Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award
Sebouh Aslanian
UCLA
2011 Winner
Sebouh Aslanian
In his book, Dr. Aslanian focuses on a community of Armenian silk merchants deported by the Safavid ruler Shah Abbas I from the town of Old Julfa on the banks of the Aras River on the Ottoman-Safavid border and resettled on the outskirts of Isfahan, Iran, just after the turn of the seventeenth century. Within a short time following their forced displacement, these merchants came to preside over one of the greatest trade networks of the early modern era. The study reconstructs and analyzes the mercantile communities of this network, which stretched from the nodal center in New Julfa, Isfahan, to London, Amsterdam, and Cadiz in the west and Mughal India, Canton, Manila, and Acapulco in the east. Intermediaries between the Christian west and the Muslim east, these merchants also served as a bridge between two great zones of the world economy at the time, the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Ocean.
Dr. Aslanian bases this work on original research in seven languages in thirty-one archives across twelve countries, including Iran. He draws on the firsthand “indigenous” business correspondence relating to this global network (rather than relying on the Eurocentric, European proxy documents often studied by scholars). These primary sources include letters, contracts, accounting ledgers, and court papers hand-written by Armenian merchants living in Julfa and their Armenian agents, also originating in Julfa, who handled business in far-reaching parts of the globe. The merchants wrote many of these documents in an obscure and now extinct dialect of the Armenian language, which complicated Dr. Aslanian’s task. Of the many previously untapped and newly discovered documents, two sets were especially influential for him: those in the All Savior’s Monastery Archives in Julfa in Isfahan, Iran, and those from the cargo of an Armenian-freighted ship, which the British navy confiscated in 1748 and sent to London.
On practically every page of this thickly described and analytically informed historical narrative, Dr. Aslanian demonstrates the conjuncture of world historical events and how they relate to this mercantile community in Iran. He examines the impact of long-distance trade on the organization of community life and the ways that merchants structured their social, economic, and political circumstances. Armenian mercantile settlements all along the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea and in northwest Europe and Russia spanned multiple empires, including the three most significant Muslim empires of Eurasia (the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals) as well as the European seaborne empires. He explores the creation of networks of trust among long-distance merchants belonging to the same closed and closely monitored trading coalition. He sheds light on the ethos of “trans-imperial cosmopolitanism,” which characterizes the cultural identity and business etiquette of the Armenian merchants based in Julfa, Iran.
Dr. Aslanian compares the Julfan trade network with two other exemplary long-distance networks of the same early modern period—that of the Multanis based in northwest India and the Sephardic Jews centered in the Atlantic region. He explains the reasons for the emergence, success, and eventual collapse of all three networks. The broad scope of this multidisciplinary book, combined with its analytically rigorous approach, will appeal to a wide community of scholars within and beyond Iranian studies.
Sebouh Aslanian’s book, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa, exemplifies the high standards set out in the mandate of the Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award: “The work should demonstrate a substantive understanding of the social and political experiences of the Iranian people and their civilization and their contribution to and influences on the world at large.”