Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks: Four Centuries of History (review)

This book is the product of two conference meetings, the first held in Corfu, Greece, in 2001 and the second in the Buenos Aires International Congress in 2002. In addition to an introduction and other brief preliminary pieces, the volume contains nineteen papers under four different headings. The first and the second deal with the early modern and modern periods and are a series of case stories. The third part contains four papers of more general import, and the fourth consists of a single paper by the late Frank Broeze, the main 'instigator' (p. ix) of the project, who died when it was in its early stages and to whose memory the volume is dedicated.

General statements about the methodological assumptions (or theoretical conclusions) of the authors are not confined to the third section of the book. They also are contained in the introduction and in some of the case study papers. The basic assumption and conclusion is that, as stated in the opening sentences of the introduction, "[n]ational historiographies have masked the significance of trade diasporas and their entrepreneurial networks [whose development] lay at the heart of the gradual integration of the world into one global system" (p. xviii).

The standard view of economic development as driven by impersonal market forces, the result of the interplay of atomistic agents driven by profit-maximizing impulses, therefore, is repeatedly challenged in this book. Its authors state that entrepreneurs, at least those entrepreneurs who work in alien lands and in strange social environments, rather than as independent atoms, tend to behave as parts of strings and clusters by associating and working in ethnically defined units. As Ioanna Pepelassis Minoglou writes, "a great deal of international business activity [. . .] was organized through collaborative or network arrangements" rather than having "the 'anonymous' businessman as [its most] important economic agent" (p. 182).

That religious and ethnic minorities have played an important entrepreneurial role in their host countries has been well known for a long time, and most of these essays contribute additional and convincing evidence. On occasion, however, some of the authors overstate their thesis. The sentences of the Introduction just cited seem to me a little overblown. Caroline Plüss clearly exaggerates when she writes that "acultural processes sustain transregional diasporic networks as necessary conditions for globalized trade" (p. 245, my italics.) Does this mean that where there are no 'transregional diasporic networks' there is no globalized trade? A pretty strong statement. And, of course, the essay proves nothing of the sort; it simply shows that those merchants often adopted customs, even took up names, of the host country, which is not really surprising. In doing so, she displays remarkable erudition and industry, but her opening statement is not sustained.

As Stathis Gourgouris writes, "often the personnel sought for [teaching about the diaspora are] scholars of actual diasporic communities," and this seems to be true of the book too (p. 384). Not only do the names of most authors seem to belong to the communities they study; most of them have teaching positions very far away from where they received their PhDs. The main diasporic communities studied are Jewish (Jonathan Israel, Huibert Schijf, and Chiara Betta), Greek (Maria Fusaro, Gelina Harlaftis, Minoglou, and Maria Christina Chatziioannou), Armenian (Ina Baghdiantz McCabe and Sushil Chaudhury), Japanese (William D. Wray), Maltese (Carmel Vassallo), and Chinese (Wai-keung Chung and Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown).

In addition, two essays deal with several groups: William Gervase Clarence-Smith on Middle Easterners, which includes Armenians and Arabs, and Plüss on Parsees, Indian Muslims, and Sephardics. On a more general plane, there are three essays, by Antony Reid, Gabriel Sheffer, and Gourgouris. Minoglou's paper, however, although centered upon the Greek diaspora, tries to draw some interesting general conclusions from her evidence. Finally, Broeze's paper is on a Scottish merchant in nineteenth-century Indonesia. Based upon the merchant's correspondence, it is very well written...