https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Za_(guilds) – Japan during the Muromachi period (1336-1573)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabunakama – Kabunakama (株仲間) were merchant guilds in Edo period Japan (1603-1868)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shreni – India in the early Buddhist period and through the Mauryan period [i.e. 322–184 BC] – Good article

Book: Meera Abraham, Two Medieval Merchant Guilds of South India (on Annas-archive)

Book: Randi Deguilhem (eds), Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East: Fashioning the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean (on Annas-archive)

Kiran Kumar Thaplyal, Guilds in Ancient India: A Study of Guild Organization in Northern India and Sestern Deccan from circa 600 BC to circa 600 AD

Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion 1770-1870

A couple of quotes from Kropotkin that might help your researches:

• “Volumes and volumes have been written about these unions which, under the name of guilds, brotherhoods, friendships and druzhestva, minne, artels in Russia, esnaifs in Servia and Turkey, amkari in Georgia”

• “Only now, when hundreds of guild statutes have been published and studied, and their relationship to the Roman collegiae, and the earlier unions in Greece and in India,[FOOTNOTE: Very interesting facts relative to the universality of guilds will be found in “Two Thousand Years of Guild Life,” by Rev. J. M. Lambert, Hull, 1891. On the Georgian amkari, see S. Eghiazarov, Gorodskiye Tsekhi (“Organization of Transcaucasian Amkari”), in Memoirs of the Caucasian Geographical Society, xiv. 2, 1891.] is known, can we maintain with full confidence that these brotherhoods were but a further development of the same principles which we saw at work in the gens and the village community.”

“We have known for quite some time that guilds and guild-like institutions were not limited to medieval and early modern Europe, but existed in other societies too – in China, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, India, and elsewhere”

• George Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London – https://archive.org/details/cu31924030086692 – on page 2 and 3 he mentions there were guilds in China and India but he doesn’t go into detail

• There’s a book called Crafts and Craftsmen of the Middle East: Fashioning the Individual in the Muslim Mediterranean that you can find on Annas-archive

• There’s a book called The Guilds of Ottoman Jerusalem that you can find on Annas-archive

Designing a solarpunk world. I wanted people living within the ecological limits in every biome: arctic, tundra, jungle, sailing the sea, sailing the sky in airships, under the sea in submarines. This last one posed a massive problem because submarines are extremely power-hungry, and that’s incompatible with the low-energy-use theme of the world. But I didn’t want to give up the Zissou vibes by erasing the submarine-tribe.

I was stuck on this for months, then had a breakthrough when I discovered an obscure technology called underwater gliders. They are AES (actually existing submarines) that use hardly any energy, can even harvest enough from ocean thermal differences to cruise the oceans perpetually hanging out with friendly dolphins. The glider system “gives the glider the ability of renewing its onboard energy stores by harvesting environmental energy from the heat reservoir of the ocean, specifically from the temperature differences of the cold deep water and the warmer surface water (available in 80% of the world’s oceans). Ranges of 30 000 to 40 000 km, circumnavigating the world, then become conceivable.”

The existing ones are small drones. But a paper with (doi:10.1007/978-3-319-16649-0_12) has a section titled ‘Size effects’ and bigger would be better. And the paper already linked has a whole chapter discussing scaling effects.

That was a great breakthrough because I went from “Submarines are poewr-hungry nuclear behemoths” to “Submarines use basically zero energy” and did it with proven tech. The tradeoff is that you have to glide up and down, and the floor will be at a 4° tilt a lot of the time, which could be annoying.

I am fascinated by the similarities … like how nations formed confederations eg. the Haudenosaunee

Right! Exactly! Three similarities we see over the world –

• Tribal confederacies. The Caledonians in Scotland, various Pashtun confederacies in history, various North American ones.

• Small tribal units and big ones. Among the Mapuche, several lov formed a rehue. Among the Māori, whānau confederated into larger hapū; hapū confederated into larger iwi. Among the Bedawin, several bayt formed a goum.

• Tribal assemblies: þing among the Nordic folk, veche in the Slavic world, sangha in India, becharaa among the Semai, Jirga among the Pashtun

• Community halls or ‘third places’: the mudhif of the Marsh Arabs, the Toguna of the Dogon, Bulgarian Chitalishte, Caravanserai of the desert people

• Managed commons: the tabu of the Hawai’ians, the hima of the Arabs

• Customary law, often with restorative justice: xeer in Somalia, coutume in France, pashtunwali, Albanian kanun. Law without cops of a Babylon-type centralised state.

So I think it’s somewhat valid to generalise that there exists a pattern called ‘tribal’, and then it’s interesting to generalise that to the whole world. Was it historically universal? No of course not, but no other model was either. The Westphalian nation-state emerged and became dominant, I’m imagining what if tribal confederalism became dominant?