Advent of the Market Economy and its Impact on Poverty

During the second half of the eighteenth and the whole of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, about half a dozen epoch-making economic systems were evolved with the express intent of uplifting masses of people economically and reducing or eliminating poverty. Prominent among these in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries was the free market economy which coexisted with the great revolutionary movements mentioned in Chapter 2. These revolutionary movements could not have been sustained under the interventionist and market-unfriendly organizational setup of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It would be equally true to say that the restrictive and interventionist structures of those times could not stand the strains and stresses of the revolutionary changes and had to be blown away. As the ‘powers of production’, that is to say the power which society has over the utilization of resources, altered dramatically, a different economic ideology was required to support and sustain the newly emerging structures of production, domestic and foreign trade, and transportation. With the changing powers of production, the ‘relations of production’, that is the relations in which the consumers, producers, traders and the workforce are linked together, had to alter — and this is what happened alongside those great economic revolutions.