Cantillon is generally recognized as one of the most important predecessors of Adam Smith and of classical economics. His account of the workings of the economy provided a strong, if implicit, case for the efficiency of markets. In particular, his argument that the owner of a large estate need not manage it himself, but can rent the farms to individual farmers and rely on the market mechanism to supply him with everything that he could have got by ordering its production himself, makes a strong case for the market. His distinction between market price and (cost-based) intrinsic value is very much in the classical tradition, as is his theory of wages and of population. Above all, he was one of the first to show a clear under­ standing of the specie-flow mechanism, which is sometimes thought to be the decisive refutation of mercantilist theories.1