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Hello, an eminent French economist of the 18th century, the market admirable,

believed that three inventions that enabled the emergence of stable political societies.

The first of these was writing, the second was money,

and the third he wrote was,

the economical table, the great discovery of our age,

of which posterity will reap the benefit.

Few people today have heard of the economical table,

but it's a landmark in financial history.

It was an economic model formulated by François Kenne,

the founder of the Physiocrats, a school of thought,

which dominated French economics and politics in the 18th century.

The Physiocrats believed that agriculture was the ultimate source of all wealth.

Their insistence that government should not interfere in trade

made a deep impression on Adam Smith.

In the world of nations, Smith described the physiocratic system as

the nearest approximation to the truth

that has yet been published upon the subject of political economy.

When me to discuss the physiocrats are Richard Watmore,

professor of intellectual history at the University of Sussex,

...