Comment by Ajedi32

The industrial revolution multiplied the size of the global economy by several orders of magnitude, but it didn't create it. International trade has been happening on a smaller scale since large-scale civilized society existed. And I said "almost no regulation", not "no regulation". Probably something on the order of 99% of the regulations we have today wouldn't have even been feasible to enforce a couple hundred years ago, yet markets still functioned just fine on the whole.