In Ann Arbor, Sebouh Aslanian to discuss Julfan Armenian trade

Published: Thursday February 19, 2009

Ann Arbor, Mich. - "Trust in Gossip but Bastinado when Needed: Policing Long-Distance 'Trust Relations' among Julfan Merchants during the Early Modern Period" is the title of a lecture by Sebouh Aslanian, a Manoogian Simone Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The lecture will be held on Tuesday, March 3 at 5 p.m. in Room 1636 of the International Institute.

In his presentation, Dr. Aslanian will examine the role of trust and cooperation in early modern long-distance trade. He will focus on the history of Armenian merchants from New Julfa, Isfahan, in the 17th and 18th centuries, but he will also compare Julfan methods of policing trust to those of two contemporaneous long-distance communities, namely the Multani Indians and Sephardic Jews. While most literature on the subject treats trust as a given attribute of long-distance merchant communities and not as a factor in need of historical explanation or analysis, Dr. Aslanian provides a historical explanation for the creation and role of trust in such communities.

Dr. Aslanian's talk is related to his upcoming book publication, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: Circulation and the Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa/Isfahan, 1606-1747 (University of California Press, forthcoming 2010). This manuscript is based on his Ph.D. dissertation, which was selected by the Graduate School as the best dissertation in the humanities at Columbia University (2007). He is also the author of Dispersion History and the Polycentric Nation: The Role of Simeon Yerevantsi's Girk or Kochi Partavjar in the Armenian National Revival of the 18th Century (2004), and numerous articles about Indian Ocean trade and Armenian merchants from New Julfa.

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