Are we living in a Brave New World?

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www.outlookindia.com/website/story/a-better-way-to-make-money/239533/amp

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www.academia.edu/30656961/A_Forgotten_Chapter_From_Economic_History_Schwanenkirchen_Wörgl_and_Other_Freigeld_Experiments_Newest_Edit_

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Borders before Nations: Encounters in the Akan and Dzungar Borderlands, 1450–1750
brill.com/downloadpdf/journals/jemh/27/5/article-p418_2.pdf

From our perspective as scholars of global history, we define border-making as a series of processes at the heart of borderland studies. This article finds that borders developed as repeat encounters became standardized. This builds on the work of James Scott, who demonstrates how border-making defined a region not once, but consistently and over time.19 By conceptualizing these spaces as borderlands, and recognizing how exchanges and conflicts shaped material and cultural processes, we are thus able to consider the experiences of specific people and communities without assuming a set spatial entity. This is especially useful for the study of regions prior to the formation of nation states and of polities outside of Europe.
In addition to recognizing the ongoing process of border-making, the concept of a borderland also enables a clearer examination of experiences on the ground. Researchers now stress questions such as who acts as a “car- rier of a border” in their everyday life, maybe even involuntarily. Therefore, border-making is here understood as a set of material practices coming simultaneously from above and from below, with different motivations and changing over time. While a state could, for example, regulate borders for commercial contact as a means of combatting disruption caused by interna- tional exchange, it was local and international traders who chose to uphold or to cross them. Such spaces were, in Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron’s terms, borderlands with well-defined crossing points, and the research focus thereby lies on the process itself.20
As Chiara Brambilla has argued, this shift in border-making theory – from the territorial imperative to a processed-based bordering that more clearly encapsulated the ongoing adaptability of borderlands as well as the experi- ence of living within them – has put a whole new stress on the ethnic and making of borders. Historical actors would have been aware of who could cross and who could not, and whose transgressions would be danger- ous or not. Because, while borderland studies stresses the fluidity of the bor- ders, that does not equal a lack of restrictions.21 Instead, studies detailing the making of rigid borders, political territorial boundaries, and their delineation in maps, are increasingly confronted with research focused on fluid, porous, lived, and imagined practices of bordering. Rigid and flexible borders are seen as parallel aspects of the same kind of border-making.22 Consequently, by examining borders before nations we can more effectively acknowledge a constant tension between openness and limits on the movement of commer- cial goods, technology, and peoples even as cross-cultural exchange drove the globalization of the world.