Abstract

Lucy Badalian and Victor Krivorotov

The article introduces a new economic concept - domestication of a territory. In the past, harnessing the Ricardian
advantage of each successive unique territory meant the development of a brand new technological package along
with social institutions, custom tailored to the land’s specifics. Today, we face a similar necessity of improving the
productivity of territories of the developing world. They are rich, diverse and fragile, thus, hardly present a good fit for
the current heavily mechanized oil-based economy, US-style. Apparently, a new approach to development is needed,
along with special strategies, custom tailored both to the specifics of these territories and their ages-old social
customs. We show that indeed such approaches are already appearing, grass- roots, from bottom- up, simultaneously
in West and East, ranging from the use of mobile phones in Kenya by fishermen for sales/banking/micro financing,
neighborhood gardens in India, new business paradigm in China (Object-Oriented Design, further OOD) to the rise of
online markets on eBay and Amazon or dissemination-democratization of knowledge by Google. The rise of new
forms is based on the use of the most modern technologies, enabling miniaturization and customization. We argue
that this may lead to the future economy of small series. This potential opposite of the current economy of mass
production would be based on the ages-old eastern tradition of artisan-style production and intensive but careful use
of smallish land plots. The outcome of such a switch in paradigms would depend on the success or failure of new
public/private forms of ownership, based on judicious use of public commons for the private gain of its residents.
This would include such intangibles as air, land, quality of life etc, usually neglected within capitalism (Polanyi, 2001).