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disdained commerce throughout Western history. Homer and Isaiah despised traders. St Paul, St Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther all considered usury a sin. Shakespeare could not bring himself to make the persecuted Shylock a hero. Of 1900, Brink Lindsey writes: ‘Many of the brightest minds of the age mistook the engine of eventual mass deliverance – the competitive market system – for the chief bulwark of domination and oppression.’ Economists like Thorstein Veblen longed to replace the profit motive with a combination of public-spiritedness and centralised government decision-taking. In the 1880s Arnold Toynbee, lecturing working men on the English industrial revolution which had so enriched them, castigated free enterprise capitalism as a ‘world of gold-seeking animals, stripped of every human affection’ and ‘less real than the island of Lilliput’. In 2009 Adam Phillips and Barbara Taylor argued that ‘capitalism is no system for the kind-hearted. Even its devotees acknowledge this while insisting that, however tawdry capitalist motives may be, the results are socially beneficial.’ As the British politician Lord Taverne puts it, speaking of himself: ‘a classical education teaches you to despise the wealth it prevents you from earning.’

But both the premise and the conclusion are wrong. The notion that the market is a necessary evil, which allows people to be wealthy enough to offset its corrosive drawbacks, is wide of the mark. In market societies, if you get a reputation for unfairness, people will not deal with you. In places where traditional, honour-based feudal societies gave way to commercial, prudence-based economies – say, Italy in 1400, Scotland in 1700, Japan in 1945 – the effect is civilising, not coarsening. When John Padgett at the University of Chicago compiled data on the commercial revolution in fourteenth-century Florence, he found that far from self-interest increasing, it withered, as a system of ‘reciprocal credit’ emerged in which business partners gradually extended more and more trust and support to each other. There was a ‘trust explosion’. ‘Wherever the ways of man are gentle, there is commerce, and wherever there is commerce, the ways of men are gentle,’ observed Charles, Baron de Montesquieu. Voltaire pointed out that people who would otherwise have tried to kill each other for worshipping the wrong god were civil when they met on the floor of the Exchange in London. David Hume thought commerce ‘rather favourable to liberty, and has a natural tendency to preserve, if not produce a free government’ and that ‘nothing is more favourable to the rise of politeness and learning, than a number of neighbouring and independent states, connected together by commerce and policy’. It dawned on Victorians such as John Stuart Mill that a rule of Rothschilds and Barings was proving rather more pleasant than one of Bonapartes and Habsburgs, that prudence might be a less bloody virtue than courage or honour or faith. (Courage, honour and faith will always make better fiction.) True, there was always a Rousseau or a Marx to carp, and a Ruskin or a Goethe to scoff, but it was possible to wonder, with Voltaire and Hume, if commercial behaviour might make people more moral.

Coercion is the opposite of freedom

Perhaps Adam Smith was right, that in turning strangers into honorary friends, exchange can transmute base self-interest into general benevolence. The rapid commercialisation of lives since 1800 has coincided with an extraordinary improvement in human sensibility compared with previous centuries, and the process began in the most commercial nations, Holland and England. Unimaginable cruelty was commonplace in the precommercial world: execution was a spectator sport, mutilation a routine punishment, human sacrifice a futile tragedy and animal torture a popular entertainment. The nineteenth century, when industrial capitalism drew so many people into dependence on the market, was a time when slavery, child labour and pastimes like fox tossing and cock fighting became unacceptable. The late twentieth century,