This volume, Scarce and Valuable Economical Tracts, was edited by John Ramsay McCulloch and originally published in 1859. It contains essays on political economy written by: Nicholas Barbon, Daniel Defoe, Henry Elking, Thomas Wise, Benjamin Franklin, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, James Anderson, Alexander Schomberg, Joseph Townsend, Edmund Burke, and Archibald Bell.
In her entry on McCulloch in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Phyllis Deane wrote: "It is now apparent that for most of the half-century preceding his death [in 1864] this hard-working, largely self-educated Scot did more than any other economist of this day to introduce the new science of political economy to an interested public." The three edited McCulloch volumes now reprinted by CL Press show the enduring value of McCulloch's service to those interested in the history of economic thought and the historical arc of liberalism.