A great mind for business
QUESTION Who was the firstever successful entrepreneur from Ireland?
THE first-ever successful entrepreneur from this country was Richard Cantillon; he even invented the word ‘entrepreneur’.
Cantillon was the son of a nobleman whose family were landowners in the Ballyheigue area of Co. Kerry. He was born in the 1680s, although his exact date of birth isn’t known.
His early life also remains shrouded in secrecy, but in his early 20s, he emigrated to France. He then spent three years in Spain, from 1711 until 1714, where he worked helping to finance the British forces engaged in the War of the Spanish Succession.
Then he returned to Paris, where he went to work for his second cousin, also called Richard, in the Paris branch of the family bank. He soon became well recognised as a banker, noted for his intellect and his ability to speak several languages. He also got to know the greatest figures of the age, such as Voltaire.
With such an extensive contact book, Cantillon was able to make a big success of money transfers between Paris and London and vice versa, making him very wealthy. Although his financial dealings were often highly questionable in terms of ethics, his influential connections ensured the money kept rolling in.
Cantillon also made a good marriage that boosted his financial connections even further. In 1722, he wed Mary Anne Mahony, the daughter of Daniel Mahony, a rich merchant in Paris who had once been an Irish general.
Cantillon made a huge amount of money for himself from the two biggest scams of the time, correctly forecasting when both schemes were going to crash and getting out early enough to make large amounts of money for himself.
France had a huge national debt, and a Scottish mercantile figure called John Law, who was also a professional gambler and a convicted murderer, came up with a new financial system to extract the riches from the new French colony of La Louisiane, now Louisiana, in America.
Speculative mania soon took hold, but before long, in 1720, the Mississippi ‘bubble’ burst. Many speculators were ruined and France was bankrupted. Richard Cantillon was closely involved, but he could see the economic flaws in Law’s scheme; Cantillon bought shares in the Mississippi scheme early and then sold them early, for a big profit.
A similar scheme in Britain was promoted by the South Sea Company. In 1718, King George I became the governor of the company and this encouraged many to invest in its schemes that involved slave trading. But in 1720, that bubble also burst, severely affecting the British economy.
Again, Cantillon remained aloof from all the financial mayhem and managed to stay extremely wealthy – adding to his fortune, in fact, rather than losing it.
After the collapse of the Mississippi bubble, Cantillon was entangled for the rest of his life in a litany of lawsuits by his debtors, who were largely ruined.
But apart from his highly successful efforts at making large sums of money for himself, Cantillon was also very interested in economic theory and his seminal work was his essay on the nature of commerce in general, the first to analyse the theory of economics. It was written two or three years before his mysterious death in London in 1734, although it wasn’t first published until 1755, long after he died.
He was in fact the ‘father of modern economics’, but his work was largely forgotten until the late 19th century.
The other great Irish entrepreneur during the 18th century was Arthur Guinness.
When he was 27, his grandfather bequeathed him £100, which he invested in a brewery in Leixlip, Co. Kildare, in 1755.
Four years later, he took a 9,000year lease on the brewery at St James’s Gate in Dublin. During the 19th century and into the 20th, Guinness remained the biggest employer in Dublin, although these days, various high-tech companies employ far more people in the city.
But during the 18th century, two key figures, Cantillon and Guinness, did much to implement the term ‘entrepreneur’. Caroline Murray, Tralee, Co. Kerry.
QUESTION Dick Van Dyke has appeared in the two Mary Poppins films 54 years apart. Have any other actors appeared in remakes or sequels long after the original?
FURTHER to the earlier answer about Cape Fear, War Of The Worlds and Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, an unusual example is 1941’s Maltese Falcon and its spoof 1975 sequel The Black Bird.
The original starred Humphrey Bogart as gumshoe Sam Spade. The madcap sequel starred George Segal as Sam Spade Jr, 36 years on.
It featured two of the original cast. Lee Patrick, who played Sam Spade Sr’s secretary Effie, was also Sam Spade Jr’s secretary, working long past her retirement. Also, the great character actor Elisha Cook Jr returned to his original role as gangster Wilmer Cook.