At least since the Greeks, European languages have employed the notion of profit to denote advantage, gain, benefit and utility in domains ranging from spiritual condition to progress in learning. ‘For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?’ demands the apostle Mark. Less dramatically, a grateful insomniac profits from the absence of the sun and a listless student profits from the efforts of a devoted teacher. Beyond its multiple uses in popular discourse, ‘profit’ has been invoked to define the outcome of numerous economic activities, as Gervais, Lemarchand and Margairaz point out in the Introduction: wages, interest on loans, land rent, manufacturing revenue, income from trade.

Over time, some meanings of and some synonyms for ‘profit’ in both general and specialist usage have fallen by the wayside. We are no longer likely to quote Jeremy Bentham's deliciously wicked epigram, ‘The profit of an offence is a lot of pleasure’, and we rarely speak of ‘profits’ to signify tips given to household servants. If anything, however, profit has moved to the centre of learned and quotidian economic analysis, for rational profit-seeking is usually taken to be vital both to the operation of market economies and to the fortunes of entrepreneurs within those systems.