His success was largely derived from the political and business connections he made through his family and through an early employer, James Brydges.

During the late 1710s and early 1720s, Cantillon speculated in, and later helped fund, John Law's Mississippi Company, from which he acquired great wealth.

His work was translated into Spanish by Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, probably in the late 1770s, and considered essential reading for political economy.

Despite having much influence on the early development of the physiocrat and classical schools of thought, Essai was largely forgotten until its rediscovery by Jevons in the late 19th century.

These contributions include: his cause and effect methodology, monetary theories, his conception of the entrepreneur as a risk-bearer, and the development of spatial economics.

Cantillon's Essai had significant influence on the early development of political economy, including the works of Adam Smith, Anne Turgot, Jean-Baptiste Say, Frédéric Bastiat and François Quesnay.

[12] Two years later, thanks in large part to financial backing by James Brydges, Cantillon bought his cousin out and attained ownership of the bank.

[19] Law began a financial speculative bubble by selling shares of the Mississippi Company, using the Banque Générale's virtual monopoly on the issue of bank notes to finance his investors.

[20] Richard Cantillon amassed a great fortune from his speculation, buying Mississippi Company shares early and selling them later at higher prices, even though he had stated he believed Law's "scheme was unsound and was bound to fail.

[6][32] One of the greatest influences on Cantillon's writing was English economist William Petty and his 1662 tract Treatise on Taxes.

[3] Cantillon's involvement in John Law's speculative bubble proved invaluable and likely heavily influenced his insight on the relationship between increases in the supply of money, price, and production.

[39] Economist Murray Rothbard credits Cantillon with being one of the first theorists to isolate economic phenomena with simple models, where otherwise-uncontrollable variables can be fixed.

[44] This led Cantillon to separate economic science from politics and ethics to a greater degree than previous mercantilist writers.

[47] Differences between prior mercantilists and Cantillon arise early in Essai, regarding the origins of wealth and price formation on the market.

[67] However, Cantillon did not believe that international markets tended toward equilibrium, and instead suggested that government hoard specie to avoid rising prices and falling competitiveness.

[68] Cantillon's preference towards a favourable balance of trade possibly stemmed from the mercantilist belief in exchange being a zero-sum game, in which one party gains at the expense of another.

[75] Traditionally, it is Jean-Baptiste Say who is credited for coining the word and advancing the concept of the entrepreneur, but in fact it was Cantillon who first introduced the term in Essai.

[79] Cantillon, while providing the foundations, did not develop a dedicated theory of uncertainty—the topic was not revisited until the 20th century, by Ludwig von Mises, Frank Knight, and John Maynard Keynes, among others.

[91] While the Essai was not published until 1755 as a result of heavy censorship in France, it did widely circulate in the form of an unpublished manuscript between its completion and its publication.

[93] Cantillon was a major influence on physiocrat François Quesnay, who has probably had access to his work through the marquis de Mirabeau, who possessed a manuscript of the Essai since 1740.

[104] In any case, through his influence on Adam Smith and the physiocrats, Cantillon was quite possibly the pre-classical economist who contributed most to the ideas of the classical school.

[6][106] On 16 February 1722, Cantillon married Mary Anne O'Mahony (1701–1751), daughter of Cecilia Weld and Count Daniel O'Mahony—a wealthy merchant and former Irish general—spending much of the remainder of the 1720s travelling throughout Europe with his wife.

[107] Cantillon and Mary had a son, who died at a young age, and a daughter: Although he frequently returned to Paris between 1729 and 1733, his permanent residence was in London.