First edition of this important but little-studied work on free trade for the public good by the physician and political writer Peter Paxton.

The ‘greatest secret in trade’ consists ‘in the uniting of these two different interests, viz private and public; for without a regard for the first there can be no trade, and without a regard for the second, it is better to have none’.

Developing an argument from his earlier Civil Polity (1703), which was one of only three contemporary works recommended by Locke in ‘Some thoughts concerning reading and study for a gentleman’, Paxton suggests here that a nation’s economic success consists in the benefits of trade being distributed not just to the wealthy but ‘to the mass of the people’. ‘With the help of trade, societies could spread wealth widely, thus allowing them to be both rich and free of the great disparities of economic power which would prove incompatible with liberty’ (Gunn, ‘The Civil Polity of Peter Paxton’, in Past & Present 40 (1968). Holland is held up as a notable example, its success seen as connected with both its size, which limits great acquisitiveness in land, and the absence of primogeniture, which restricts the accumulation of large estates.

‘Like some other pronounced individualists, Paxton may have been overlooked by economic historians … However, for those interested in individualism and the public good, Paxton is an important thinker. He seems to have been one of the most consistent free-traders of the period. Monopolies, bounties and duties all stood condemned as hindering the “natural course of things”. They were no more than a “violence upon nature” … for the nation’s profit was measured by the number of people profitably involved in trade’ (Gunn, Politics and Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (1969).

Little is known of Paxton’s life outside his several publications, which also include several medical works.

Goldsmiths’ 4042; Hanson 343.

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