Armenian Trading Communities between Amsterdam and Venice, 1650-1730

Armenian merchants, translators, and brokers were critical actors in the global trade of luxury goods between Asia and Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

They were able to move and settle in cities across Europe with relative facility, facing comparatively fewer political barriers than Jewish or Muslim traders due to their status as a Christian-majority trading group.

However, the current historiographical picture of these communities in Western Europe has not adequately illustrated or understood the complexity of what ‘trading community’ really meant for Armenians, and other mobile minorities; it often assumes a level of cultural cohesiveness within these groups.

How should we understand the concept of community when it is shaped by circumstance, conducted over distance, formed of both transient and settled members, and interacts with the host environment?

This project investigates this question by a comparative analysis of the Armenian communities of early modern Amsterdam and Venice, and the un-explored mercantile networks between them.

New archival research redresses the historiographical neglect of these two communities and their connection to shed new light on the conceptual and practical formation of trading community.

Integrating the theoretical paradigms of social and spatial mobility, and crossing the disciplines of history, sociology, and human geography will advance a new nuanced concept of minority community from the early modern period to the present.