 Finally, the adjective “political” became paramount in the nineteenth century, but was seldom used in the early modern period. The primary name for economics in the eighteenth century was the “science of commerce”, as is evident in the titles of a number of leading texts at the time, for example by Forbonnais, Cantillon, Tucker, and Condillac. Moreover, the primary focus was on public debt, and appeals to significant political reforms were peripheral rather than central. As Hume observed in 1741, “trade was never esteemed an affair of state till the last century” (“Of Civil Liberty”, [1987: 88])—Niccolò Machiavelli made no mention of trade; moreover, it might prove too challenging to arrive at “general truths in politics” (ibid. [1987: 87–88]). When Smith took up the “science of political economy” in Book Four of the Wealth of Nations, he limited it to the policies of the legislator and public finance. Notwithstanding attention to the political restrictions on trade and commerce, the leading economists of the latter half of the eighteenth century, namely Hume, Quesnay, Turgot, and Smith, were inclined to downplay the influence of politics, and were conservative when it came to property rights. It was an age dominated by Montesquieu in France, and Edmund Burke in Britain, and the revolutions of 1776 and 1789 were bourgeois rather than socialist (see Pocock 1985; Sonenscher 2007).