Notes
1 Subsistence commodities should always be part of wages; on this problem, see Roncaglia (1975, chapter 4). Here I do not discuss the issue of the measurement of this surplus but I simply recall that a bundle, a vector, of physical commodities does exist.
2 On the defeat of the so called “bullionism,” see Appleby (1978, 202).
3 A wider discussion of Petty's view on the division of labor is in Aspromourgos (1986, 29-32).
4 This point is dealt at length in Roncaglia (1977, chapter8).
5 The limits of Cantillon's concept of profit have been examined elsewhere (see Vaggi, 1990, 1-2).
6 Herlitz regards Cantillon as the most rational supporter of mercantilism (see Herlitz, 1988, 25).
7 The subsistence of men is the foundation of society.
8 Quesnay's ideal economy has been defined as a sort of agrarian capitalism (see Hoselitz, 1968, 661-62).
9 This is the ratio that characterizes large-scale cultivation and is assumed to be the one in operation in the 1759 Tableau economique (see “Extrait des economies royales de M. De Sully,” in Kuzcynski and Meek, 1972, 6).
10 According to some of the best explanations of Asian economic growth, the above nexus is one of the major economic mechanisms that help to understand the East Asian miracle (see, for instance, Wade, 1990 and UNCTAD, 1996).
11 On the tableau as an early linear production model, see the very interesting paper by Van den Berg and Steenge (2016).
12 On some precapitalistic modes of production in agriculture, see, for instance, Bhaduri (1983, chapter4).
13 The Maximesgenerals... were published in the 1767 in the Physiocratie by Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours. A similar text is in the note to maxime XIV in the Extrait des economies royales de M. De Sully, in the third edition of the Tableau economique, in the first months of the 1759 (Kuzcynski and Meek, 1972, 10).
14 Notice that the division of labor is a typical feature of a civilized state vis-a-vis a primitive one. On the four stages theory in Smith and in the eighteenth-century debates in France, see Meek (1976). Turgot, too, provides a very interesting analysis of the division of labor (see the chapter by Peter Groenewegen (2017) in this book).
15 On Smith's view about international trade and the sale of a growing output, the so-called vent for surplus argument, see Myint (1977).
16 Remember that Smith uses the term “stock” where we now use “capital.”
17 For a description of the different views on the division of labor of some classical authors and their relationship to modern development issues, see Sai-wing Ho (2016).
18 In sub-Saharan Africa, agricultural output per person is now only slightly higher than in the early 1960s.