The first British figure of consequence in the development of economics was William Petty (1623–1687), the Fellow of the Royal Society whom we met in Chapter 23 and who coined the phrase ‘Political Arithmetick’, the title of one of his books. He attempted a comprehensive quantification of Britain’s capital assets, public finances and population (harder than it sounds, because Parliament did not sanction a census until 1801, and it wasn’t comprehensive until1851).
