The East India Company’sFarmān, 1622‒1747

The East India Company’s presence and ongoing trade in Persia was reliant on the privileges outlined in the Farmān, granted after the capture of Hormuz in 1622. The relationship between these two powers was cemented in the rights enshrined in the Farmān, which was used by both to regulate their varying needs and expectations over the course of 125 years. This article explores the Company’s records of the Farmān and how changes to its terms were viewed from both sides. As a Persian document, the Farmān gives a clear view of the attitudes of native officials and rulers to the Company and how these terms were used as a means of control

4. The Commercial Law of the New Julfa Armenians

For scholars researching pre-modern legal systems a common difficulty is that surviving sources give relatively rich information regarding legal theory and the codification of law, but that often there is a dearth of evidence when it comes to actual legal practice. This raises questions about how far the surviving sources – codices, lawbooks and works of jurisprudence – are normative or idealized constructions reflecting academic and elite perceptions of the law, and how far they reflect the ..

A Response to ‘One Asia, or Many? Reflections from connected history’

The idea of Asia as a unity has appealed both to Europeans interested in differentiating themselves from a threatening if inferior Asiatic ‘other’, and to Asians keen to mark their distance from an alien and alienating Europe and West. For both groups, Asia is a useful term of alterity, although the place of ‘us’ and ‘them’ is reversed. Near the beginning of his lecture Sanjay Subrahmanyam remarks that, ‘in the play between the –emic and the –etic, the insider’s and the outsider’s perspective, a concept like “Asia” falls decidedly on the side of the –etic’. This point is reinforced by the fact that the European concept of Asia goes back to the Ancient Greeks (as Subrahmanyam notes), whereas the interest of Asian insiders in the concept of a homogeneous Asia is a modern phenomenon, a reaction against the assumption of superiority inherent in western imperialism and neo-imperialism. In the case of both the European and the Asian conceptions, however, it is the viewpoint of the observer rather than the empirical features of what is observed that gives shape and meaning to the concept. I will use this short response to take a look at Asia from a third perspective, one that is neither fully in- nor out-sider in character, namely that of the early modern Armenians, whose travels took them across the length and breadth of Asia, and Europe too

The Armenian merchants of New Julfa, Isfahan: a study in pre-modern Asian trade

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the merchants of Julfa, a town on the trade routes linking the Mediterranean with Iran, developed an extensive international trade network reaching from the Atlantic coast of Europe to the Indian Ocean. Part 1 of the dissertation traces the history of Julfa and examines the factors contributing to the Armenians' success - among them the significant growth of Iranian raw silk exports to Europe; the stimulus to East-West trade given by the influx of American silver to Europe and the consequent imbalance in the value of bullion between Europe, the Middle East and South Asia; the forced resettlement of the Julfans in Isfahan and the formation of a close economic relationship with the Safavi court.Part 2 concentrates on social and economic organisation, examining the structure of the Armenian patriarchal household and its commercial operation as family firm, and the community and its provision of the institutions that upheld commercial law and the merchants' system of values and standards of behaviour. The discussion in Chapters 4 and 5 of partnership and agency and the credit system operated by the Julfans is based on research into surviving contracts and credit instruments.These documents also provide the material for Part 3. The Julfan mercantile documents are a unique record of the commercial world of an Asian trading community in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. They also present numerous technical difficulties, which are discussed through the presentation of examples of documents in the original, with translation, notes and a glossary.The history of the Julfa merchants affords a rare opportunity for close examination of the organisation and techniques of trade in Asia and provides a basis for comparison with other Asian merchants.</p

The Refuge of the World: Afghanistan and the Muslim Imagination 1880-1922

This dissertation is an attempt to solve a puzzle: how and why did the poor, remote and isolated country of Afghanistan become a site of international Muslim aspiration and imagination in the early 20th century? To answer this question, the dissertation focuses on the creation of ‘place’ - of Afghanistan in conceptual and material terms - out of the movement through ‘space’ of Afghan and Muslim travellers, and the inscriptions of such movement in texts. Through such a study, the dissertation argues that Afghanistan’s emergence as imperial counter-space and practical base for Muslims was the product of new physical and intellectual interactions amongst Afghan and Muslim travellers, powered by new technologies of steam and print. Such an argument resituates Afghanistan in connection to larger transformations taking place elsewhere. It thus marks an attempt to write late 19th and early 20th century Afghanistan back into global history. At the same time as drawing Afghanistan into that larger global story, however, the dissertation stresses the distinctiveness of the ‘Muslim turn’ to Afghanistan: how many of these new physical and intellectual movements relied on older physical or imagined connections with ‘the land of the Afghans’; how other movements offered strikingly original visions of what Afghanistan was and could be; how the Afghan court fostered and encouraged such movements through its particularist policies; how Afghanistan’s seemingly remote location, on the peripheries of the religious heartlands of the Middle East and the political and economic centres of western imperialism, made it such a prominent and attractive focus of Muslim interest and action. By plotting the inter-connections of Afghan and Muslim travellers over a forty-year period, the dissertation charts how Afghanistan grew to become one of the great hopes of the Muslim world. At the same time, the dissertation charts the growing gap between the idealized representation of Afghanistan and its reality. Finally, it illustrates how the ‘Muslim turn’ to Afghanistan ended in disillusionment and disaster, on Afghanistan’s plains.This thesis is not currently available via ORA