(FORTUNE Magazine) – For nearly a month after Black Monday, London, Europe's hottest takeover market for the past several years, was an M&A Antarctic. The pre-crash takeover boomlet on the Continent also went bust. But now across Europe, dealmaking is back. Leading the rush is British Petroleum, which has offered $4.2 billion for Britoil, a formerly state-owned company that controls 7% of Britain's North Sea output. To head off BP, Britoil's management has called in America's Atlantic Richfield as a red-white-and-blue knight. In the food field, tiny Barker & Dobson -- armed with some $2 billion in bank loans provided by an international consortium led by Citibank -- has made a hostile $3.6 billion , offer for Dee Corp., a British grocery chain roughly 15 times its size. On the international front, British Airways successfully fended off a last- minute assault from Scandinavian Airlines System and snapped up its smaller rival, British Caledonian Group, for more than $450 million. Britain's RTZ Group paid about that much to outbid a French competitor for M.K. Electric, a British electronic components company. Currently, Britain's Grand Metropolitan and Canada's Seagram are locked in a transatlantic tussle for Martell, France's No. 2 cognac maker. Companies are eager to find international mates by 1992, when the European Economic Community hopes to remove the last barriers that hinder the free flow of goods, services, and capital across the continent. Lower share prices have made potential targets cheaper -- and once loyal institutional investors more willing to sell. Noting the canceled Christmas holidays of many London investment bankers, Philip Healey, editor of Acquisitions Monthly, predicts that ''1988 is going to be a record year for takeovers.''