Jean-François Melon (1675–1738) was the most widely read European political economist before Adam Smith. This book is the first collection dedicated to exploring the context, message, and reach of Melon’s work.

The leitmotif of commerce versus conquest offers a key to Melon’s vision. He argued that a new kind of commercial state must displace the war-oriented regimes of the past. The vitality of commerce was the crowning achievement and natural outcome of well-conceived statecraft, not simply a means to other ends. His Essai politique sur le commerce (1734, rev. 1736), which circulated in ten French-language editions and was translated into eight other languages, was the first comprehensive outline of a political economy appropriate for the modern state, overturning many contemporary conventions. Commerce versus Conquest explores the settings in which Melon wrote and the debates his work generated both within the French context and in translation. It also offers the first English translations of several key works by Melon including three new chapters of the expanded 1736 edition of the Essai.

This volume is intended for scholars and students of the history of economic thought, the history of political thought, French intellectual history, Enlightenment studies, and the history of capitalism.

John Shovlin is Professor of History at New York University. He is the author of Trading with the Enemy: Britain, France, and the 18th-Century Quest for a Peaceful World Order (2021) and The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism and the Origins of the French Revolution (2006).

Koen Stapelbroek is Professor of Humanities at James Cook University. He is the author of Love, Self-Deceit and Money: Commerce and Morality in the Early Neapolitan Enlightenment (2008) and has edited numerous collective volumes and special issues on eighteenth-century history and political thought.