INTRODUCTION

Markets of one form or another have occupied a key place in the social, economic and political cultures of all peoples throughout recorded history. Exchange seems to have been known since the late stone age and marketing principles feature in the earliest documents of civilization. Market institutions such as regular fairs and markets have an unbroken continuity stretching back to the middle ages. When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, commerce had become so ubiquitous that he saw ‘the propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another’ as an elementary psychological trait of the human race.

The writings of Smith, however, did more than just focus attention upon market institutions and market principles. The Classical Economists elevated ‘the Market’ to totemic status. It alone was the agency by which all in society could advance their material condition, provided that their natural inclination to exchange was unhindered by regulation or restriction. As Smith wrote:

From the late eighteenth century onwards, faith in ‘the Market’, a belief that the self-regulating market functioned at all times in a natural and benevolent manner whenever permitted the liberty so to do, became a kind of secular orthodoxy, ‘Political Economy’.