When I first traveled to New Julfa, the Armenian suburb of Isfahan, Iran, I visited its museum and noticed that one of the exhibits was an Armenian Bible that had been printed in Madras, now Chennai, India in the 18th century. The Bible attracted my attention because I had just left Madras/Chennai. At the time I knew little about the history of the Armenian community in Iran or India and even less about its Eurasian trade network, but the Bible stimulated my interest to learn more about the Armenian diaspora and its remarkable worldwide commercial network. Subsequently, I nursed an amateur interest in the subject while making repeated research visits to Iran and India. I learned a good deal about the New Julfa community and especially its Indian Ocean connections, but it was not until I spoke with Sebouh David Aslanian and then read this exceptional book that I was able to appreciate the scope and nature of Armenian settlements and its merchants’ commerce. While other scholars have illumined many aspects of this subject, Aslanian has written a book that must be regarded as its definitive history. His book also represents the best study of any commercial diaspora in the early modern era.

Based on the voluminous records of New Julfa Armenian merchants, materials in Armenia itself, as well as sources in India, Mexico, and western Europe, Aslanian follows an introductory historiography of academic studies of trade diasporas with a history of the Isfahan Armenian settlement, the critical economic and political base of the merchants’ diaspora for two centuries. Like other chapters of this book, his account of the history and commerce of these merchants is fluently written, lavishly illustrated with unique documents, precisely argued, and persuasive. The New Julfa suburb originally comprised merchants forced from their small but prosperous Old Julfa settlement on the Safavid–Iranian border by Safavid Shah ʿAbbas I (1571–1629), as Ottoman armies approached their homeland. While the deportation of the Julfa Armenians from their original home appears to have originated as an aspect of ʿAbbas's scorched earth policy, he gradually came to exploit these merchants’ commercial expertise to market Iranian silk to Europeans. They were to become agents of the Safavid state monopoly. Using their privileged position in Iran, the New Julfa Armenians expanded, as Asalanian writes, into “one of the greatest trade networks of the early modern period” (p. 43).

Two subsequent chapters on the expansion of the New Julfa trade network into India, Southeast Asia, the Mediterranean, and Europe contain evocative samples of Armenian merchants’ business correspondence and photographs of actual letters, and include also details of an elaborate mail delivery system that linked the widely dispersed settlements. The Armenians’ elaborate private information network was later supplemented by the publication in Madras of the first Armenian newspaper in 1794, the Azdarar, which was devoted not only to commercial news but also included social and political information. It included, Aslanian notes, timetables of commercial shipping traffic at the port of Madras, a list of various commodities traded in the local markets and other features adopted from English-language newspapers that had recently begun publishing in India (p. 87). These chapters lead into two others that comprise nearly half of the book and contain his analysis of the structure and functioning of Armenian family firms, based on their records and correspondence alluded to above. The family structure of Armenian trade and these families’ reliance on commenda contracts to finance and organize trade has long been known in general outline, but Aslanian has provided photographic copies of accounts and commenda contracts—“the most significant legal instrument for Julfan long-distance trade”—which has enabled him to flesh out this trade to a degree that rivals accounts of early modern European merchants for this period. He has been able, even, to examine the internal governance of Armenian commerce through the study of documents on the Assembly of Merchants in Julfa and “portable courts” in other settlements (pp. 191–97). These chapters and the book as a whole represent an exceptional scholarly achievement.

Ultimately the Julfan network collapsed in the late 18th century due first to the deterioration of the Safavid regime, accompanied by increasing harassment and outright attacks on non-Muslims. These deteriorating conditions worsened dramatically in 1722 when Afghan tribesmen defeated the Safavid army and occupied Isfahan. The Afghans’ brief, inept, and turbulent rule was followed by the ascendancy of Nadir Shah Afshar (r. 1736–47), the exceptionally vicious heir to Safavid dominions. Nadir Shah not only ravaged the New Julfa community by extorting funds to pay for his campaigns, but in 1739 he also applied the coup de grâce to the decadent Mughal Empire, thus contributing to the deterioration of the previously vibrant trade networks between Iran and South Asia. These events destroyed the political and economic environment that had allowed New Julfa Armenians to flourish and by the late 18th century the community sunk into a sad decrepitude.

Reflecting on these events, Aslanian concludes that Armenian reliance on the commenda contract “contributed to the insularity of their network, and that in the long term this insularity, along with Julfa's small population, would probably have prevented the Julfan network from expanding and diversifying” (p. 234). In his brief comparative section he also observes that while the Iranian Armenian commercial enterprise collapsed, other contemporary trade diasporas active in Iran, such as the Multani Hindus, survived. While he does not consider why this occurred, one might reflect that the Armenian and Multani diasporas were fundamentally different in several important respects. New Julfa Armenians constituted a vulnerable foreign community, subject to quixotic policy changes and religious harassment, living in an economically fragile country of no more than ten million people. Tens of thousands of equally foreign Multani Hindus could abandon their Isfahan bazars and retreat back to their Punjabi homelands, where they were able to reinvigorate their commercial lives within India's vibrant economy and its enormous markets. Multani Hindu merchants in Iran represented India's fundamental and continued economic strength; in the chaotic 18th century the New Julfa Armenians represented only themselves.