LAW, John.

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Considerations sur le Commerce et sur l'Argent. Traduit de l'Anglois. First edition in French of Law's seminal disequilibrium theory of money, published as the Mississippi Bubble was coming close to bursting. By 1720, Law had finally been appointed minister of finance in France and was in near-total command of the French economy. At the same time, his scheme to monopolize the commercial development of French North America was running into difficulties: shares in the Mississippi Company stagnated amid increasing reports of underdevelopment in the French colonies. By December, these shares had crashed completely, sparking a general stock market crash in France and prompting Law to flee to Venice. Considerations had originally been published in English, as Money and Trade Considered, in 1705, when Law was attempting to persuade the Scottish government of his ideas. He was bitterly opposed to this French edition, not least because it revealed details of the man he had killed in a duel 25 years earlier. Although ruinous to many individual investors, Law's system is generally credited with stimulating the French economy exhausted after Louis XIV's wars.

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