In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

215 9 Conclusion Comparative Thoughts on Julfan Armenians, Multani Indians, and Sephardic Jews In an era of when contracts could be hard to enforce, especially across political boundaries, it helped to deal with people who came from the same place you did. . . . In case a trading partner was tempted to cheat you, it helped that their relatives and yours lived near each other. If worse came to worst, there were people you could take your anger out on.1 Most scholarship on “trade diasporas,” or long-distance mercantile communities and their networks, has tended to be insular and narrowly focused on a single community of merchants. Little work has been done to conceptualize mercantile communities in a comparative context. As Jonathan Israel puts it, “The role of different diasporas in long-distance trade . . . [has] only rather rarely been systematically compared.”2 ThischapteroffersacomparativeexcursusintoJulfanArmenian,MultaniIndian, and Sephardic Jewish trade networks and trading practices. The comparison is warranted because the three trade networks were arguably the leading long-distance mercantile communities of the early modern period and hence, either together or separately, can be taken to embody some of the more important traits of other early modern long-distance communities. Moreover, comparing the Julfan network with the Sephardic and Multani networks will be helpful in highlighting the peculiarities of each mercantile community and, for our purposes, will help us articulate more clearly some of the idiosyncrasies of the Julfan trade network and its merchants identified thus far. The chapter will examine the following: (1) how each network emerged, expanded, and eventually declined; (2) how each network was structured in relation to a single “nodal center” of circulation, as in the case of the Julfans and Multanis, or to multiple centers, as in the case of the Sephardim; and, most importantly, (3) how each network used different types of commercial contracts for partnerships to organize long-distance trade. The chapter will conclude by exploring the idea that the choice of a particular type of commercial contract over another could have serious ramifications for a given network’s ability to expand into new markets and to police “trust relations” in long-distance trade. It will also explore the possible correlation between a network’s structural properties (i.e., monocentric versus polycentric) and its tendency to privilege one form of partnership over another. THE JULFAN ARMENIANS As we saw in chapter 2, the Julfan network had its origins in the mercantile town of Old Julfa on the Safavid-Ottoman frontier. Merchants from this town had become internationallyrenownedpurveyorsofIraniansilkinthesecondhalfofthesixteenth century largely due to a “global conjuncture” of several otherwise unrelated historicaldevelopments ,includingtheinflowofNewWorldsilverintotheMediterranean, which increased the purchasing power of European merchants from the Mediterranean ; the transformation of Iranian silk into the second most important global commodity after pepper (at least as far as the Levant trade was concerned); and the proximity of Old Julfa to the silk-producing regions of northern Iran. Their pivotal role in the silk trade enabled the merchants of Old Julfa to create a trade network that had already stretched to Mediterranean ports such as Venice and probably extended to South Asia in the closing decades of the sixteenth century. The Safavid ruler Shah ‘Abbas I decided to relocate the Julfans to the outskirts of his new capital of Isfahan in 1604–1605 during the Ottoman-Safavid wars, when much of the region’s population was also forcibly displaced and resettled in different parts of Iran. Within a short period after their deportation and resettlement on the outskirts of the Safavid imperial capital, the Julfan merchants had come to preside over one of the greatest trade networks of the early modern period, with trade settlements or nodes spanning several empires, including the three most significant Muslim empires of Eurasia—the Ottoman, the Safavid, and the Mughal empires—as well as Muscovite Russia, Qing China, and all the major European seaborne empires, including the British, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Beneficiaries of and contributors to the Safavid state monopoly of the silk trade under ‘Abbas I and of Iranian silk’s increasingly important place in the global economy , the Julfans were able to branch out and establish a trade network with four interconnected circuits around New Julfa as a nodal center. Arguably the most important of these circuits was the Indian Ocean, to which the Julfans had access once Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf came under Safavid control in 1622 following the ousting of the Portuguese garrison there. This move allowed Julfan expansion...

Share