ‘Natural Growth of Settlements’

This chapter focuses on the significance of the occurrence in the writings of both Daniel Defoe and Richard Cantillon of simple accounts of the emergence of human settlements and of central marketplaces. It first traces the evolution of Defoe&s;s depictions of the ‘planting of people’ through his various writings, and it is shown that this author took successive steps towards fictionalising what was originally a plan for an actual settlement project in order to develop a kind of economic parable. Thereafter, the chapter examines the traces of this parable in Cantillon&s;s writings. It is shown that the parallels between Defoe&s;s final account in A Plan and that found in Philip Cantillon&s;s Analysis are such that it is scarcely possible to doubt a literary dependence of the latter on the former. Although the connection with the account as it appears in Richard Cantillon&s;s Essai is less straightforward, it is argued that the French version of Cantillon&s;s work, which was apparently based on a more advanced manuscript than the one from which the Analysis derived, retained enough passages that are similar to ones found in Defoe&s;s Plan to suggest that Richard Cantillon knew that work. Beyond a concern with literary dependency, the chapter then considers how Cantillon seems to have recast Defoe&s;s parable for his own theoretical purposes, retaining only their ‘natural’ essentials and infusing them with more overt economic reasoning. The conclusion addresses the consequences for our understanding of Cantillon&s;s seminal attempt in the Essay to develop a new kind of economic discourse, which was successful to such an extent that it has often been considered ‘the first treatise on economics’.