Notes
Notes PREFACE 1. Hyam and Henshaw 2003, 7. 2. See Aslanian 2006c. 3. McNeill 1986, 2. I have shifted McNeill’s focus on “pattern recognition” away from historical events to data contained in archival documents. Needless to say, this does not mean that the historian is free to disregard or relegate as “background noise” data that contradict or disturb the patterns that he or she discerns. 4. Steensgaard 1974, 8. 1. FROM TRADE DIASPORAS TO CIRCULATION SOCIETIES 1. “Forced migrations” of entire populations were a common practice of centralizing monarchs in the Safavid Empire, as in the neighboring Ottoman Empire, and did not affect the Armenians alone. Both sedentary populations (the Armenians and Caucasian Georgians) and nomadic tribes (the Qajars, Kurds, and others) were the target of such policies under ‘Abbas I. See Perry 1975, 199–215; and Maeda 2002. See chapter 2 for a discussion. 2. See chapter 2 for a discussion. The original sociological treatment of the synergy between rootlessness and servants of power goes back to Georg Simmel and his treatment of the figure of the European Jew as a stranger and “pariah,” qualities that Simmel argued made Jews useful to many European monarchs. For a more recent discussion, see Coser 1972, 574– 581. 3. The term “service nomad” has most recently been used by Slezkine (2004), who describes service nomads as an outsider community, usually territorially mobile, with special skills that are deemed useful to a given host society. Jews, Armenians, Parsees, and others are usually referred to as service nomads. 235 4. Coser 1972. The practice of forcibly removing and resettling talented “outsiders” and promoting them to positions of power was also a feature of Mongol rule in Eurasia. As Allsen notes in his important study of the Mongol conquests, “The Mongols also preferred ‘outsiders ’ without local connections and networks. To this end, the Mongols made heavy use of foreigners as well as people from the lower strata of society. In either case, recruits with such backgrounds were more likely to remain loyal to the Chinggisids and less likely to identify with local elites” (2001, 199). 5. The terms “gunpowder empires” and “Islamicate” are associated with the pioneering work of Marshal G. H. Hodgson (1975). 6. On “early modern” as a distinct period in world history, see Bentley 2007, 13–33; 1996, 749–770. The best applications of the concept to Eurasian history are Subrahmanyam 1997; Fletcher 1995; Lieberman 2003 and 2009; and Richards 1997. See also Subrahmanyam 1992b, chap. 1. 7. Roemer 1986, 269. On roads and infrastructure in Safavid Iran, see also Floor 2000a, 35–40. 8. My brief comments here are inspired by the discussion in Dale 2002, chap. 1. See also Dale 2010. 9. On the notion of “archaic globalization,” see Bayly’s influential 2002 essay. 10. Schaffer et. al. 2009, xiv. See also Raj 2009 for an illuminating discussion on go-betweens in eighteenth-century Calcutta. 11. For technology transfers in the textile industry, see Raveux 2010; and Riello 2010. For art, see Landau 2007 and 2010. 12. Raj 2009, 115. 13. Ibid. On the activities of Israel di Sarhat (also written Israel Sarhad or Surhaud), see Seth 1937/1992, 420–429. Alida Metcalf’s term “transactional go-between,” referring to “translators, negotiators, and cultural brokers” or men and women with “complex and shifting loyalties” (Metcalf 2005, 10) who often facilitated encounters between Europeans and non-European states and cultures in an age of European expansion and “discovery” might also be an appropriate way of describing the role of Khwaja Israel di Sarhat and others like him. For the concept and its application to Portuguese expansion history in sixteenth-century Brazil, see Metcalf, 10–13. 14. On Marcara Avachintz, see Baghdiantz McCabe 1999, 309–311. 15. It should be understood that by the “Julfa dialect” here and elsewhere in the book, I mean the mercantile dialect used by Julfan merchants in their correspondence and other mercantile writings from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century. This mercantile dialect had a larger proportion of technical and other loanwords from foreign languages than the dialect that the great linguist Hrachia Acharian studied and classified during the early years of the twentieth century. Even the nonmercantile dialect studied by Acharian was fading away under the influence of the Araratian dialect of Standard Eastern Armenian spoken today by Armenians in Iran and the Republic of Armenia. The mercantile version of the dialect used by Julfan merchants in the early modern period is largely if...
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