Business
A trading community with no empire, navy, or state behind it can still operate across every major empire at once. Shared trust, cooperation, and communication among its members do the work that state backing did for rival merchants. A small outpost was enough to run settlements stretching from London and Amsterdam to Manila and Acapulco.
For merchants scattered across continents, networks for passing information and communicating were as essential to operating as goods or capital. A dispersed trading community runs on the circulation of messages among its members.
A dispersed merchant community without state enforcement relies on a shared ethos of trust and cooperation among its members. That ethos is what allows distant partners to do business with one another at all.