What You Should Read To Understand the Commons

The Context

• The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange. by Kojin Karatani. Duke University Press, 2014

The commons, i.e. 'communal shareholding', is one of the four important ways humanity has used to exchange and allocate resources, together with the gift economy, distribution according to rank, and the market. Alan Page Fiske's The Structure of Social Life documents many examples of each, but Karatini's great contribution is to historize this evolution. It's a rather fantastic synthesis of the anthropological and historical literature on the subject, and I very warmly recommend it.