ABSTRACT
William Petty is described, for instance, as "the initiator of English classical economics". As it turned out, Petty was readily forgiven his Cromwellian past, and was willingly accepted back into Restoration 'society'. Petty tenure of these lands was precarious, however, and he, like all his fellow beneficiaries of the Cromwellian settlement, lived in the fear that "a new settlement, unsettlement, resettlement, a new 'resumption', confiscation, revolution, or general bedevilment of all things, might come upon them any day". Many historians of economic thought provide little more by way of explanation of the phenomenon of Petty's 'anticipations' than the assertion that he was endowed with exceptional intellectual gifts. Much of the existing literature on the history of economic thought adopts a retrospective, or 'Whig', approach, 167 resulting in the assessment of the contribution of pioneering writers such as Petty in terms of the extent to which they anticipated the theories of Smithian and post-Smithian economic thought.
