Although economics is primarily concerned with the modus operandi of the market mechanism, an overview of premarket coordinative arrangements not only is interesting in itself but throws a useful light on the distinctive properties of market-run societies. The earliest and by far the most historically numerous of economic systems has been that of primitive society, for which tradition serves as the central means of bestowing order. Such economic forms of social organization are likely to be far more ancient than Cro-Magnon people, although a few of these forms are still preserved by such groups as the Inuit, Kalahari hunters, and Bedouin. So far as is known, all tradition-bound peoples solve their economic problems today much as they did 10,000 years or perhaps 10,000 centuries ago—adapting by migration or movement to changes in season or climate, sustaining themselves by hunting and gathering or by slash-and-burn agriculture, and distributing their output by reference to well-defined social claims. The American writer Elizabeth Marshall Thomas described this distributive system in The Harmless People (rev. ed. 1989):

It seems very unequal when you watch Bushmen divide the kill, yet it is their system, and in the end no person eats more than the other. That day Ukwane gave Gai still another piece because Gai was his relation, Gai gave meat to Dasina because she was his wife’s mother.…No one, of course, contested Gai’s large share, because he had been the hunter.…No one doubted that he would share his large amount with others, and they were not wrong, of course; he did.

Besides the shared property that is perhaps the outstanding attribute of these hunting and gathering societies, two further aspects deserve attention. The first concerns their level of subsistence, long deemed to have been one of chronic scarcity and want. According to the still controversial findings of the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, this notion of scarcity is not true. His studies of several preliterate peoples found that they could easily increase their provisioning if they so desired. The condition usually perceived by contemporary observers as scarcity is felt by preliterate peoples as satiety; Sahlins describes preliterate life as the first “affluent society.”

A second discernible characteristic of preliterate economic systems is the difficulty of describing any part of their activities as constituting an “economy.” No special modes of coordination distinguish the activities of hunting or gathering or the procedures of distribution from the rest of social life, so there is nothing in Inuit or Kalahari or Bedouin life that requires a special vocabulary or conceptual apparatus called “economics.” The economy as a network of provisioning activities is completely absorbed within and fully inextricable from the traditional mode of existence as a whole.

Very little is known of the origin of the second of the great systems of social coordination—namely, the creation of a central apparatus of command and rulership. From ancient clusters of population, impressive civilizations emerged in Egypt, China, and India during the 3rd millennium bce, bringing with them not only dazzling advances in culture but also the potent instrument of state power as a new moving force in history.

The appearance of these centralized states is arguably the single most decisive alteration in economic, and perhaps in all, history. Although tradition still exerted its stabilizing and preserving role at the base of these societies—Adam Smith said that in “Indostan or ancient Egypt…every man was bound by a principle of religion to follow the occupation of his father”—the vast temple complexes, irrigation systems, fortifications, and cities of ancient India and China and of the kingdoms of the Inca and Maya attest unmistakably to the difference that the organizing principle of command brought to economic life. It lay in the ability of centralized authority to wrest considerable portions of the population away from their traditional occupations and to use their labour energies in ways that expressed the wishes of a ruling personage or small elite.

The Greek historian Herodotus recounts how the pharaoh Khufu used his power to this end:

[He] ordered all Egyptians to work for himself. Some, accordingly, were appointed to draw stones from the quarries in the Arabian mountains down to the Nile, others he ordered to receive the stones when transported in vessels across the river.…And they worked to the number of a hundred thousand men at a time, each party during three months. The time during which the people were thus harassed by toil lasted ten years on the road which they constructed, and along which they drew the stones; a work, in my opinion, not much less than the Pyramids.

The creation of these monuments illustrates an important general characteristic of all systems of command. Such systems, unlike those based on tradition, can generate immense surpluses of wealth—indeed, the very purpose of a command organization of economic life can be said to lie in securing such a surplus. Command systems thereby acquire the wherewithal to change the conditions of material existence in far-reaching ways. Prior to the modern era, when command became the main coordination system for socialism, it was typical of such command systems to use this productive power principally to cater to the consumption or to the power and glory of their ruling elites.

Moral judgments aside, this highly personal disposition of surplus has the further consequence of again resisting any sharp analytic distinction between the workings of the economy of such a society and that of its larger social framework. The methods of what could be termed “economic coordination” in a command system are identical with those that guide the imperial state in all its historical engagements, just as in primitive society the methods that coordinate the activities of production and distribution are indistinguishable from those that shape family or religious or cultural life. Thus, in command systems, as in tradition-based ones, there is no autonomous economic sphere of life separate from the basic organizing principles of the society in general.

These general considerations throw into relief the nature of the economic problems that must be resolved in a system of market coordination. Such a system must be distinguished from the mere existence of marketplaces, which originated far back in history. Trading relations between the ancient Levantine kingdoms and the pharaohs of Egypt about 1400 bce are known from the tablets of Tell el-Amarna. One thousand years later the Greek orator Isocrates boasted of the thriving trade of Classical Greece, while a rich and varied network of commodity exchange and an established market for monetary capital were prominent features of ancient Rome.

These flourishing institutions of commerce testify to the ancient lineages of money, profit-mindedness, and mercantile groups, but they do not testify to the presence of a market system. In premarket societies, markets were the means to join suppliers and demanders of luxuries and superfluities, but they were not the means by which the provision of essential goods and services was assured. For these purposes, ancient kingdoms or republics still looked to tradition and command, utilizing slavery as a basic source of labour (including captives taken in war) and viewing with disdain the profit orientation of market life. This disdain applied particularly to the use of the incentives and penalties of the market as a means of marshaling labour. Aristotle expressed the common feeling of his age when he declared, “The condition of the free man is that he does not live for the benefit of another.” With the exception of some military service (see mercenary), nonslave labour was simply not for sale.

The difference between a society with flourishing markets and a market-coordinated society is not, therefore, merely one of attitudes. Before a system orchestrated by the market can replace one built on obedience to communal or authoritarian pressure, the social orders dependent on tradition and command must be replaced by a new order in which individuals are expected to fend for themselves and in which all are permitted—even encouraged—to improve their material condition. Individuals cannot have such aims, much less such “rights,” until the dominant authority of custom or hierarchical privilege has been swept away. A rearrangement of this magnitude entails wrenching dislocations of power and prerogative. A market society is not, consequently, merely a society coordinated by markets. It is, of necessity, a social order with a distinctive structure of laws and privileges.

It follows that a market society requires an organizing principle that, by definition, can no longer be the respect accorded to tradition or the obedience owed to a political elite. This principle becomes the generalized search for material gain—a striving for betterment that is unique to each individual. Such a condition of universal upward striving is unimaginable in a traditional society and could be seen only as a dangerous threat in a society built on established hierarchies of authority. But, for reasons that will be seen, it is accommodated by, and indeed constitutive of, the workings of a market system.

The process by which these institutional and attitudinal changes are brought about constitutes a grand theme—perhaps the grand theme—of economic history from roughly the 5th to the 18th and even into the 19th century in Europe. In terms of political history, the period was marked by the collapse of the western Roman Empire, the rise of feudalism, and the slow formation of nation-states. In social terms, it featured the end of an order characterized by an imperial retinue at the top and massive slavery at the bottom, that order’s replacement by gradations of feudal vassalage descending from lord to serf, and the eventual appearance of a bourgeois society with distinct classes of workers, landlords, and entrepreneurs. From the economist’s perspective, the period was marked by the breakdown of a coordinative mechanism of centralized command, the rise of the mixed pressures of tradition and local command characteristic of the feudal manor, and the gradual displacement of those pressures by the material penalties and rewards of an all-embracing market network. In this vast transformation the rise of the market mechanism became crucial as the means by which the new social formation of capitalism ensured its self-provisioning, but the mechanism itself rested on deeper-lying social, cultural, and political changes that created the capitalist order it served.

To attempt to trace these lineages of capitalism would take one far beyond the confines of the present subject. Suffice it to remark that the emergence of the new order was first given expression in the 10th and 11th centuries, when a rising mercantile “estate” began to bargain successfully for recognition and protection with the local lords and monarchs of the early Middle Ages. Not until the 16th and 17th centuries was there a “commercialization” of the aristocratic strata, many of whose members fared poorly in an ever more money-oriented world and accordingly contracted marriages with wealthy merchant families (whom they would not have received at home a generation or two earlier) to preserve their social and material status. Of greatest significance, however, was the transformation of the lower orders, a process that began in Elizabethan England but did not take place en masse until the 18th and even the 19th century. As feudal lords became profit-minded landlords, peasants moved off the land to become an agricultural proletariat in search of the best wages obtainable, because traditional subsistence was no longer available. Thus, the market network extended its disciplinary power over “free” labour—the resource that had previously eluded its influence. The resulting social order made it possible for markets to coordinate production and distribution in a manner never before possible.