New Delhi, July 4 -- The idea of the commons goes back further than technology, even property. In medieval Europe, the commons was the meadow where everyone's cows grazed, the forest where families gathered firewood or the river where they fished. The commons was about survival, about living together. For generations, these places weren't managed by distant officials or formal laws. They ran on ritual and trust. Rules like 'don't fish before the tide turns', or 'don't cut branches thicker than your wrist'. The commons was less a thing and more a bond, a relationship between people, place and memory.

That relationship was broken in the seventeenth century. Across England and Europe, the enclosure movement turned shared land into private p...