Turgot’s first published piece on economics, a translation of the second part of Tucker’s Reflections on the Expediency of a Law for the Naturalisation of Foreign Protestants (1752). Tucker wrote the first part of his tract in 1751 in support of Robert Nugent’s bill to relax British naturalisation laws against foreign protestants, a bill that would prove controversial and ultimately fail. It was in the present second part, published the following year, in which Tucker “developed the established theory that a concentrated, industrious population generated economic success. The opposition to the naturalisation bill was generated, he believed, by both bigotry and entrenched, monopolistic vested self-interest” (ODNB).
Turgot’s translation of this part of the treatise was appended with his own notes, which are significant for several reasons: “in the first place, because several of this notes once more reveal at this still early stage of his career, the tremendous importance of free competition and free trade in the development of Turgot’s economic thought. Further, they reveal the fact that thanks to Gournay Turgot’s economics came under the influence of English economics to a far greater extent than that of his French contemporaries who were followers of Quesnay” (Groenewegen, The Economics of A. R. J. Turgot, p. xiv). Turgot is also known from his correspondence to have later translated another of Tucker’s tracts, ‘On Going to War for the Sake of Trade Wars’ (1763), but his translation was not published and is now lost (see Stephens, The Life and Writings of Turgot, p. 291).
Turgot praised Tucker (together with Adam Smith) in 1778 letter to Richard Price as one of the two “political writers on commerce” in Britain who did not support “the system of monopoly and exclusion”.
Provenance: Contemporary marginal ink annotations, largely correcting the translation, to pp. vi, ix, x, 14, 53, 68, 117. Small modern book label of Peter Stewart Young, Tillingham.
Rare. ESTC lists only 4 UK copies (BL, 2 copies at Trinity College Cambridge, and LSE). OCLC adds another copy in the UK, held by the National Library of Scotland. RareBookHub / ABPC list only one copy to have appeared at auction.
Kress, 5481; Goldsmiths, 9023; Einaudi, 5757; Barbier III, 1157 f.
