How Economics Instructors Can Teach Entrepreneurship: Lessons from the “Cradle of Political Economy”

This article draws on insights from the historical scholarship in economics to motivate a classroom discussion of the role of entrepreneurs in the market process.Richard Cantillon's description of entrepreneurial risk-taking can be joined with the descriptions of market integration and the law of one price that we find in the historical scholarship of Adam Smith to demonstrate the importance of the entrepreneur in the development of markets.In doing so, instructors can provide students with an important and vivid illustration of how to join historical scholarship to modern theory and then to use both to understand real-world patterns.