Traders, Informal Trade and Markets between the Caucasus and China

Dr. Fehlings‘ book is an important step towards a historical economic anthropology of everyday economic action, because she succeeds excellently in making this everyday action transparent in its diversity and its historical plasticity. 

  Werner Plumpe, Professor of Economic History, Goethe University, Germany

Why and how do Georgian and Chinese traders travel across Eurasia without any formal institutional support and what consequences are there of such ‘globalization from below’ for economy, markets, sociality and materiality? 

Susanne Fehlings’ ethnography skilfully explores the structural conditions, background and everyday lives of such traders and businessmen, scrutinizes their activities, narratives and logics of action and offers a rich anthropological discussion embedded in historical, legal and political contexts. 

Lale Yalçın-Heckmann, Docent for Social Anthropology, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic
The book is about the economic practices of traders and businesspeople from the Caucasus and China who work in local bazaars in Tbilisi and Beijing. It describes their activities, their motivations, their socio-cultural backgrounds, their work environments, and their interactions with one another. Contributing to a broader debate on the nature and role of informal economic practices in the post-Soviet periphery and processes of “globalization from below”, the book aims at providing a thick description of the embeddedness of bazaar traders’ economic behaviors and strategies in local and global political, economic, and cultural contexts, markets and supply chains.

Susanne Fehlings is a Lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and a Senior Researcher at the Frobenius Institute for Research in Cultural Anthropology, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Her main interests include economic anthropology, the anthropology of the state, urban anthropology and topics related to ethnobotany. Her regional focus is post-Soviet Eurasia and the South Caucasus.