ABSTRACT
Historians of economic theory and doctrine pride themselves on tracing the first articulation of a proposition further and further back in time, and there is understandably no consensus among them on who should be regarded as the first modern economist. In Europe the seventeenth century economic primacy of the Dutch had given way to the eighteenth century clash of Great Britain and France for leadership. The primal take-off of the 1780s sharply reduced attention in Great Britain to the rich country-poor country problem for about a century, shifted its locus, and transformed its terms. Great Britain was the only nation to move into take-off in the first graduating class in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. Evidently the world economy faces a difficult and potentially precarious adjustment if dynamically stable growth patterns are to be established in both the advanced industrial and developing regions.
