No abstract

This essay examines the role of 'trust' and cooperation in early modern long-distance trade. While most literature on the subject posits trust as a given attribute of long-distance merchant communities and not as a factor in need of historical explanation or analysis, this essay seeks to provide a historical explanation for the creation and role of trust in such communities. It focuses on the history of Armenian merchants from New Julfa, Isfahan, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The central theoretical model this essay relies upon to explain trust among Julfan Armenian merchants derives from 'social capital' theory as elaborated in sociology and economic sociology, as well as theory from the New Institutional Economics associated with the influential work of Avner Greif. Unlike the latter body of work, however, this essay argues that Julfan trust must be understood not solely as an outcome of informal institutions such as reputation-regulating mechanisms discussed by Greif in his work on Maghribi Jews of the medieval period, but also as a result of the simultaneous combination of both informal and semi-formal legal institutions. In the Julfan context, the essay thus focuses on a merchant arbitrage institution known as the Assembly of Merchants, which enabled Julfan merchants to generate and maintain trust, trustworthiness and uniform norms necessary for collective action and cooperation.

This essay addresses the burgeoning field of global studies of print culture by examining the rich history of early modern Armenian print culture and book history, both it is own right and comparatively with their counterparts in the European and Islamic worlds.. Drawing on a variety of primary sources (colophons, notarial documents, and correspondence between printers), it makes two significant contributions to the broader scholarship on print culture and book history. First, it restores to the historiography of global print a valuable case study of a Near Eastern print tradition thus far missing from it. Second and more vital, unlike the recent spate of case studies involving South Asian, Persian, and Arabic print histories, it examines an Asian print tradition that stretches back to the first phase of printing, coinciding and overlapping with the early modern period and also with the “hand press” era of printing before the onset of the Industrial Revolution. It argues that from its inception in Venice in 1512 until roughly the early 1800s, the history of Armenian print culture was not only linked to its European counterpart but, much like it, was closely entangled with that of port cities, initially in Europe and subsequently in Asia, where Armenian long-distance merchants, or “port Armenians,” were settled.

No abstract

No abstract