† Marx regarded Sir William Petty (1623–87) as the founder of that ‘classical’ political economy which, for all the limitations of its bourgeois standpoint, did ‘;investigate the real internal framework of bourgeois relations of production’, as opposed to the mere apologetics of the ‘vulgar economists ’ (Volume 1, pp. 174–5, note 34). The specific reference here is to Petty’s A Treatise of Taxes and Contributions, London, 1667, pp. 23–4. (See also Theories of Surplus-Value, Part I, pp. 176–7 and 344 ff.)
Richard Cantillon, Essai sur la nature du commerce en général, Amsterdam, 1756. Cantillon (1680–1734) was in fact an English economist and merchant, despite his book being published in Holland in French.