Hull mentions Zuckerkandl and von Bergmann in the introduction, and Ingram, Roscher, Kautz, McCulloch and Travers Twiss in the final chapter of 'Petty's Place in the History of Economic Theory'.

[2] Hull himself had published The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty (in 2 volumes), in 1899, in which he had already written a large 'Introduction', containing biographic information on Petty (and Graunt), and in which he spend quite some space on the debate concerning the authorship of the Observations upon the Bills of Mortality, concluding that Graunt was the author of it.

Nowadays, Hull's article is often mentioned in the same breath with Wilson Lloyd Bevan's Sir William Petty: A Study in English Economic Literature, published a few years earlier,[3] and demonstrating the revival of interest in Petty and his role in the development of (economic) thinking in the seventeenth century.

The first chapter contains a short biography of Petty, and a general description of the economic writings, in which Hull makes a division in three (or four) groups, relating to distinct periods in Petty's life, and to books with "a common provocation and common characteristics":[5] The division given here was still used by scholars at the end of the twentieth century.

The well-known quote of Petty is "The Method I take is not very usual; for, instead of using only comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments, I have taken the course (as a Specimen of the Political Arithmetick I have long aimed at) to express myself in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature".

So a great number of basic facts, like the population of London, of England and of Ireland, had to be calculated, with all the risks of inaccuracies.

"He did not hesitate to advance, in all seriousness, the most astounding proposals for increasing the national wealth of the three kingdoms by a wholesale deportation of the Irish and Scotch into England,—proposals based solely upon the results of a complicated series of guesses and multiplications.

The division of the writings of Petty into three groups, which was proposed by Hull in this article, was still referred to at the end of the twentieth century, for instance by Hutchison in 1988[14] and by Yang in 1994.

In Hull's opinion, these essays, generally regarded as his works on vital statistics, "added practically nothing of economic interest to these earlier books",[17] while Matsukawa thinks they are "in final analysis his arguments for the increase of the 'Superlucration'.

"[16] Roll, in his A History of Economic Thought,[18] is annoyed by Hull's characterization of Petty as "a sort of English cameralist".

[22] In 2002 Dooley referred to Hull 1900 as a "notable commentator" on Petty in the context of the early development of the labour theory of value.