Abstract

The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rise of an elite non-Muslim merchant community in Aleppo benefitted both the Empire and the community’s three component groups: Europeans, Jews from Livorno or Venice, and local Christian Arabs, Armenians and Greeks. The dramatic financial and social ascent of this Levantine society resulted largely from three economic policies energetically pursued by the Porte to spur trade with the Muslim-suspicious West. First, increasingly broad Imperial capitulations granted Europeans and their non-Muslim local prot�g�s tax exemptions and the right to adjudicate cases in their consular courts. Later, the Ottomans extended these extra-territoriality privileges to any participating local trader, minority or Muslim. Finally, the Empire inaugurated wide-ranging Tanzimat reforms integrating non-Muslim subjects as fully equal. As a result of these policy shifts, even when the nineteenth-century decline in trade led joint stock companies like the English Levant Company, the French Levant Company and the Dutch VOC to abandon Aleppo, individual European merchants--traditional mediators for Western enterprises and for Muslim traders--could create and expand their family trade networks regionally and could simultaneously serve as European nations’ business representatives and diplomatic consuls. Classic Ottomanists have depicted these Imperial economic decisions as proof of Imperial paralysis, rigidity, and weakness vis-�-vis the West. But the revisionist view, supported by the archival evidence this dissertation presents, finds that the Porte actively, innovatively, and forcefully enacted these strategies to advance its own international trade and to aid its own traders of any national origin. These far-reaching laws purposively hoisted the status and power of the hybrid Levantine community which could uniquely and usefully bridge East and West by belonging equally to both. As a privileged class, Levantines kept their identity and elevation by fluency in both native and foreign languages and cultures, by establishing clan-based trade networks, and by exclusionary marriage practices. Yet their characteristic cosmopolitanism won them the irreplaceable role as the financial, diplomatic, and cultural link between the Empire and Europe. This connection perpetuated the commercial power of the Porte, in the face of impending Western hegemony, for an impressive period, just as it maintained the Levantine identity until this century.

This dissertation analyzes the early modern global luxury commodity trade of diamonds and gems conducted between the Indian Subcontinent and the Mediterranean during 1670s and 1730s. It examines the involvement of the Armenian mercantile network of merchants from New Julfa, Isfahan in this global trade by focusing on the previously unpublished and unstudied body of archival documents from state and private archives in Italy, the UK, Armenia, Iran and beyond. By focusing on a single family firm of professional gem merchants, the Minasians, their network of agents and business activities, this dissertation argues against the previously presumed idea by economic historians that early modern Asian merchants and family firms were merely peddlers in the face of the European chartered joint-stock companies. Operating from Isfahan and Livorno all the way to the Russian, Ottoman and Mughal Empires, the previously little-studied Minasian archival documents demonstrate that these gem merchants’ business ventures covered vast distances and included all three “gunpowder empires” of the early modern period.

This dissertation also sheds light on the specifics of decision making, as well as the role of social capital in the long-distance business operations of this family firm. It argues that the systematic circulation of information and market knowledge played a key role in the business and decision-making culture of this family firm. Moreover, their detailed knowledge of early modern gem markets and the efficient information circulation through correspondence provided the most accurate, combined use of the caravan and maritime trade routes, whichever was cheaper and safer at any one moment. By offering a new narrative on the agency of the Minasian family firm in the early modern Eurasian long-distance trade, this dissertation makes an argument that the above-mentioned practices could be representative of a bigger body of Asian family firms operating in late seventeenth and eighteenth century Eurasia.