From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa
392
From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa
392eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520947573 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 05/04/2011 |
| Series: | California World History Library , #17 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean
The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa
By Sebouh David Aslanian
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-94757-3
CHAPTER 1
From Trade Diasporas to Circulation Societies
During the Safavid-Ottoman wars of 1603–1605, the Safavid monarch Shah 'Abbas I (r. 1587–1629) practiced "scorched earth" tactics, laying waste to the frontier regions of his empire, deporting up to 300,000 Armenians and others from the frontier territories, and resettling them in the interior of his realm. While many of the deportees suffered from their brutal displacement and perished during their deportation to Iran, the population from the small mercantile town of Old Julfa on the banks of the Aras River was given relatively privileged treatment by the Safavid ruler. After their town was razed to the ground in the autumn of 1604, the Julfans were driven to the Iranian capital of Isfahan, where 'Abbas I granted them land across the Zayandarud River and permitted them to build their own suburb, named New Julfa, in memory of their abandoned home. Though 'Abbas I does not seem to have had a "conscious policy" or blueprint for resettling the population of Old Julfa, he was clearly aware of the mercantile reputation of the town's merchants.
Soon after resettling the Julfans in an exclusive suburb of his capital, 'Abbas I granted them a number of privileges, including broad administrative and religious autonomy that went well beyond the rights usually associated with dhimmi communities residing under Muslim-ruled polities. As rootless aliens in a land where they were strangers, the Julfan Armenians were ideal "servants of power" for the centralizing Safavid monarch. That they were "stateless" and owed their safety and prosperity to 'Abbas I meant that the shah could trust them without significant fear of threat to his power in ways that he could not do with his other subjects. Because they were "service nomads" with special skills to offer, the Julfans were also ideal for the shah's policies of state centralization, which hinged on reformist measures aimed at promoting Iran's international silk trade. The Julfans had extensive experience as purveyors of Iranian silk to European merchants dating back several decades before their deportation. They were also known for their international connections and network of contacts in markets as far away as Aleppo, Venice, and possibly Mughal India. Moreover, they were well versed in numerous languages and were a Christian minority, traits that increased their mobility and contributed to their commercial success. Their Christian status was particularly advantageous because it meant that they were often perceived as "neutrals" in the largely "Sunni versus Shi'a"–colored Ottoman-Safavid rivalry during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As such, the Julfans were able to travel across Ottoman territory to the Mediterranean markets in times of conflict while transit rights were generally denied to Shi'a merchants. All these attributes, coupled with the Julfans' status as rootless outsiders with no prior relations with potentially fractious elements in Iranian society, allowed Safavid monarchs, and especially 'Abbas I, to lavish on them a number of privileges, in exchange for using their skills in much the same manner as the Habsburg emperors relied on the services of their "court Jews."
After winning a public auction in 1619 for the right to export Iranian silk, the Julfans became the principal exporters of Iranian silk, and they held on to their privileged position even after the silk industry was deregulated under 'Abbas I's successor Shah Safi (r. 1629–1642). As a result of its lucrative hold on Iran's silk exports to Europe, the small suburb of New Julfa grew throughout the seventeenth century to become one of the most important mercantile centers in Eurasia. Its Armenian merchants experienced unparalleled economic prosperity as purveyors of Iranian raw silk, then one of the most important commodities in world trade; during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, New Julfa's Armenian merchants diversified their portfolios and traded in Indian textiles as well as gems. Within decades of their deportation and exile from Old Julfa, the Julfan Armenians were able to build one of the greatest trade networks of the early modern period. This network, consisting of a cluster of trade settlements, grew as four interconnected, and to some extent overlapping, circuits around what I refer to as the "nodal center" of the New Julfan suburb. The most important of these circuits was established in the Indian Ocean, extending out from Julfa by way of the nearby ports on the Persian Gulf (Basra, Bandar Kung, and Bandar 'Abbas) and reaching out to Mughal India, then Southeast Asia, and, by the turn of the seventeenth century, to Canton and all the way to Manila and Acapulco in the New World. This Indian Ocean circuit of settlements was the first region to be extensively settled by Julfan merchants and served as the hub of Julfan trade activity. A second circuit of settlements was in the Mediterranean zone, encompassing mostly port settlements on the Mediterranean littoral, such as Aleppo (ideally situated near the port of Iskenderun/ Alexandretta), Izmir, Venice, Livorno, Marseilles, and Cadiz on the Atlantic. These settlements were important because they provided access to the northern European markets in Amsterdam and London, where raw Iranian silk was a much sought-after commodity and where silver currency was readily available. In the course of the seventeenth century, the Julfans established trade settlements in a third circuit overlapping parts of northwestern Europe and including settlements in Amsterdam and London. A fourth circuit was located north of Julfa, on the Eurasian landmass crossing the Russian Empire and leading to the ports on the Baltic and White seas. Settlements in Astrakhan, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Archangel, and the Baltic region served as relay stations connecting the Russian circuit to that in northwestern Europe, and especially to the markets of Amsterdam and London via the Baltic region.
The Julfan merchants are of interest to scholars of international trade and to world historians for at least two reasons. First, they were arguably the only Eurasian community of merchants to operate simultaneously and successfully across all the major empires of the early modern period, including the three "gunpowder empires" of Islamicate Eurasia (Mughal, Ottoman, and Safavid), Muscovite Russia, Qing China, and all the major European seaborne empires (the Portuguese, Spanish, British, Dutch, and French). The Julfan mercantile network, as we shall see, expanded and flourished in a proto-globalized space in early modern Eurasia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that interconnected the regional world-economies of Islamic Eurasia to their counterparts in the Christian Mediterranean and northwestern Europe. The conjuncture of several early modern global processes and developments helped create the interconnected world of Eurasia that facilitated Julfan expansion. Of these, the most important was arguably the development of four large centralized and stable Eurasian states or empires (Safavid Iran, Mughal India, Ottoman Empire, and Muscovite Russia) that promoted long-distance trade by establishing an infrastructure of transportation and patronizing mercantile communities. H.R. Roemer's remarks on the role of the most important Safavid ruler, Shah 'Abbas I, help contextualize the subsequent rise of the Julfa merchants and their global networks:
At the end of the 10th/16th and the beginning of the 12/17th century, Shah 'Abbas had mastered the crises which had shaken his country at the time of his accession.... After security had been restored in the country 'Abbas turned his attention to establishing an effective administration. In the development of transport routes, which he pursued with energy, particularly noteworthy is the network of caravansarais he created.... These and other measures invigorated trade and industry.
The same can be said of Akbar in restructuring the infrastructure of the Mughal Empire during the second half of the sixteenth century, and of contemporaneous rulers in the Ottoman and Muscovite empires. All four empires, pivotal to Julfan success, were successors of the Mongol-Timurid empires that stretched across Eurasia in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and in each case the centralization and expansion of each empire/state during the early modern period helped promote Julfan expansion and commercial prosperity. The simultaneous growth of European maritime networks, beginning with the Portuguese expansion into the Indian Ocean and followed by English, Dutch, and French expansion into the same space, where the Julfans were already operating for the most part, also helped integrate the early modern Indian Ocean with the Mediterranean and other parts of Europe. In doing so it also facilitated the further expansion of the Julfan network. The Julfans can thus be seen as an emblematic early modern mercantile community and trade network that both contributed to and benefited from the forces of what Chris Bayly has called "archaic" and "proto"-globalization, integrating and connecting the diverse parts of the early modern world stretching from the Mediterranean to the far recesses of eastern Eurasia.
As a community with a global network, the Julfans were also important "go-betweens," or cross-cultural brokers adept at "articulat[ing] relationships between disparate worlds or cultures by being able to translate between them." As we shall see in chapter 4, the role of their Eurasian network as a conduit for technology transfers from the East to the West and vice versa is illustrated by the transmission of South Asian calico printing techniques to Marseilles and other European cities in the seventeenth century, as well as by the transfer of printing technology and European artistic motifs and "visual culture" first to Safavid Iran, followed by Muscovite Russia, also during the seventeenth century. In South Asia, the "Armenians [read: Julfans] were to play a central role in diplomatic and financial negotiations with the Mughal and Safavid authorities on behalf of the British and thus counted as indispensable go-betweens for their continued existence in the region until the middle of the 18th century." For instance, in 1698 the Julfan merchant-diplomat Khwaja Israel di Sarhat acted as a "go-between" for the English East India Company by helping the company attain taluqdari (rent farming) rights over a region that later developed into modern Calcutta, in addition to the famous Mughal farman (royal edict) of 1715 giving the English trading privileges and the right to build fortifications around their settlement. Another merchant-diplomat, Martin di Marcara Avachintz, served as a regional director for the newly established French Compagnie des Indes in the 1660s and secured a farman through his contacts with the ruler of Golconda granting the French company the right to establish a settlement in the South Indian coastal city of Masulipatam.
The second reason a study of Julfan history should be of interest to global historians and economic historians of Eurasia and the Indian Ocean in particular is that of all the Asian communities of merchants operating across the Indian Ocean, the Julfans are possibly the only Asian community to have left a trail of documentation, stretching east from London to Isfahan, written by themselves and in their own obscure and now extinct dialect. Not only are these sources important for scholars studying other Asian mercantile communities (where local sources are, for the most part, lacking), but they can also be a healthy corrective to decades of scholarship on Indian Ocean history, much of which has been centered almost exclusively on documents produced by the bureaucracies of various European East India Companies, thus giving the Eurocentric impression that the "driving force of the Indian Ocean has been the crusading Europeans." As Denys Lombard put it in the introduction to an important collection of essays on Asian merchants in the Indian Ocean world,
The immense body of Western sources, which are both precise and lend themselves to quantitative treatment, as also the colonial perspective, itself well-established from the end of the nineteenth century, have created a situation in which all exchanges are seen through the prism of a periodization whose pulse is to be found in Lisbon, London, or Amsterdam.
Holden Furber, another eminent scholar of the Indian Ocean, expressed similar concerns about the difficulty of escaping from a "Europe-centeredness" in historians' accounts of the Indian Ocean, given the fact that
the bulk of the Asian sources for the maritime and commercial history of the Indian and China seas has in large part perished, a victim of tropical climate and paucity of family and business archives.... Paradoxically the European records of maritime, commercial, and political contact with the East are bulk, but anyone who delves among them even cursorily will at once become aware that they represent, as concerns Asian life, only the tip of an iceberg, a tip seen almost wholly through European eyes.
Use of Julfan sources thus can provide unprecedented insight into the inner workings of an important Eurasian mercantile community and in doing so help reorient our focus on the dynamics of Eurasian trade away from the citadels of Lisbon, London, and Amsterdam to local Asian actors in the Indian Ocean.
This book examines the emergence and growth of the global trade network of Armenian merchants from New Julfa from the founding of the suburb in 1605 to roughly 1747, when the suburb was looted and largely destroyed by the post-Safavid ruler Nadir Shah Afshar (r. 1736–1747). Unlike other works on the Julfa merchants, the primary focus of this book is not the communal history of New Julfa, the international trade of Iranian silk or the trade of Indian textiles or gems and their modes of operation, nor is its aim to analyze Julfan merchants' relationships with Armenian merchants from other communities or with "state power" represented by either the Safavid state or the European trading companies. These issues are touched upon in the first part of the book and periodically crop up in other places where they help to illuminate matters connected to the sociological aspects of Julfan society and economy, such as the impact of long-distance trade on the organization of community life, to which I give privileged treatment. In tracing Julfan settlements and trade in the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, and northwestern Europe and Russia, my aim is not to focus on the types of commodities the merchants traded but to explore the ways in which they were able to travel across these settlements and create a hybrid and syncretic identity that I call transimperial cosmopolitanism. Relying on economic sociology, this book also explores the creation of networks of trust between long-distance merchants. Through the rigorous use of thousands of pieces of mercantile correspondence, most of which are consulted here for the first time, this book seeks to recreate the ethos of trust and cooperation between merchants of the same community. From the perspective of economic history, the book also explores particular types of economic institutions, such as the commenda contract and the family firm, and their uses in the context of the Islamicate world of Eurasia.
Another aim of this book is to demonstrate the importance of information networks and communication in the workings of early modern long-distance merchant communities. Through the study of the art of Julfan business correspondence across early modern Eurasia and the Mediterranean, I argue that information sharing was important not only for merchants in their daily commercial affairs, but also for maintaining the social and cultural integrity of merchant networks as a whole. In the context of the Julfan mercantile community, letter writing connected far away commenda agents to their masters in New Julfa and also unified the trade settlements on the periphery to the nodal center of the entire network in New Julfa. Finally, the book examines the Julfan network in a comparative context with two other early modern long-distance trading networks, the Multani and the Sephardic. By placing the Julfan network in a comparative context, the book probes the Julfan network for possible structural flaws and argues that one such flaw was the high premium the Julfans placed on trust in their network, which compelled them to hire commenda agents almost exclusively from within their coalition, limiting their ability to expand and diversify into new markets.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean by Sebouh David Aslanian. Copyright © 2011 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations, ix,Acknowledgments, xi,
Preface, xv,
Note on Transliteration, xix,
1. From Trade Diasporas to Circulation Societies, 1,
2. Old Julfa, the Great Deportations, and the Founding of New Julfa, 23,
3. The Julfan Trade Network I: The World of the Indian Ocean, 44,
4. The Julfan Trade Network II: The Mediterranean, Northwestern European, and Russian Networks, 66,
5. "The salt in a merchant's letter": Business Correspondence and the Courier System, 86,
6. The Circulation of Men and Credit: The Commenda and the Family Firm, 121,
7. Trust, Social Capital, and Networks: Informal and Semiformal Institutions at Work, 166,
8. The Center Cannot Hold: The Decline and Collapse of the Julfan Trade Network, 202,
Conclusion: Comparative Thoughts on Julfan Armenians, Multani Indians, and Sephardic Jews, 215,
Notes, 235,
Bibliography, 307,
Index, 345,
What People are Saying About This
"Fascinating."—Times Literary Supplement (Tls)
"Exceeds, by far, all previous scholarship on the Armenian merchants of New Julfa."—Ararat
"A fascinating book."—Times Literary Supplement (Tls)
"Aslanian has unearthed a veritable treasure trove, and this book, which is written in a lucid style, is of great interest."—The Historian
"An extensively researched study . . . that is both scholarly and interesting to read. . . . Well written and well-documented."—Armenian Mirror-Spectator