Stateless commerce

In Stateless Commerce, Barak Richman uses the diamond industry to explore how ethnic trading networks operate and why they persist in the twenty-first century. How, for example, does the Forty-Seventh Street diamond district in midtown Manhattan--surrounded by skyscrapers and sophisticated financial institutions--continue to thrive as an ethnic marketplace that operates like a traditional bazaar? Conventional models of economic and technological progress suggest that such primitive commercial networks would be displaced by new trading paradigms, yet in the heart of New York City the old world…