Part I dates the construction of a price system, which is the best empirical support in the manuscript for the Hayek route and for our own thesis. In 1500 England held about 1,800 market towns with markets once or twice weekly, inter-market trade was virtually nonexistent, prices were primarily determined by customs and regulation rather than supply and demand, and middlemen were few because they were looked down upon for raising prices and creating scarcity. Then the sequence: grain traded at inter-market level in the sixteenth century, livestock and animal products in the seventeenth, and by the eighteenth most commodities traded nationally with competitive bid-pricing and a large number of middlemen. A price mechanism is not a natural feature of commerce. It was built over two centuries, and the people who built it were despised while doing it.

Evidence 1 passage

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prices were primarily determined by customs and regulation rather than supply and demand. There were also few middlemen as they were looked down upon for raising prices and creating scarcity. These were locally sufficient market communities that had little integration with outside markets. Autocat

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