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The Tercentenary of Henry Martyn's Considerations upon the East-India Trade

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2009

Andrea Maneschi
Andrea Maneschi
Affiliation:
Department of EconomicsVanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA.
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Extract

Henry Martyn's Considerations Upon the East-India Trade, published anonymously in 1701, stands out as a major contribution to the field of political economy that took root in Britain in the eighteenth century, and to the demonstration of the gains from free trade (Martyn 1701). Martyn provided one of the earliest formulations (and by far the clearest) of what Jacob Viner termed the “eighteenth-century rule” for the gains from trade, that “it pays to import commodities from abroad whenever they can be obtained in exchange for exports at a smaller real cost than their production at home would entail” (Viner 1937, p. 440). The numerical examples that Martyn used to illustrate it went even beyond the case for free trade advanced seventy-five years later by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. Martyn's tract contains other remarkable insights that became important features of classical political economy, such as the nature and advantages of the division of labor, the dependence of the latter on the extent of the market, the workings of a market economy, the role of money, and the impact of international trade on resource allocation, on productivity, and on economic welfare.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the History of Economic Thought , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , June 2002 , pp. 233 - 249
Copyright
Copyright © The History of Economics Society 2002

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