 Eighteenth-century economic discourse was more evenly spread across the Continent, but the empiricist school in Britain left the most enduring imprint. Locke, Hume and Smith made important contributions to economics, whereas scholars have yet to locate significant economic insights in the work of the leading rationalists, Descartes, Spinoza, or Leibniz, although Leibniz also wrote extensively on politics. One discernible pattern is that the leading anglophone contributors to eighteenth-century economics were, for the most part, not English-born, but Dutch, Scottish or Irish; nor were they particularly devout. Locke is the notable exception on both counts. It is important to point out that Mandeville (Dutch), Cantillon (Irish-French), and the Scots Law, Hume, and Smith, were inclined to study and promote commerce and trade as the progressive face of a more secular world. If much of modern economic thinking builds upon moral philosophy, it is and was, with a few exceptions, grounded in non-sacred sources.