Dialogues Sur Le Commerce Des Bleds

Ferdinando Galiani

Londres [Paris, Merlin], 1770

Octavo. [4], 314, [1] p. Quarter leather over marbled boards.  Raised bands, brown leather spine label, marbled endpapers. Rubbing, library labels to spine. Institutional stamps on title pages. Notation to first blank, marginalia in colored pencil. Last 4 pages have chipping at top margin, does not affect text. 

First edition of a controversial critique of the 1764 French royal edict liberalizing grain exports, arguing against the free trade policy advocated by the Physiocrats. Ferdinando Galiani was an Italian economist, a leading Italian figure of the Enlightenment. His economic reputation was made by Dialogues sur le commerce des bles, "Dialogues on the commerce in wheat". This work, by its light and pleasing style, and its vivacious wit, delighted Voltaire, who described it as a cross between Plato and Moliere. The author, says Giuseppe Pecchio, treated his arid subject as Fontenelle did the vortices of Descartes, or Algarotti the Newtonian system of the world. The question at issue was that of the freedom of the corn trade, then much agitated, and, in particular, the policy of the royal edict of 1764, which permitted the exportation of grain so long as the price had not arrived at a certain height. The general principle he maintains is that the best system in regard to this trade is to have no system - countries of different circumstances requiring, according to him, different modes of treatment. He fell, however, into some of the most serious errors of the mercantilists - holding, as indeed did also Voltaire and even Pietro Verri, that one country cannot gain without another losing, and in his earlier treatise going so far as to defend the action of governments in debasing the currency. Hutchinson, Before Adam Smith, pp. 255-256 and p. 269). Kress S.4633; Goldsmiths 10642; Einaudi 4026; Mattioli 2483; INED 3314; Leblanc, De Thomas More Chaptal, 120; Higgs 4942; Conlon 70:1235.