We do not need to theorize the impact that the market has on our lives; we all know the angst of waiting to hear whether a job application has been successful, losing sleep as we worry about how we will afford the next heating bill, becoming frustrated or angry about the cost of a train ticket, and wondering whether we will ever be free from student or mortgage debt. Even high- earning city workers cannot escape the health- depleting stress of the market, with studies showing that work- related anxiety leads to the dangerous disruption of eating habits for bankers, who have to use antidepressants to maintain working regimes that are killing them. These are all examples of the market invading our thoughts and even impacting our mental and physical health, but the impacts of the market on the most vulnerable among us are even more profound. These include migrants from Central America dying from thirst in the New Mexican desert as they seek employment in the US, millions of children in the UK who are going hungry and thousands of refugees drowning in the Mediterranean as they try to escape the poverty and hunger that has resulted from market-induced climate change in sub- Saharan Africa. These and other instances of suffering occur because of society's collective acceptance that the market should be allowed to decide that the hungry ought to not be able to eat enough to sustain themselves. All of these are examples of how the market has come to capture our thinking and – in the case of malnourished children living in poverty, refugees dying from thirst and drowning, or the increasing normalization of anxiety and depression – has come to govern our bodies too. Over the next three chapters, we will work our way back through the Enlightenment. Starting in 1776, when Adam Smith published his ground- breaking economic treatise The Wealth of Nations, we will see how his theories have been interpreted and misinterpreted since, how they were used to justify slavery, colonialism and the theft of indigenous lands, and how the market precipitated ‘bewitchments’ and mass hallucinations in the 1640s.