📚🧐 From "The Anxious Triumph" by Donald Sassoon: The state was crucial in creating the preconditions of economic transformation, including a set of legislative institutions regulating competition, because capitalism, unlike other economic systems, has strong anarchic tendencies. Taming the beast to save the beast was essential. In Book I of "The Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" Adam Smith wrote that the interests of merchants ‘is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. To widen the market, and narrow the competition, is always in the interest of the dealers.’ In fact, markets, far from adjusting to change automatically, if unchecked, would lead to monopolies: "The constant view of such companies is always to raise the rate of their own profit as high as they can; to keep the market, both for the goods which they export, and for those which they import, as much under-stocked as they can; which can be done only by restraining the competition, or by discouraging new adventurers from entering into the trade."(𝐓𝐗𝐌𝐂)