Favors on the Margin ebook

When wages failed, currency vanished, or official shops came up empty, people built other routes to food, fuel, clothing, and work. This book examines the improvised economies that grew in the spaces between regulation and need. It traces street trading, household networks, cross-border exchange, and black markets without treating them as a single world. By attending to the people who negotiated price, risk, and trust, it reveals how informal exchange could be both a refuge from hardship and a source of unequal power.