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Sir William Petty (1623-1687) is widely recognized as the founder of political economy. His works established key concepts that came to dominate economic thinking for 300 years. His writings include some of the earliest works on "full employment", the use of public works as a method of creating employment, the benefits of expenditure tax over income tax; land and labour as the only primary factors of production; and a labour theory of value. Petty's greatest achievement is considered to be the invention of "Political Arithmetick" - the quantitative estimation of both the stock of national wealth and the flow of national income in order to determine the appropriate base for taxation. This was a key work in the development of modern economic statistics and influenced many economists, including Davenant, Quesnay, Cantillon, Smith, Ricardo, Marx, and Keynes. This edition includes a selection of his manuscripts and up-to-date scholarship on Petty and his works. It also makes available again the out-of-print Hull and Lansdowne editions.