China's cattle trade before 1949 is effectively invisible to historians. With no geographic center, few dominant firms, and little government oversight, cattle trade left behind no clear archive of sources, leaving scholars to the mercy of conjecture and episodic evidence. Combining insights from business and social history, we focused our attention on trade intermediation as the key to understanding the operations of a diffuse trade system. In the absence of a top–down archive, we composited hundreds of local sources on intermediation in cattle trade and remotely interviewed 80 former brokers. These sources revealed large numbers of individuated trade routes, which we break into three types: persistent supply, specialized demand, and resource circulation. Each type of trade called for distinct forms of intermediation with relatively little overlap between specialized networks. This recreation of China's cattle trade reveals a sophisticated market for animal labor that calls into question the direct causal link between imperialist resource extraction and rural immiseration, and suggests the utility of applying tools and perspectives of social history to other sorts of decentered commercial systems.

A new form of digital economic circulation has emerged, wherein ideas, knowledge, labour and use rights for otherwise idle assets move between geographically distributed but connected and interactive online communities. Such circulation is apparent across a number of digital economic ecologies, including social media, online marketplaces, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and other manifestations of the so-called ‘sharing economy’. Prevailing accounts deploy concepts such as ‘co-production’, ‘prosumption’ and ‘peer-to-peer’ to explain digital economic circulation as networked exchange relations characterised by their disintermediated, collaborative and democratising qualities. Building from the neologism of platform capitalism, we place ‘the platform’ — understood as a distinct mode of socio-technical intermediary and business arrangement that is incorporated into wider processes of capitalisation — at the centre of the critical analysis of digital economic circulation. To create multi-sided markets and coordinate network effects, platforms enrol users through a participatory economic culture and mobilise code and data analytics to compose immanent infrastructures. Platform intermediation is also nested in the ex-post construction of a replicable business model. Prioritising rapid up-scaling and extracting revenues from circulations and associated data trails, the model performs the structure of venture capital investment which capitalises on the potential of platforms to realise monopoly rents.

New global history studies have provided theoretical models related to different paths of economic growth and consumer behaviour between East Asia (mainly China and Japan) and Europe during the period of the first industrialisation. However, more research challenging the Eurocentric views of the origins of globalisation is needed. In this article, I examine the exchanges of Chinese silks and porcelains and European wines and liquors for American silver through the Swedish Grill Company. This company had extensive business activities in Canton and Macao establishing strategic links and intermediation with other relevant companies from China, Manila, Seville and Marseille. On the global level, such exchanges played a crucial role for the accumulation of American silver in China during the Qing dynasty, and the outflows of Chinese goods to the Americas and Europe fostered market integration and globalisation that occurred earlier than 1820.

We consider an economy in which people choose between a random-matching sector and organized markets absent double-coincidence problems. Merchants in the organized markets issue bills of exchange. Pareto-ranked multiple equilibria exist with the extent of the market and circulation of private liabilities endogenously determined. If trade frictions are moderate, bills circulate as a general medium of exchange, and the level of specialization is higher relative to barter. In this case, higher inside liquidity is accompanied by more specialization. When all transactions take place in the organized markets, trading risk vanishes and the economy achieves complete specialization.

It is well known that the first welfare theorem can fail for overlapping generations economies with private production and unsecured debt. This paper demonstrates that the reason for this failure is that intermediation is modeled as a purely passive coordination activity implemented by a Walrasian Auctioneer. When intermediation is modeled instead as a contestable activity carried out by a corporate intermediary owned by consumer-shareholders and operated in their interest, every equilibrium is Pareto efficient. In broader terms, these findings caution that the inefficiency observed in standard modelings of overlapping generations economies may not be the reflection of an intrinsic market failure. Rather, the observed inefficiency could instead be due to a fundamental incompleteness in the model specification — the presumed inability of private agents to exploit the earnings opportunities associated with incurring and forever rolling over debt.