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Preface For some scholars, no doubt, archival work is logistically too difficult or temperamentally uncongenial. Such must survive by their theorizing, and hope to invent a concept which catches on. But history is too important to be left to stay-at-home theorists.1 Some studies are idea-driven; at their inception is a notion or theory about a process of historical development. The writer usually begins with an insight that may help pull together certain relatively well-known historic facts or events into a coherent whole. Others are archive-driven. In this case, the work in question begins not with a theoretical insight; rather, it is propelled by the discovery of a mass of archival documents heretofore neglected or overlooked by other scholars. Theoretical insights and generalizations certainly may play an important role in works of this sort, but mostly after the documents have been carefully gathered, laid out from beginning to end, scrupulously mined for the information they possess, and interpreted for the answers they may hold to the kinds of big questions historians are in the habit of posing. This book, which began its career as a Columbia University doctoral dissertation , falls into the second camp. The idea of writing it took shape in my mind after the serendipitous discovery of archival material in the spring of 2003 while I was doing dissertation research in London. At the time, I had already begun work on another topic dealing with the role of Armenian merchants in the “origins” of Armenian nationalism and the flowering of Armenian culture in the late eighteenthcentury Armenian diasporic settlements of Europe and India. Based on the secondary literature I had read, I had decided to focus my study on the patronage activities of a group of merchants from New Julfa, an Armenian commercial suburb of the Safavid capital of Isfahan, who were for the most part residing in Madras, India. This Perso-Armenian community of merchants in India provided the social and economic foundations for what has come to be known in Armenian historiography as the “national revival movement” in the diaspora. They bankrolled the xv nascent craft of Armenian printing in places like Venice, Amsterdam, Livorno, Madras, Calcutta, Lvov (now in the Ukraine), and New Julfa. They were also behind the revival of letters then spearheaded by a small band of Armenian Catholic missionaries known as the Mkhitarist Order, based on the island of San Lazzaro in Venice; they supported the establishment of schools of higher education in Venice, Paris, New Julfa, Moscow, and Calcutta. In addition to their financial patronage, some members of the Julfan merchant community became cultural and intellectual producers in their own right, as in the case of Shahamir Shahamirian, the wealthiest Armenian merchant in Madras during the second half of the eighteenth century. After conducting research in Venice and Vienna during 2001–2002, thanks to a Columbia University Dissertation Travel Fellowship, I realized that the theoretical insights that had led me to formulate some ideas concerning the Armenian “revival movement” were inadequate in themselves to the task at hand. In order to write a thickly described and analytically informed historical narrative of the “revival” movement, I needed fresh archival evidence. Such evidence, however, was hard to come by. The most likely repository of Armenian documents pertaining to the cultural activities of Armenians in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the archive of the cultural producers themselves, namely, the Mkhitarist Congregation on San Lazzaro, as well as the archives of the Armenian churches in Calcutta and Madras. Unfortunately, my one-year research stint in Venice proved to be fruitless in this regard. The Mkhitarist archives were not open to most noncongregationists and have largely remained so to the present. This was a great disappointment, since these archival collections are among the richest repositories of documents pertaining to Armenian history in the early modern period (1500–1800). To remedy the situation , in the spring of 2003 I traveled to London, where I worked for three months examining some of the East India Company’s papers at the India Office Records (IOR) stored in the British Library, in the hope of discovering material on some of the Madras-based Armenian merchants whose patronage activities I had been studying. Though I did not come across important material on these merchants and their cultural activities, I did stumble upon a collection of mercantile papers relating to an Armenian-freighted ship called the Santa Catharina, which was confiscated in India by the British...

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