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The Commercial Culture of the Armenian Merchant: Diaspora and Social Behaviour

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 June 2011

Søren Mentz
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Extract

Historians have very little information about the operation of Asian commercial networks and the social interaction between merchants. Hampered by this lack of data scholars have focused on trade routes and commodities. Our knowledge of the Armenian trading network is more or less limited to its geographical dispersal. The network stretched from New Julfa, a suburb of the Iranian capital of Isfahan, to Amsterdam and London in Europe, and to important centres in the Levant and Central Asia, covering the Indian Subcontinent, and extending eastwards to Manila in the Philippines. Armenian merchants were prosperous and communities were located in commercial towns all over the world. The brothers Khojah Joseph and Khojah Johannes Marger, for instance, established a partnership at Hyderabad in 1666 with a starting capital of 27,550 rupees. Some forty years later on the death of Joseph Marger, the trading activity of the two Armenians was worth more than two million rupees.

Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 16 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Research Institute for History, Leiden University 2004

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