I have looked back and managed to find several links of interest in varying contexts.
The appear under the Origins of Wants…
http://www.antenna.nl/wim.nusselder/schrijfsels/economics_print.htm
ttp://www2.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/4379.html
http://www2.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/6881.html

Otto

Iggy

fascinating story, thanks a lot for sharing it with us and I even hope we can republish it here as well. I wouldn’t argue that p2p is ‘entirely’ new. Rather as Alan Page Fiske argues, it’s one of the 4 relational dynamics that is always present. But it has been subsumed historically to the tribal gift economy, pre-modern hierarchies and the modern capitalist market. We could also say, and this is new, that internet/web technologies radically bring down the transaction costs of creating global intellectual/cultural/scientific and ultimately productive commons, liberating it from time and space constraints. So rather than arguing that it is entirely new, I would rather say that it gets a renewed lease of life, to the point that it may even become the core relational mode of a sustainable, and necessarily post-capitalist, civilisation (which doesn’t mean, ‘without any market”).

What I found so interesting in your reading and contribution, is the scale of such a network in the midst of the Middle Ages, and that pre-capitalist markets where much more commons friendly than the current one, which is a real ‘enclosure’ machine.

Michel

I recalled a paper I had read time ago “Reputation and Coalitions in Medieval Trade: Evidence on the Maghribi Traders” (A. Greif, 1989). And surprisingly the description of this “Maghribi Traders” trading model fits more or less within what it is understood of a P2P (weakly true, but so close that it amazed me). I analize it here,
http://golpedee-estado.blogspot.com/2009/07/p2p-state-of-art.html
I find it surprising to find such similarities with a human group living a thousand years ago.

So far.

I can’t find that phrase in the text, I need more context . Can you point me where you found it?

Michel