If you are, like me, an historian manqué, this is a truly wonderful book on trade diasporas. Though I have written on trade diasporas, until I read this book I had not realized the profundity of my ignorance. I was happy to find out, for example, that the expression was coined in 1971 by my friend and namesake (but not a relation), the late Abner Cohen, who gave it a reasonably precise definition, including an insistence that there had to be evidence of moral community if the notion of ‘trade diaspora’was to carry conviction. This was an acute observation which has not always been recognized by the authors and editors of this book, who somewhat casually conflate ‘trade diasporas’ with ‘diaspora networks’ and ‘entrepreneurial networks’. However, a number of the contributors point to the necessity for moral cohesion if risks are to be taken, or an often vulnerable minority is to survive or thrive. A close degree of kinship also permits trusting someone with large advances for what might be long-delayed and uncertain returns. As the editors recognize, family, the creation of a common commercial culture and religion, among other factors, provide the ties that bind (though they are sceptical that any one religion does the job better than any other). Perhaps the editors felt that relaxed definitions were necessary to include all their case studies. The book comprises nineteen papers divided into four parts, with pithy and informative introductions by the editors to each part. In the opening introduction the editors observe that nationalist histories submerged trade diasporas, while imperialist and colonial accounts treated them as subalterns (the somewhat inappropriate, but now fashionable word for compradors). Yet Greek, Armenian and Jewish traders (and trade diasporas from many other ethnic or sub-ethnic groups) are threaded through all political structures–pre-national, national and imperial. To give some idea of its scope, the book includes chapters or sections on Sephardic Jews in the Portuguese maritime empires; Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, India and Iran; Huguenots in the Atlantic trade; early Japanese trade diasporas in South East Asia; Greeks brokering the trade between Venice and England; Maltese as intermediaries between the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans; Jewish bankers in the nineteenth century; Chinese traders in Indonesia and Scots in Batavia. And this does not exhaust the list.

It is difficult to reproduce the common threads and cross-cutting generalizations spanning diverse cases and periods without extensive quotation–not possible in a short review. But I can recount some acute remarks by a number of the contributors. First, Jonathan Israel noted that extensive and important as they were, none of the early trade diasporas was able to span all four of the European/Near East religious zones (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox and Muslim), though Sephardic Jews, Julfan Armenians and Greeks each bridged two or three. Second, a number of the contributors point to the need for successful trade diasporas to interrogate at least two cultures (a feature first discussed at length by Philip Curtin in his important early account). Often language and religion are decisive; so (as Vassallo notes) the Maltese could link the Hapsburg and Ottoman zones by being western in religion and eastern in language. Third, trade diasporas were