Business
When a modernizing state builds formal structures that leave no room for personal contacts, people who do business through relationships turn to the informal networks that still work for them. This makes those networks more valuable and more powerful. Trying to sideline an old system of trust can push everyone further into it.
A community's internal web of relationships loses influence when a rival web, built on ties to powerful officials and state-linked institutions, controls access to resources. Members then look upward to patrons instead of sideways to one another. The local network may survive, but it no longer decides who succeeds.
Contracts, arm's-length dealing, standardized goods and fixed prices replace the need to know and trust your trading partner. Once that happens, a merchant's personal reputation stops being the key to success. The bonds that reputation used to hold together loosen with it.
A government's policies toward a social group can produce the opposite of what it intends. A regime hostile to a traditional merchant community left it stronger and more autonomous, while a later regime pledged to protect it ended up weakening it. To judge a policy, follow what it does to how the group is organized, not what the rulers said they wanted.
When rulers hand out favors one person at a time instead of through formal channels, members of a group compete for those favors. This exposes and widens divisions inside the group and erodes its solidarity. Being friendly to a group can weaken it more than open hostility does.
A community bound by repeated personal dealings and shared reputations can turn private grievances into collective demands on the state. The same networks that carry credit and trust can carry money, messages, and coordinated action. When those ties fade, the group loses its capacity to act politically, even if its members stay wealthy.
Where people trade face to face, the constant exchange of information during business becomes a major channel for news. That makes a physical marketplace a public forum for the people who shape opinion. Economic centrality and influence over what society hears grow together.