In effect, by far the greater part of trade flowed in such dispositional channels, while a much smaller part continued to proceed on transactional li… - Karl Polanyi

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In effect, by far the greater part of trade flowed in such dispositional channels, while a much smaller part continued to proceed on transactional lines. Numerous devices ensured that no merging of the two should ensue.
Both equivalencies, which made gainless transactions possible, and rules of law, which organized riskless dispositions into a trading system, were a result of the dominance of redistributive forms of integration. But these did not operate in the ways of tyrannical administrative bureaucracy, as assumed by historians in the past. The absence, or at least the very subordinate role, of markets did not imply ponderous administrative methods tightly held in the hands of a central bureaucracy. On the contrary, gainless transactions and regulated dispositions, as legitimized by law, opened up, as we have seen, a sphere of personal freedom formerly unknown in the economic life of man.