The alternative to market organization was slavery. Teachers have to work rather hard to hide this fact. For instance, when students in classes in British literature encounter Charles Dickens s 1854 Hard Times, with its savage attack on markets and market economics, teachers wishing to present Dickens as progressive have to be careful. When they explain why it is inscribed to Thomas Carlyle, it is probably helpful to their cause if they not mention that in 1853 Carlyle republished an expanded version of his part of the exchange with Mill under the title Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question. The Carlyle-Mill debate was a theoretical debate.
Ideas do have consequences.
The issues stopped being purely theoretical in what historians call the Governor Eyre controversy of mid-1860s Britain. On the side demanding colorblind justice we find the old coalition Carlyle opposed, antislave Evangelicals and economists now joined by Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley. In opposition we find all the major antimarket voices in Victorian literature Dickens, John Ruskin, Charles Kingsley, and Alfred Tennyson joining Carlyle in making the case that it could not be murder to kill Jamaicans of color because one could only murder people. The defeat of the Evangelical-economic coalition was complete. And the episode is never mentioned when in English classes the stories of the progressive literary figures and the heartless economists are retold.