FROM THE BUKHARAN BAZAAR TO THE DIGITAL MARKETPLACE: REREADING ABDURAUF FITRAT’S COMMERCIAL ETHICS IN THE AGE OF PLATFORM ECONOMY
Abstract
This article proposes a novel reading of Abdurauf Fitrat’s commercial ethics through the lens of contemporary platform economy and digital marketplace research. While previous scholarship has examined Fitrat’s economic ideas in the context of classical moral economy, this study advances a forward-looking thesis: that the conceptual problems Fitrat identified in the early twentieth-century Bukharan bazaar — information asymmetry, trust deficit, predatory intermediation, hidden fees, and the displacement of local producers — reappear with striking similarity in the architecture of today’s e-commerce platforms (Uzum, Yandex Market, Wildberries, OLX, Amazon). Drawing on the typology of “five bazaar pathologies” reconstructed from Fitrat’s journalistic articles in Hurriyat and Oyina, the article maps each pathology onto its digital counterpart and proposes a framework of seven “digital muhtasib” functions for contemporary marketplace governance. The empirical illustration draws on Uzbekistan’s e-commerce sector (2020–2025), where the gross merchandise value (GMV) grew from 0.4 to 4.6 billion USD. The findings suggest that Fitrat’s 1915 framework offers a culturally resonant vocabulary for designing consumer-protection rules, ethical algorithms and transparent marketplace governance in twenty-first-century Central Asia.
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