Traders, Informal Trade and Markets Between the Caucasus and China

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.