I’m not sure anthrapological evidence would back you up. There are and have been a whole host of structures for economic relations, it just so happens that the market has become the domminant form, in no small part down to the actions of the emerging nations states in the 17th/18th century.

No alternative system can be shown to have lifted more people out of poverty and misery than(mostly-free)market capitalism.

The author gets many things backwards; the state has imbedded itself in the market, not the other way. Market activities and free exchange are as old as man himself; the state however came second. Exchange arose as a natural consequence of specialization, and the division of labor. The state, to protect the group from outsiders.

He is quite correct that today’s markets are not completely free, and are very much subject to the manipulations of the state, the pols and their well-connected friends in industry. These are not failings of natural markets, but of the people who seek to regulate and control them for their own benefit.

Paraphrasing Hayek – it is the economist’s job to illustrate to men just how little they know about what they desire to design.