University of Minnesota Law School Scholarship Repository Minnesota Law Review 1934 Industrial Combinations and the Law in the Eighteenth Century W.S. Holdsworth Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/mlr Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Holdsworth, W.S., "Industrial Combinations and the Law in the Eighteenth Century" (1934). Minnesota Law Review. 2475. https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/mlr/2475 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the University of Minnesota Law School. It has been accepted for inclusion in Minnesota Law Review collection by an authorized administrator of the Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. MINNESOTA LAW REVIEW Journal of the State Bar Association VOLUME XVIII M1ARCH, 1934 No. 4 INDUSTRIAL COMBINATIONS AND THE LAW IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, By W. S. HOLDSWORTH* F ROM the middle of the fourteenth century onwards there is authority for the principle that all persons ought to be allowed to carry on their trades freely, subject only to any restrictions or regulations which might be imposed by the common law or by statute law. The law, it was said, gave to every man the right to carry on his trade as he pleased, free from arbitrary restric- tions not recognised by law, whether those restrictions were im- posed by the illegal actions of officials of the local or central gov- ernment, or by the lawless acts of rivals in trade. This general principle of the common law was quite consistent with the recog- nition of the need for much legal regulation of many aspects of trade in the interests of the state.