From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa

5. “The salt in a merchant’s letter”: Business Correspondence and the Courier System

5 “The salt in a merchant’s letter” Business Correspondence and the Courier System It is now widely acknowledged that “information was the most precious good” in the lives of early modern merchant communities.1 Claude Markovits explains: It is the capacity of the merchants to maintain a constant flow of information within the network that ensures its success. This means two things: first, that “leaks” have to be avoided as much as possible to the outside world, secondly, that information must circulate smoothly within the network, both spatially and temporally, as it gets transmitted from one generation to another . . . , in the long run, the most successful merchant networks havebeen those mostabletoprocess informationintoa bodyofknowledge susceptible of continuous refinement. This body of knowledge, of a pragmatic nature, which is mostly about markets, is more or less congruent with what is often called the “secrets of the trade.”2 Information flows were particularly important for Armenian merchants from New Julfa who by the eighteenth century had branched out from their small mercantile suburb on the outskirts of Isfahan across a global trading network stretching from Amsterdam and Cadiz in the West to Canton and Manila on the rim of the Pacific Ocean in the East. Information sharing was important not only for merchants in managing their daily commercial affairs, but also for maintaining the integrity of the Julfan network as a whole. Letter writing connected distant commenda agents to their masters in New Julfa and also unified the trade settlements on the periphery of the network to its nodal center in New Julfa. Given that this was the case, the question arises, how was information circulated in the Julfan network? Did merchants use a courier system to deliver news to each 86 “The salt in a merchant’s letter” 87 other? What role did commercial correspondence play in Julfan society and the long-distance trade of its merchants? This chapter will explore these questions through an examination of Julfan commercial correspondence from archives in London, Venice, and New Julfa, and will demonstrate that the Julfan trade network was built on and unified through a culture of long-distance commercial correspondence. Moreover, as a close examination of thousands of business letters reveals, Julfan merchants had a sophisticated system of circulating information. Following Rene Barendse, I call this system the “intelligence network.”3 Most of my discussion will focus on the presence of this network in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, because the data almost exclusively pertain to these spheres of Julfan activity. First, I examine the culture of commercial correspondence in Julfan society by analyzing the style and content of Julfan business letters, illustrating the discussion with examples drawn from a broad sample of commercial correspondence. Then, I consider the uses of the courier network in Julfan society. Relying on data found in Julfan business letters, I provide statistical information on the average “speed” of the delivery of news between the Mediterraneansettlements (especiallyVenice,Livorno,Izmir,andAleppo),ontheonehand, and those in the Indian Ocean, on the other, to the network’s nodal center in New Julfa, Isfahan. Tables featuring data on mail delivery between these spheres of Julfan commerce are provided. These data are important in helping us to understand both the confines in which communication in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuriescirculatedandthewayinwhichthecirculationofinformationwasabletoover come what Fernand Braudel famously called “distance: the first enemy.”4 THE CULTURE OF COMMERCIAL CORRESPONDENCE IN JULFAN SOCIETY . . . a Factor is created by Merchants Letters.5 When the first Armenian newspaper, Azdarar (Intelligencer), was launched in Madras in the fall of 1794, it contained special features that struck its eighteenthcentury readers as quite novel. In the first place, the new newspaper devoted a numberofpagesinitsserializedissuestomaking commercialinformationpubliclyavailable for the benefit of Madras’s Armenian merchant community. It included detailed timetables of commercial shipping traffic at the port of Madras, a price list of various commodities traded in the local markets, and brief “notices” by merchants advertising goods for sale, along with their prices. Each issue of Azdarar also included social and political news regarding the various Armenian communities in India, as well as a quick recap of world news (mostly concerning affairs in Europe) excerpted andtranslatedfromEnglish-languagenewspapersinIndiaandEurope.Manyofthese innovativefeatureswerecreativeadaptationsfromEnglish-languagenewspapersthat had just begun to appear in India, including the idea of presenting information per- 88 “The salt in a merchant’s letter” tinent to the business community in a public forum. Clearly, the aim of Azdarar’s editor, as he...