Fred Carstensen's interesting post on the significance of the Law  
Merchant for the emergence of capitalism is echoed (but with no fixed  
date for the birth of constitutional limited government - freedom - and  
capitalism) in a related discussion by Allyn Young in a 1924 essay on  
"How the World Goes to Market" (reproduced in Mehrling & Sandilands,  
eds., _Money and Growth: Selected Papers of Allyn Abbott Young_  
Routledge, 1999). I reproduce here a relevant passage (full article  
available electronically on request):  
  
   
  
> Political freedom, as we understand it, appeared first in the towns of  
the later Middle Ages. These towns were communities of traders. There  
men found a freedom from the restrictions which obtained in the isolated  
country villages. There they found new and varied opportunities. Trade  
between the towns became world trade in the modern sense after the  
discovery of America and of the sea route to India at the end of the  
fifteenth century. In the advance of civilization into the new worlds  
thus opened up, the trader, along with the missionary, led the way.  
  
   
  
> Doubtless economic civilization today remains far short of its goal of  
equality of opportunity for all. But it is important for us to remember  
that such a goal could not be conceived of, even as a remote ideal, by  
the men of antiquity or of the Middle Ages. Freedom of commercial  
enterprise has brought with it enlarged and enriched notions of the  
meaning and significance of life. That the world now ranks men according  
to their own achievements and only in small measure by the status into  
which they were born is to be attributed in no small measure to the fact  
that commerce and the system of free enterprise that has grown up along  
with and as a part of commerce gives little weight to anything but  
achievement and success.  
  
   
  
> An illustration of the significance of the relation of the growth of  
commerce to the growth of freedom is found in the history of the Law  
Merchant. This was in the beginning merely a body of rules laid down by  
medieval merchants for regulating their relations one with another. The  
old rules of medieval law hampered them. Moreover, their trade created  
new situations and problems to which the old rules did not apply. The  
Law Merchant was different in spirit from the then prevailing systems of  
law. It made little of distinctions of outward form, of the status of  
the parties to a litigation, of title or sex, in order that it might  
deal with rights and duties on a broadly human basis. It had to do very  
largely with contract, that is, with free agreement. It has long been  
absorbed into the general body of our law, where it has had a most  
wholesome influence and effect.  
  
   
  
Roger Sandilands