The honor of being called the "father of modern economics" belongs, then, not to its usual recipient, Adam Smith, but to a gallicized Irish merchant, banker, and adventurer who wrote the first treatise on economics more than four decades before the publication of the Wealth of Nations. Richard Cantillon (1680s–1734) is one of the most fascinating characters in the history of social or economic thought. Little is known about Cantillon's life except the fact that he died a multimillionaire, but the best modern researches show that he was born in County Kerry of a family of Irish landed gentry who had been dispossessed by the depredations of the English Puritan invader Oliver Cromwell. Cantillon's first cousin once removed, also named Richard, emigrated to Paris to become a successful banker, thereby perpetuating the tradition, born in the 16th century, of religiopolitical exiles from Britain emigrating to France.1 The Cantillons were part of the Catholic emigration, centering, by the end of the 17th century, on the Stuart pretender to the throne of Great Britain.
Richard Cantillon joined the emigration to Paris in 1714, quickly becoming the chief assistant to his cousin at the latter's bank. Moreover, Richard's mother's uncle, Sir Daniel Arthur, was a prominent banker in London and Paris, and Arthur had named Richard's cousin as the Paris correspondent of his London-based bank.2 In two years, Cantillon was in a position to buy his cousin's ownership of the bank.