ABSTRACT
The consequent upsurge of economic liberalism and the appearance of a number of important technical innovations in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries produced a combination of circumstances highly favourable to the growth of a market economy. Many of the institutional arrangements which form the basis of a competitive market economy were highly advanced in Britain by the middle of the eighteenth century. In Western Europe, the emergence of a competitive market economy and a greater degree of individual freedom were accompanied by a relaxation of impediments to international trade and commerce and international movements of labour and capital. Despite the adherence of national governments to the competitive market economy, all states found it necessary to intervene, in varying degrees of intensity, in the working of the free enterprise economy by introducing legislation to counteract the worst of the evils thrown up by the new economic system.
