armenians in india

ARMENIAN EUROPEAN RELATIONSHIP IN INDIA, 1500-1800: NO ARMENIAN FOUNDATION FOR EUROPEAN EMPIRE?

BY

BHASWATI BHATTACHARYA*

Abstract

Historical evidence points to the existence of Armenians in India in small numbers at leastsince the sixteenth century. Beginning with the Portuguese in that century, Europeans enteredthe spheres of Euro-Asian and intra-Asian trade in an increasing volume. Armenian contactwith India received a boost following the settlement of a large number of Armenians in NewJulfa that coincided with the coming of the European companies in India. The arrival of theEuropeans opened up various possibilities for the Armenians. Consequently, Armenian trade,based to a great extent on various forms of community-based network and partnership, wasnot ‘exclusive’ in nature. In their social life too Armenians formed part of the pluralisticChristian community in India.

Les données historiques suggèrent l’existence en Inde d’un petit nombre d’Arméniens depuisle XVIe siècle. A partir de l’arrivée des Portugais à cette époque, les Européens ontdéveloppé les échanges avec l’Asie et en ont pénétré de plus en plus le commerce intérieur.Les contacts des Arméniens avec l’Inde ont connu une rapide expansion à la suite de l’étab-lissement d’un nombre important d’entre eux à New Julfa, dans la mouvance de l’arrivée descompagnies européennes qui leur offraient des possibilités variées. De ce fait, le commercearménien, largement fondé sur diverses formes de réseaux et de partenariats internes à leurcommunauté, n’était pas de nature « exclusive ». Dans leur vie sociale, aussi, les Arméniensétaient partie prenante de la communauté chrétienne indienne, pluraliste.

Keywords: Armenian commercial network, Asian trade, Armenian-European relationship,Armenians in India, commerce in India in the 17th and 18th centuries

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 JESHO 48,2Also available online – www.brill.nl

* Bhaswati Bhattacharya, International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden, Nether-

lands, [email protected]

Research for this paper was carried out with a grant from the Indian Council of HistoricalResearch in New Delhi. I would like to thank Gautam Bhadra for the encouragement andadvice I received in connection with the research. I have benefited from conversations withBasudeb Chattopadhyay, Bhaskar Chakraborti, and Suranjan Das. Fr. Boghos Levon Zekiyanhas been a source of inspiration. The paper was presented in a different form to theInternational Institute of Asian Studies Workshop on ‘Country Trade and Empire in theArabian Seas, 17th-18th century’, Leiden, 9-10 October 2003. Shushanik Khachikian, InaBaghdiantz-Mccabe and Sebouh Aslanian have helped in solving many puzzles. I would liketo thank them Rene Barendse and René Bekius and the two anonymous experts of this jour-nal for their comments on the paper.

JESHO_665Bhaswati_277-322 5/23/05 4:28 PM Page 277

http://www.brill.nl

278 BHASWATI BHATTACHARYA

The lively description of Oriental commerce and the profit accruing from it has enriched the genre of travel literature perhaps since the Periplus of the ErythreanSea. In the aftermath of the discovery of the direct sea-route to the IndianOcean, traffic in the region increased from the sixteenth century onwards. Anincreasing wealth of information on the port-to-port trade in Asia flooded in,inviting more and more adventurers seeking the blessings of Mammon in thewild waters of the East. Though it is not possible to pinpoint exactly whenArmenians, specialised in the overland trade between Eurasia and Europe,entered the circuit of intra-Asian trade,1 European documents from the sixteenthcentury onwards mention the Armenians as actively participating in—in addi-tion to the Europe trade—various branches of inter-Asian trade, better knownas ‘country trade.’ By the seventeenth century, Armenians were well establishedin all important centres of trade in Europe and Asia. As merchants buying andselling in the same markets and trading in the same commodities, Europeans inthe capacity of the East India Companies and private merchants were their com-petitors. The contempt often expressed in European travel accounts against Armenianmerchants as an ubiquitous evil reflects the underlying concern of rivals in thesame trade.2 Yet, as part of the pluralistic society of merchants (among peopleof other professions) that characterised the Asian market towns and ports in theearly modern period, they shared the same lot. When the Portuguese arrived in the East in the sixteenth century, the other factor they shared with theArmenians was faith: Christianity. All this makes it interesting to see how Arme-nians and Europeans interacted with each other in Asian waters. In her recentstudy on the role of the Armenian merchants of Julfa in Persia and India, Bagh-diantz Mccabe has suggested that in Persia, where a large number of Armenianswere to be found outside of Armenia, Armenians did not co-operate with theEuropeans. She does admit, that Armenians in India operating in individualcapacity co-operated with the English in the eighteenth century, but adds that

1 Mesrovb Seth noted that already in the early part of the Christian era the Armenians hada settlement in Benares. Armenians in India: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day,London, 1897, 22. A recent work maintains that Armenians were engaged in maritime tradewith India since the beginning of the sixteenth century. See V. Baibourtian, InternationalTrade and the Armenian Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (Delhi: Sterling Publishers,2004): 198.

2 See e.g. Tavernier, ‘wherever the Armenians see that money is to be made they have noscruple about supplying materials for the purposes of idolatry. . . .’, Tavernier’s Travels inIndia, Tr. from French by V. Ball, 2 vols. London, 1889, vol. 1, 261; cf. ‘a people in them-selves despicable. . . . [the Armenians] are likewise educated in all the servilities of Asia, andunderstanding how to accommodate themselves to indignities, which the genius of a freenation will hardly submit to. . . .’ J. Hanway, An Historical account of the British Trade overthe Caspian Sea, 4 vols. (London: 1753), vol. 2: 31.

JESHO_665Bhaswati_277-322 5/23/05 4:28 PM 78

until the English gained political power after the conquest of Bengal, ‘Armenianassociations were with Indian merchants and nawabs’.3 This essay will try totrace the relationship between Armenians and Europeans in India from the six-teenth century till the late eighteenth century. Armenians were already presentin India in the sixteenth century as traders, and it is not entirely impossible thata few religious personalities travelled over land to India. The arrival of the Europeans opened up new possibilities for the Armenians in India. With theirunique position as one of the few Asian communities able to link up theEuropean and Asian worlds of trade through a community based network thatpromoted both trade and intelligence, Armenians used these possibilities to max-imize their profit.

ORGANIZING THE TRADE

Before delving into the actual relationship, an attempt will be made first tobriefly compare the conditions under which Armenians and Europeans operatedin India. Baghdiantz Mccabe has maintained that the Armenian merchants ofNew Julfa were member-participants in a company of merchants that ran alongthe pattern represented by the European East India Companies. The richest mer-chants of Julfa were the directors of this company. They invested capital athome and ruled the commercial affairs of fellow Armenians abroad by takingresponsibility for their unpaid debts, and by pronouncing judgement in litiga-tions.4 Since most of the Armenian merchants in India—at least for the greaterpart of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as we shall see below—wereeither representatives or partners, or both, of Armenian merchants based inPersia, it would be interesting to see if the organization of trade by Armeniansin the former country reflected the same in the latter.

There is a plethora of literature on the East India Companies, representing aform of trading organisation with certain characteristics quite unique in the sev-enteenth century. Niels Steensgaard in particular contrasted the company pres-ence in the seventeenth century as a ‘productive enterprise’ with the Portugueseenterprise in the sixteenth century, which he termed as violent and ‘redistribu-tive’.5 It is not my intention here to go into the details of how the East India

3 Ina Baghdiantz Mccabe, Shah’s silk for Europe’s silver: the Eurasian Trade of the JulfaArmenians in Safavid Iran and India, 1530-1750 (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), 344-45.

4 Ibid., ch. VIII, esp. 244-245.5 Niels Steensgaard, ‘The Dutch East India Company as an institutional innovation’, in

Dutch Capitalism and World Capitalism, ed. M. Aymard (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1982), 235-57; also his Asian Trade Revolution in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1974), passim.

ARMENIAN EUROPEAN RELATIONSHIP IN INDIA, 1500-1800 279



Companies were organized or how they functioned. I shall only point to themajor characteristics of the company trade and those of the Armenian trade.Historians have written at length on the dual nature of the Companies; theyenjoyed certain semi-sovereign rights abroad and a national monopoly at homedelegated to them as a corporation by the government.6 The charter granted byQueen Elizabeth secured for the English East India Company exclusive privi-leges of trade with the countries beyond the Cape of Good Hope and the Straitsof Magellan for fifteen years.7 It has been suggested that the Companies werethe first forms of the multi-national corporations we see today. Though a largepart of the Company’s capital came from the investment made by merchantswho were directly engaged in selling the commodities at home or re-exportingto other countries, a number of private citizens also delegated to the Companythe right to dispose of parts of their property.8 The bulk of the working capitalof the English East India Company for example, consisted of capital borrowedin London on short-term through the issue of quarterly and half-yearly bonds at fixed rates of interest. As a joint stock company trading with both equity and debenture type capital, the Companies represented a category of businessorganization in which management of capital was partially separated from itsownership. With their elaborate procedure of government reflected in thebureaucratic apparatus including the courts of law, the Companies were like astate within the state.9 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, whether itwas Batavia, Madras or Calcutta, the semi-sovereign character of the Europeansettlements yielding some revenue was clear. The privileges obtained from localsovereigns gave their trade a special status unknown to Asian merchants.

The other feature that distinguished European trade from the existing patternof trade in the Indian Ocean was the attempt to monopolize trade in certaincommodities and over several routes. Although royal monopolies were not pre-viously unknown, the way the Portuguese claimed their monopoly on pepperand the Dutch on spices, was new. An attempt was made to enforce this mono-poly by the use of force. So, political power went side by side with armed

6 Niels Steensgaard, ‘The Companies as a specific institution in the history of Europeanexpansion’ in Companies and Trade: Essays on Overseas Trading Companies during theAncien Régime, ed. L. Blussé and F. S. Gaastra (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1981): 245-264. According to Steensgaard the companies, with their new form of organization, revolu-tionized the trade in Asia. See his Asian Trade Revolution.

7 K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company: the study of an early Joint-StockCompany, 1600-1640, London, (London: Cass, 1965): 28. In the case of the Dutch VerenigdeOost Indische Compagnie (henceforth V.O.C.) this monopoly was for 21 years.

8 Niels Steensgaard, ‘The Companies as a specific institution. . . .’, 247. 9 K. N. Chaudhuri, The English East India Company . . . ch. 2.


force. All of the independent territorial bases the Europeans possessed in Asiawere fortified. Though the Mughal historian Khafi Khan praised the Portuguesefor leaving shipping in the Indian Ocean at peace (provided the latter boughtthe pass or cartaz), it was precisely that nation that started using force system-atically against Asian shipping. This legacy was continued by the East IndiaCompanies. Not only were the Companies able to extract special privileges fromthe sovereigns, the privileges were backed up by the threat of the use of force.Competitive trading in the markets of Europe combined with a fortified territo-rial presence in Asia provided the East India Companies with a sense of pur-pose and institutional cohesion.10 It should be remembered that armed trade was, after all, one of the main reasons for dispute between Siraj-uddaula, thenawab of Bengal and the English in the middle of the eighteenth century. In hisletters to the Armenian merchant Khoja Wajid, the nawab mentioned that theArmenians, also foreigners in Bengal, had not built any fort and traded underthe protection of the Mughal government. Why should the Europeans—theEnglish in particular—insist on fortifications?11

So far, the best analysis of the organization and structure of Armenian tradeis to be found in the works of Shushanik Khachikian, who, in her study on theJulfa Armenians in Russia, shows that Armenians did not have European typecompanies.12 In addition, Edmund Herzig has made an important contributiontoward the understanding of the commercial organisation of the Armenian mer-chants of New Julfa in his thesis and articles.13 Baghdiantz Mccabe herselfoffers an excellent account of the career of Marcara. Rene Bekius’s research onthe textile trade of the Armenians touches upon their trade in Persia.14 Neither

10 K. N. Chaudhuri, ‘The Engish East India Company in the 17th and 18th centuries: apre-modern Multi-national Organization’ in Blussé, L. and F. S. Gaastra ed. Companies andTrade, 29-46.

11 Bengal in 1756-57. A selection of public and private papers dealing with the affairs ofthe British in Bengal during the reign of Siraj-uddaula ed. With notes and an historicalintrod. By S. C. Hill, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1905) vol. 1: 3-5; also Robert Orme, AHistory of the Military Transactions of the British Nation in Indostan, (henceforth MilitaryTransactions) 2 vols. (London, 1775-77) vol. 2: 58.

12 The Armenian Trade of New Julfa and its commercial-economic ties with Russia duringthe XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries, Yerevan, 1988 (in Armenian). Edmund Herzig (see notebelow) and Ina Baghdiantz Mccabe refer to her work in detail. I have communicated withKhachikian who kindly confirmed her position through e-mail, 21 September, 2003.

13 The Armenian Merchants of New Julfa, Isfahan: a Study in Pre-Modern Asian Trade,D. Phil. Thesis, Oxford, 1991; also ‘The family firm in the commercial organisation of theJulfa Armenians’, in Etudes Safavides, ed. J. Calmard, (Paris Teheran: Institut Français derecherche en Iran, 1993), 287-303.

14 ‘Armenian merchants in the Textile Trade in the 17th and 18th centuries: a Global Enterprise’ (unpublished) paper presented at the Conference ‘Carpets and textiles in the




Herzig nor Bekius subcribes to the thesis that Julfa Armenians conducted tradeas a centrally organized company.

Most of the Armenians trading in India were from Persia, where they hadlong been living.15 The Safavi Emperor Shah Abbas deported a large number ofArmenians to New Julfa from the commercial town in Armenia bearing thesame name in the early years of the seventeenth century.16 It was a consciousattempt on the part of Shah Abbas, who was aware of the expertise of the Armeniansin trans-continental commerce, to settle them in the outskirts of Isfahan. Duringthe following two centuries the Armenians would traverse the Indian Ocean andsail up to the coast of China. Mathee and Baibourtian have pointed to the sym-biotic relationship between the Safavid state and the Armenian merchants ofIran—a relationship in which the court granted those merchants a favoured status in return for certain commodities, revenue and information.17 But that not-withstanding, Armenian merchants were not backed by any national monopolythat would empower them to represent Persia in India, for example. In Indiathey traded at the market places and ports side by side with the Indians, Jews,Persians and Turks among others, and were dependent on the favours theyreceived from the Mughals in Delhi and their representatives in the provinces.Consequently, for the Indian merchant at an Indian port, an Armenian merchantwas more like himself than the western European who could point to his com-pany, the factory and the fort belonging to his nation and use these symbolseither as carrot or as stick as the situation would permit. No one could, how-ever, stop the Armenians from referring to, and using their connections back inPersia and Europe. This connection, including knowledge of Persian, often gavethem an edge over others in that they had easy access to the Mughal court. Secondly,though Baghdiantz Mccabe has suggested that there was a company of Arme-nian merchants in New Julfa directing the Armenian commerce worldwide, shehas not given any evidence and has drawn on the work of Khachikian who doesnot claim there was an East India Company type association of the Julfa Armenians.18

Iranian World, 1400-1700’, organised by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and the Iran HeritageFoundation, 30-31 August, 2003, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

15 Armenians lived in Persia since pre-Christian times. See David Marshall Lang, TheArmenians: A People in Exile (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981): 81.

16 On the deportation of the Armenians see E. M. Herzig, ‘The deportation of theArmenians in 1604-1605 and Europe’s myth of Shah Abbas 1,’ Pembroke Papers 1, (1990),59-71.

17 R. P. Matthee, The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600-1730 (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 73-74; V. Baibourtian, International Trade . . .,203.

18 Ina Baghdiantz Mccabe, Shah’s silk. . . .


So far as Armenian trade in India and the Indian Ocean was concerned, thereseems to have been no European-type chartered joint-stock Armenian company.Herzig, for example, has shown that family firms with extended patriarchalhousehold as the basis of business organization were a major organ of thistrade.19 Organizing commerce on the basis of family connections has been com-mon in pre-modern societies in Europe and Asia. Braudel noted that the familyoffered the most natural and sought after solution for commercial networks.20

Baghdiantz Mccabe herself admits that family was the basic unit and the pre-ferred system of Armenian merchant associations.21 In the seventeenth century,John Fryer left a description of the trading method of the Armenians:

The Armenians being skilled in all the intricacies of trade at home, and travelling withthese into the remotest kingdoms, become by their own industry, and by being factorsof their own kindred’s honesty, the wealthiest men. . . .22

This is the organizing principle still followed in many modern Indian indus-trial firms.23

However, if the family firm provided the basics of the business organization,the other system that was part and parcel of the development of the long dis-tance financial and trading networks of the Armenians was the sending out offactors or agents, often family members. A description of this system was alsoprovided by Fryer:

they [the Armenians] enter the theatre of commerce by means of some benefactor,whose money they adventure upon, and on return, a quarter part of the gain is theirown: from such beginnings do they raise sometimes great fortunes for themselves andMasters.24

19 E. M. Herzig, ‘The family firm’ also, Baghdiantz Mccabe, Shah’s silk . . .20 F. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, vol. 2, The Wheels of Commerce, Trans. S. Reynolds,

(London: Harper & Row, 1982): 150. The Tamil Muslim merchants of the Coromandel coastknown as Marakkayars organised their trade on the basis of extended kinship. See S. Arasa-ratnam, Merchants, companies and commerce on the Coromandel coast, 1650-1740, Delhi,1986 passim and B. Bhattacharya, ‘The Chulia merchants of southern Coromandel in theeighteenth century: a case for continuity’, in Commerce and culture in the Bay of Bengal,1500-1800, ed. O. Prakash and D. Lombard (Delhi: Manohar, 1999), 285-305.

21 Shah’s silk: 245-250.22 A New Account of East India and Persia, being nine years travels, 1672-1681; edited

with notes and an introd. by William Crooke, 3 vols. (London: the Hakluyt Society, 1909-15), 249.

23 After the demise of Dhirubhai Ambani of the Reliance Industries recently, the eldest sonMukesh Ambani took over the charge of the business. Cf. the Ahmedabad industrialistKasturbhai Lalbhai created companies for his nephews; see Claude Markovits, ‘The Tataparadox’, in Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia, ed. Burton Stein and SanjaySubrahmanyam (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 237-248.

24 A New Account of East India, 249.




This kind of partnership was prevalent among different merchant communi-ties of South Asia in different forms. The shah-gumastha partnership existingamong the Sindhi merchants of Shikarpur, under which a small group ofsahukars and sarrafs controlled financial and commercial transactions over avast area encompassing Khorassan and Turkestan, was a variant of this sys-tem.25 The most popular type of partnership prevalent among the Armenians ofNew Julfa was the commenda contract, incorporating features of partnership,loan, and in few cases, employment.26 A classic account of this system as itexisted among the Armenians was left by Hovannes of Julfa in the pages of hisledger book.27 Though such detailed accounts are available mostly in Armeniandocuments, the English records of the Fort St. George amply testify to the exis-tence of the system until the end of the eighteenth century. Khoja Zachary diAvetik of Isfahan came to Madras from Amsterdam in 1714. One of the prin-cipal merchants Zachary represented was his father, Khoja Avetik of Isfahan.28

At the time Zachary wrote his will, his wife Azis was in Isfahan. He had threesons: Hovannes, Gregory, and Avetik. By the time he came to Madras, Zacharymust have been well established in the trade to Europe. In Amsterdam, heseems to have had transactions with Sarhad, a merchant from New Julfa who

25 Claude Markovitz, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750-1947: Traders of Sindfrom Bukhara to Panama, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 5.

26 Edmund Herzig, The Armenian Merchants of New Julfa, Isfahan: a study in pre-mod-ern Asian trade. Ph.D. thesis, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, 1991, ch. 3 offersa detailed account of the different kinds of partnership known among the Armenians and howthese worked. These were commenda partnership, true partnership, commission agency andrepresentation. The commenda contracts were basically of two types: unilateral, where thewhole capital was provided by the investor (sleeping partner) and active partner or agentinvested the labour, and bilateral, where a part of the capital invested came from the activepartner.

27 L. Khachikian, ‘The ledger of the Merchant Hovannes Joughayetsi’, Journal of theAsiatic Society, 8, no. 3, (1966), 153-86. This ledger book has been edited in Armenianrecently by L. Khachikian and H. Papazian.

28 Shushanik Khachikian suggested that Khoja Avetik, referred to as ‘master’ in the willwas most probably the father of Zachary de Avetik, e-mail, September 21, 2003. ‘De’ or ‘di’ in Armenian names are abbreviation of the word ‘vordi’ meaning son. Zachary di Avetik,in this sense, means Zachary the son of Avetik. I am grateful to Sebouh Aslanian for thisclarification. For reference to Khoja Avetik Kalantar as brother of Aga Piri see See VaheBaladouni, and Margaret Makepeace ed. Armenian merchants of the seventeenth and earlyeighteenth centuries: English East India Company sources, (Philadelphia: American PhilosophicalSociety, 1998) (henceforth Armenian Merchants), no. 237; and Aga Piri as the son of KhojaPanous, ibid. nos. 146, 175, 182. This volume offers a unique collection of documents onArmenian merchants and their relationship with the English East India Company. It is alsopossible that our Avetik was another person, known as Avetik di Petros, operating inAmsterdam in the late 1690s. For Avetik di Petros see R. Bekius, ‘Armenian merchants inthe textile trade’.


traded with Russia and Holland.29 Already in 1697 we find Zachary shippingglass-ware and broad cloth on English Company ships.30 He was one of thosemerchants who travelled between different places in Europe, Siraz, Gombroon,Isfahan, Madras and Pegu. In 1718 he replaced Khoja Simon as the Armenianalderman of the Madras municipality and was known to have owned the shipsBon Voyage and Silliman, sailing to Pegu, among other places.31 He representedat least another merchant of Isfahan, Khoja Tarkon [?Tarkhan].32 In lieu of afactorage bond worth 300 tomands, his master [in Isfahan] issued two bills ofexchange, one worth 150 tomands on Zachary di Avetik in India and the otherof similar value on [?his son] Khoja Avetik in Europe. Zachary traded on mul-tiple accounts. Apart from the account together with his master Khoja Avetik,he had three other large accounts with Gregory de Agazar, Ma[natsa]gan di AgaPiri and Issa Gully di Avateek Shaudullah, who were also, like Zachary him-self, factors of other principal merchants.33 Since 1714, he had a partnership accountwith Macartoon Yanhoopa (the second part does not resemble Armeniannames), another factor of Khoja Avetik.34 Zachary seems to have had an agentcalled Beethan in Gombroon. He had four other accounts running—two of thesewere partnership accounts between himself, his masters [not named] and Avidde Zeany and two other between Macartoon Yanhoopa, Khoja Zachary and thelatter’s master [?Khoja Avetik]. Zachary had two more accounts with the promi-nent Bengal/Madras merchant Khoja Nazar Jacob Jan. One of these accounts

29 Shushanik Khachikian informed the author that the Armenian Sarhad trading in Russiahad transactions with a Zachar, who was however, not known as a ‘khoja’. E-mails to theauthor, 23 September, 2003 and 1 February, 2004.

30 Armenian Merchants, no. 241. 31 Records of Fort St. George (henceforth RFSG), Diary and Consultation Book, 1718: 56,

171 and 1719: 93 and 120. 32 Was he a grandson of Khoja Minas? See Edmund Herzig, The Armenian Merchants,

The family tree of Khoja Minasean family p. 451. Zachary does not mention Tarkhan as hismaster but mentions that the latter, when he visited India, handed Gregory (son of Zachery)a full discharge for 300 tomands, Tamil Nadu Archives, (henceforth TNA), Records of theMayor’s Court, Copy of Wills, Probates, etc. vol. 1: The Last Will and Testament of ZacharyDe Avateek, dated 10 September, 1736, henceforth ‘the last will of Zachary’.

33 It is very much likely that this Issa Gully was the same person as the Armenian IssaCoolly/Coollyan at the Mughal court, Armenian Merchants . . . nos. 141, 169, 231. He wasrelated to Khoja Zachary and replaced him as the Armenian alderman when Zachary left forPegu. See RFSG, Diary and Consultation Book, 1719: 177. Issa Cooly was noted by theDutch at Surat as a person friendly with the Mughal official Salabat Khan, see NationaalArchief, the Hague (henceforth N.A.), Dag Register Surat, 14 June 1685, V.O.C. 1409, (film1035) f.1599v. Similarly, Magan di Aga Piri was a son of Aga Piri Kalantar of Surat andMadras (see more on him below).

34 English East India Company sources refer to one Persia de Marketon freighting goodson the company ships, Armenian Merchants, documents 241, 249, 253.




was part of Zachary’s account with his masters [not named]. In the otheraccount Zachary, together with his sons, seems to have acted as factor of KhojaNazar Jacob Jan, as the latter possessed a ‘factorage’ bond worth Rs. 24,000 inthe name of Zachary and his sons.35 Was Zachary’s father (Avetik) a son of thefamous Armenian Khoja Panous Kalantar, the very influential merchant of NewJulfa and London in the second half of the seventeenth century?36 Though thereis no direct evidence connecting the two Avetiks, it is evident that the wide-spread network of transactions Zachary mentioned in his will was facilitated bythe connections established over more than one generation.37 Moreover, itappears that the number of Armenian families involved in the Euro-Asian tradein the Company’s bottoms at the end of the seventeenth century was limited.38

Zachary had a partnership contract with Ma[natsa]gan, a son of Aga Piri (sonof Khoja Panous)39 and was member of a family firm consisting of three gen-erations operating simultaneously from different parts of the globe. He was partof a wide-ranging network of commercial transactions in which the interests ofhis principals (including his father), their other factors, his own interests as wellas those of his sons were intertwined in an extremely intricate cris-cross patternof partnership. Unfortunately, the will does not specify the type of partnershipsZachary had with all these different partners. In another case in 1732, KhojaSarkies di Agavelly and Khoja Gregory of Fort St. George had Khoja Simon as

35 ‘The last will of Zachary’.36 In 1688 he signed a contract with the directors of the English East India Company in

London on behalf of the Armenian merchants of New Julfa. See Armenian Merchants, no.112 for the text of this agreement. For a lively discussion on the agreement see M. J. Seth,Armenians in India: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day—a work of OriginalResearch (Delhi: Oxford etc., 1937), 231-44. All further references to this work are from thisedition. Also, R. Ferrier, ‘The agreement of the EIC with the Armenian Nation’.

37 Armenian Merchants, refers to two Avetiks—one without (documents 62, 74, 77) andone with the title kalantar (documents 153, 179, 183, 188-89 and passim)—though indexedtogether under one name ‘Coja Aveatick Calendar’ p. 281. Though the term ‘Calandar’, alter-nately ‘Calendar’, or ‘Callenter’ is treated in European records as surname, it referred tokalantar (alderman or mayor), a city official appointed by central government in Iran.

38 Ibid. documents 261 and 262 for example.39 Aga Piri was active in Surat during the 1690s. When his father was returning from

London to Julfa in 1692, the English expected Aga Piri or some other member of the fam-ily to go to London in order to look after his business. Armenian Merchants, no. 146. Hewas a ‘well known’ Armenian inhabitant of Surat and broker for the Dutch East IndiaCompany. 52250 lb. of indigo was purchased by De Keyser at Agra through the broker AgaPiri for f.79662. Generale Missiven v.5 1686-97, ed., W. Ph. Coolhaas (’s Gravenhage:Martinus Nijhoff, 1975): 770. Aga Piri settled in Madras somewhere at the turn of the cen-tury. Later he became the Armenian Alderman of the Mayor’s Court at Fort St. George.Armenian Merchants, no. 264.


their ‘factor’ in Pegu.40 Again, Khoja Thaddeus Aga Piri & co. Brothers, a mer-chant firm of Fort St. George appointed Khoja Aveat their factor at Pegu. Uponaccepting the ‘factorship’, Aveat signed a ‘factorage bond’ with the said firmvalid for five years and set out for Pegu with a sum of Pagodas 2,750, ‘Prin-cipal sum’ advanced by the Aga Piri brothers to be employed in their interest.At Pegu he worked together with one Petrus. During his stay in Pegu, Aveatreceived several consignments from the Aga Piri brothers amounting to morethan Pagodas 17,000.41 In a distinct case of commenda partnership, KhojaCachick Khojamal, when he set out from Isfahan in May 1740, received fromKhoja Nazar di Abid Aga the sum of 320 tomands on the condition that out ofthe profit made, 220 parts together with the principal sum would go to KhojaNazar while 100 part of the profit would be Khojamal’s. On his arrival atMadras in September 1740, Khojamal was employed by the famous KhojaPetrus Woskan who advanced him Rs. 18,000. Khojamal particularly mentionedin his testament that the two accounts were entirely separate and should not bemixed up. He had another account with his nephew Marcar di Sattoor, and herethe profit was to be equally divided between the two partners.42 The referenceswe come across to Armenian trade in Persia and India, in the wills and testa-ments of Armenian merchants suggests that the organization of Armenian tradewas left to individual initiatives. Partnership among these individuals in differ-ent capacities was indeed a salient feature of this trade. This was, however, farfrom the formal superstructure represented by the East India Companies, whosestructure, size and scale made the nature of commercial operations impersonal.43

Armenian merchants in the Indian Ocean were rather like the multitude of otherAsian merchants engaged in networks of private trade, based on personal net-works of extended kinship and the pursuit of similar goals. The Companies withtheir modern structure co-existed with this pre-modern structure of trade, but thebasic differences are clear.

The reliance on the ethno-religious community provided the Armenians ofNew Julfa with a network that spanned at least half the globe. The network ofthe Armenian merchants indeed reflected a structure, as defined by Markovits,

40 RFSG, Pleadings in the Mayor’s Court 1731-32, 75. Khoja Simon acted as the Peguagent of other Armenians and sailed as nakhuda on ships sailing between Madras and Pegu.

41 RFSG, Pleadings in the Mayor’s Court, 1737, 8-9.42 Calcutta High Court, Old Will no. 224, The last will and testament of Coja Catchick

Cojamaul deceased, 17 November, 1755.43 There were of course informal connections behind this formal structure of the compa-

nies; and the informal networks formed by the representatives of these formal companies intheir private capacity were crucial for country trade.




facilitating a continuous circulation of capital, credit, goods, information and human resources.44 Almost any ship sailing between two ports in Asia, or leavingan Asian port for a destination in Europe could be used for sending agents, or consignments, or both. In addition to caravans, pattamars or messengers wereused for sending messages overland. Through a multitude of partners andagents, or representatives of agents, or even the kin of acquaintances workingat different levels, in some or other way related to the community, the con-signment—no matter if it contained an important message related to business orfamily, a couple of bills of exchange or promissory notes, a parcel contain-ing cash or a few precious stones, a copy of a contract, a few bales of cloth—was bound to reach the destination. As the Julfa dialect (Armenian, with manyPersian loan words) was the medium of all commercial transactions, there wasno possibility of disclosure of a confendential information. In 1711 the gover-nor and council of Fort St. George wanted to buy up the new company’s debtto Masulipatnam merchants amounting to Pagodas 80,000. The merchants ofMasulipatnam must have sought assistance of Armenians in soliciting theCompany’s favour in London. When the separate stock ship Windsor arrived inMadras in 1713, rumour had it that the Armenians had received advice that thedirectors of the Company had ordered the Fort St. George Council to dischargethat debt fully. Initially the council did not take notice of this rumour. But totheir dismay, after the arrival of the ship King William, Aga Piri Kalantar, thenresiding in Madras, produced an original letter to Khoja Babur di Sultan [Piri’sagent in London] dated January 29, 1712. The letter acquainted him, by orderof the Court of Directors, that the council of Fort St. George had been directedto satisfy the merchants’ demands on the New Company as far as these werejust.45 The news of the Anglo-French War starting in Europe in 1756 reachedthe Armenian Khoja Wajid in Bengal through his kothi in Surat.46

From the seventeenth century onwards centres in India—Surat, Bombay,Madras and Calcutta in particular—seem to have come up as places where Armeniancapital was concentrated. Wealthy Armenian merchants of such ports had agentsat places like Pegu, and Manila. One is struck by the continuous circulation ofeven the leading members of the community. We have noted the case ofZachary above. Khoja Petrus Woscan left New Julfa at for Madras in 1705when he was about twenty-five years of age. It is not known exactly when he

44 Claude Markovitz, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 25.45 RFSG, Despatches to England, v.3, 1711-14, 133. Khoja Babur di Sultan seems to have

functioned as the London agent of other Armenians too. See Armenian Merchants, nos. 261,262. It must have been Aga Piri who referred the case to Babur. who got the order issued.

46 S. C. Hill, Bengal in 1756-57, vol. 2, no. 144.


sailed for Manila where he spent about twenty years. It is clear from his testa-ment that the beginnings of his fortunes were made in Manila. He came backto Coromandel in 1722 when he settled down permanently at Madras. He neverwent back to New Julfa, but recovered his ancestral property in that town, thathad been mortgaged to others. Though the overseas transactions of his networkstretching from Constantinople to Manila were made mostly through his agentsand their partners, he travelled frequently between Madras, Pulicat, Masuli-patnam and Pondicherry in connection with his trade and was kept informedabout the transactions of his agents through other itinerant members of the com-munity.47 Armenian aldermen of Madras often left for Pegu, no doubt in con-nection with their business. While someone else from his family or communitywould take over the absentee’s duties, he would take care of the commercialtransactions of his compatriots in Pegu. The flexible and unassuming characterof the members of their network, willing to take up almost any role that suitedthe occasion, offered Armenians the potential to exploit the existing and newlyopened channels of commerce and communication to the maximum.

ARMENIANS AND THE MILIEU OF THE INDIAN TRADING WORLD

As noted above, the Arabian Seas especially provided the major thoroughfarein transcontinental commerce, in addition and to the overland route, since veryancient times. Even before the rise of Islam that led to the expansion of com-merce along the Indian Ocean littoral, Arabs, Syrian Christians and Persians hadtraded and settled at Indian ports. While ports like Cambay, Mangalore, Calicut,Cochin and Quilon housed merchants of international communities, both over-land and overseas trade connected India with the world outside.

Prior to the seventeenth century, Armenians coming to India seem to haveused the overland route to a greater extent than the overseas route. Babur, thefounder of the Mughal empire already noted the importance of Kabul andKandahar in the overland route to India.48 At least since the close of the six-teenth century onwards, Safavid Iran, Uzbek Turan, and Mughal India provideda broadly similar commercial and liguistic environment, with Persian as themost widely used language for administrative and cultural purposes.49 In the

47 TNA, Records of the Mayor’s Court, Copies of wills, probates etc. vol. 5, ff.212-311:the last will and testament of Coja Petrus Uscan (henceforth, the last will of Petrus Uscan).See my work on the Armenian merchants of Madras (under preparation).

48 Babur-Nama: (Memoirs of Babur), tr. from the original Turkish text by AnnetteSusannah Beveridge (rep. Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint, 1970): 202.

49 S. F. Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600-1750 (First Indian edition,1994), 7-13.




same way as Indian Sindhi firms and Hindu merchants operating in this routespread to Kandahar, Bukhara, Isfahan and beyond, Armenian, Persian, Turkish,and other merchants followed this caravan route to different market and pro-duction centres in north and northwest India.50 Except for short segments, themajor route from Kabul to Agra underwent few modifications since the close ofthe sixteenth century, testifying to relatively stable urban setting.51 Indian ruraleconomy, with its commercial production, was very much geared to an inte-grated pattern of trade through networks of mandis and qasbas stretching fromLahore, Multan, and Sind on the west to Assam and Bengal in the east, con-nected through road and river routes.52 In the early seventeenth century, Lahorewas a principal commercial centre of India, attracting commodities from far andnear brought by merchants of all the nationalities mentioned above.

It has been suggested, that in the pre-Mughal period, most of the Armenianscoming to India were travelling merchants who came here for business andreturned to their own country each year.53 But considering the distance and thenature of the overland or caravan trade, it seems unlikely that one year wasenough to travel all the way from Eurasia or western Asia—wherever thesemerchants came from—to carry out such business and return.54 Moreover, asmany of these itinerant traders traded in multiple (relatively small) accounts, itwould take a few years to accumulate some profit from all the accounts. Thedescription provided by the ledger book of Khoja Hovannes in the late seven-teenth century can again be taken as examplary: one set out on a journey thatcovered several years during which the traveller-cum-trader invested his master’s

50 For the Sindhi diaspora see C. Markovitz, The Global World of Indian Merchants andScott C. Levi, The Indian Diaspora in Central Asia and its Trade, 1550-1900 (Leiden: Brill,2002); for Armenians taking this route see J. Russell, ‘Two Armenian graffities from Ziârat,Pakistan’, Revue Etude Armeninnes (1988-89), XVI, 471-75.

51 Jean Deloche, Transport and Communications in India prior to Steam Locomotion, 2vols., tr. From the French by James Walker, Delhi, 1993-94, v.1, 34.

52 B. R. Grover, ‘An Integrated Pattern of Commercial Life in the Rural Society of NorthIndia during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ in Money and Market in India, 1100-1700, ed. S. Subrahmanyam (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994): 219-255.

53 S. Neill, A History of Christianity in India, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1984-85), vol. 1: The Beginnings to A. D. 1707, 384. Neill’s information here is basedon the account left by the eighteenth century Armenian merchant-cum-historian ThomasKhojamall. According to M. J. Seth, however, Khojamall’s account is not reliable. See his‘Armenians in India’ especially 15-21.

54 A journey from Surat to Agra took 86 days. See R. J. Barendse, The Arabian Seas, 158;a journey from Goa to Lahore via Daman and Cambay (up to Cambay by ship), which usu-ally took two months, could easily take as long as six months. P. du Jarric, Akbar and theJesuits. An account of the Jesuit Missions to the Court of Akbar, tr. with introduction andnotes by C. H. Payne (London: Routledge & Sons, 1926): 52-59.


(partner)s as well as his own capital; made new acquaintances and renewed theold ones; carried goods from one place to another for sale and noted thedemand for new ones. In the end, the ones lucky enough to survive the odds ofthe weather and the roads, and to make enough profit to settle the accounts withthe master, went back. During the intermittent period the trader had to live atdifferent places along the route.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century we find Armenians, together withArabs, Parsees, and Turks, sailing from Cambay as part of the four Gujaratiships annually leaving that port for Melaka where many of them stayed back.55

In the course of the sixteenth century, Armenians were to be found at differentplaces in India and at least a few Armenian settlements seem to have beenthere. Portuguese missionaries in the early sixteenth century noted that in mat-ters of faith, the Christians of St. Thomas in Coromandel gave hearing to

none except their bishops, who come from Armenia, because with the people of thiscountry, no one can succeed but these bishops.56

At Pulicat, Portuguese merchants coming from Melaka stayed with ArmenianChristians. It was at the invitation of Coja Escandel (?Iskandar), among otherArmenians, that Diogo Fernandes and Bastião Fernandes made the pilgrimageto the house of the Apostle St. Thomas at St. Thome in 1517.57 Akbar’s farmanto the Jesuit Provincial at Goa asking the latter to send him learned priestscapable of informing the emperor about Christianity was carried by the ambas-sador Abdallah and Dominic or Domingo Pires, an Armenian Christian.58 Piresaccompanied both the first and the third Jesuit missions to the Mughal court as interpreter.59 Though it is not clear if Akbar met the parents of Mirza Zu’lqarnain,

55 Tome Pires, The Suma Oriental, 2 vols. (London: the Hakluyt Society, 1944), vol. 1:46,v.2:268-69.

56 G. M. Moraes, A History of Christianity in India: from Early Times to St. FrancisXavier, A.D. 52-1542 (Bombay: Manaktalas, 1964): 226. Moraes was not sure if theseChristians were Armenians or Syrians. It is true that early Portuguese sources referred to allEastern Christians as Armenians. See E. Maclagan, The Jesuits and the Great Mogul(London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1932): 271 and S. Neill, A History of Christianity: 466fn. Armenians were elsewhere in India and also engaged in the overseas trade to SoutheastAsia, but it is possible that the Christian priests the Portuguese came across in Coromandelwere Syrians.

57 A. Mathias Mundadan, History of Christianity in India, vol. 1: From the Beginning upto the middle of the Sixteenth century (up to 1542) (Bangalore: Theological Publications inIndia, 1984): 407.

58 M. J. Seth suggested that this Portuguese name was perhaps assumed by the person forstrategic purposes.

59 E. Maclagan, The Jesuits and the Great Mogul: 24, 39, 41, 196; S. Neill, A History ofChristianity in India . . . vol. 1: 170.




the well-known Armenian Catholic with close contact with the Jesuit fathers atAgra or somewhere in Kashmir, it is clear that they were living in (Mughal)India where both Zu’lqarnain and his brother were born.60 The brief account ofthe merchant pilgrim Khwaja Martyrose in Seth’s work reminds us of a Sufisaint.61 Though we have such accounts of Armenians in different parts of thecountry in the sixteenth century, it is, however, difficult to accept Hewsen’sposition that there were large settlements of Armenians already at Agra (by1562), Surat (by 1579) and Calcutta (by 1630).62

At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Jesuit Fr. Emmanuel Pinheiroat Lahore came across the books and a copy of the Gospels being carried byan Armenian merchant from Jerusalem for the Emperor Akbar. Travelling over-land from Ormuz, the Armenian had breathed his last near Lahore.63 The mis-sion of the lay brother Benedict Goes to China sent by Fr. Jerome Xavier fromLahore in 1603 was accompanied by the Armenian Isaac, who remained withGoes till the end.64 At this stage of settlement, Armenians living in India were

60 See below for more on Mirza Zu’lqarnain. 61 M. J. Seth, Armenians in India: 102-7. On pp. 22-23 he gives the names of seven

Armenian priests who died at Agra between 1614 and 1675.62 Robert. H. Hewsen, Armenia: A Historical Atlas (Chicago: The University of Chicago

Press, 2001). As far as South Asia is concerned, Hewsen’s atlas is a bit confusing becausethe symbols explained on p. xvii point to the size of the place (e.g. village, small town andcity) but refer to the size of the community on the map (p. 160). Hewsen bases himself onMesrobv Seth’s work. Except for two tombstones from 1557 and 1560, the rest of the tomb-stones of Armenians at Agra dated back to 1611. Seth’s assumption that a large number ofArmenians had flocked to Agra during the reign of Akbar was not corroborated by any his-torical source. See his Armenians in India: 110. According to the account of Khojamall,whom Seth elsewhere dismissed as untrustworthy, Akbar had allowed an Armenian churchto be built in Agra as early as 1562. But the Jesuit priests, who had a close contact withArmenians, do not mention any Armenian church in Agra. E. Maclagan, The Jesuits and theGreat Mogul: 271. About Seth’s position that no Armenian women came to India in the sev-enteenth and eighteenth centuries, see below. As regards the possibility of a large Armeniancolony in Calcutta by 1630, a hypothesis based on the discovery of the tombstone of RezaBibi dated July 11, 1630 in the churchyard of the Holy Church of Nazareth (Calcutta), C. R.Wilson already dismissed it on the ground that the tombstone in question was an isolatedinstance, and that the stone was not in situ. He suggested that the stone was probably broughtto Calcutta from somewhere else at a later date. See Early Annals of the English in Bengal:being the Bengal Public Consultations for the first half of the 18th century, (henceforth EarlyAnnals of the English in Bengal) 3 vols. (London: W. Thacker, 1895-1919), vol. 1: 137, n. 4; also P. T. Nair, Calcutta in the 17th Century (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1986): 443-46.Calcutta became an important centre of commerce in the 18th century following the founda-tion of the English settlement there in 1690. It is more likely that if Armenians were therein Bengal in the early 17th century, they were based mainly at Chinsura, and not in Calcutta.

63 E. Maclagan, The Jesuits and the Great Mogul: 213-215.64 C. Wessels, Early Jesuit Travellers in Central Asia, 1603-1721 (The Hague: Martinus

Nijhoff, 1924): 1-42.


well integrated into the existing socio-economic fabric of India. For commerceoverland they travelled in caravans consisting of merchants of different Indianand west Asian communities. Overseas commerce too, as we have noted above,was carried out with merchants of different origins.

The relationship of the Armenians with non-Christians was often not limitedto trade alone. Familiarity with Persian provided them access to the Mughalcourt, which often employed them as trusted interpreters.65 As regards the con-version of Armenians to Islam, not much is known so far. The relationshipbetween Armenians and Muslims of different denominations has never been freefrom tensions as historical Armenia has often fallen prey to the aggressive poli-cies of Turkey and Persia. At the same time, it also provided Armenians withthe experience of living under Muslim domination. One account that was widelyknown among the European missionaries and travellers in seventeenth-centuryIndia was that of Mirza Zu’lqarnain mentioned above. His father, MirzaSikandar, acquired great favour at the court of Akbar, who married him toJuliana, the daughter of the Armenian Mir Abdul Hai, in charge of the royalharem.66 After Jahangir succeeded to the throne, both Zu’lqarnain and hisbrother Sikandar were forcibly converted to Islam. This seems to have beenmore of a political show as after his conversion, Zu’lqarnain did not practiseIslam but became an adherent of the Roman Catholic Church.67 It was notuncommon for Armenians during this period to conceal their faith under somereal or assumed political pressure. When the governor of Lahore threatened in1604 to arrest all the Christians of that city, some twenty-three Armenian mer-chants seem to have fled the city hastily. According to Fr. Pinheiro, the three

65 For the legend about the (Armenian) Christian wife of Akbar see M. J. Seth, Armeniansin India: 151-61. Seth maintained that Akbar indeed had an Armenian wife. But he alsoquoted the paper of Fr. J. Hosten published in the Statesman, 14 November 1916, whereHosten left the issue open as he had no conclusive evidence. Also, E. Maclagan, The Jesuitsand the Great Mogul: 157-61.

66 Abdul Hai, an Armenian, was in the service of the imperial harem of Akbar. His daugh-ter was married to Iskandar who was also in the service of Akbar. Iskandar had two sons:the elder son, also called Iskandar, was later named Mirza Zu’lqarnain. Tuzuk I Jahangiri,tr. By Alexander Rogers, ed. By Henry Beveridge, 2 vols., (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal,1968), vol. 2: 194. The life of Mirza Zulkarnain attracted the attention of many contempo-rary accounts perhaps because of the fact he was, together with his brother, forcibly circum-cised by Jahangir.

67 Except for the period 1633-35 when he suffered from Shah Jahan’s anti-Christian out-bursts, Mirza seems to have enjoyed the favour of Jahangir and Shah Jahan who entrustedhim with various responsibilities. For his carreer see Fr. H. Hosten, Memoirs of the AsiaticSociety of Bengal, 1916; E. Maclagan, The Jesuits and the Great Mogul: 170-80; M. J. Sethquoted extensively from Fr. Hosten’s work in Armenians in India, 22-87.




to four Armenians he met did not want to be seen talking to him, as theywished not to be recognised as Christians.68 The Italian traveller Pietro DellaValle’s Persian Christian servant Cacciatur (the name suggests he was an Armenian)had declared himself at the customs at Surat to be a Muslim as he was afraidhe would be persecuted in the Mughal dominions.69 Contemporary accounts sug-gest that Armenians in India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries co-habited with Hindu and Muslim women.70 These Hindu and Muslim concubineswere later either abandoned or accepted as partners through marriage in the church.71

Such co-habitation would be logical even if for entirely strategic purposes.Akbar himself seems to have been present at the wedding ceremony of his Armenian interpreter Dominic Pires and his Indian bride in 1582.72

Another interesting case, though we have not come across any conclusiveevidence about this one so far, is that of Khoja Wajid, a colourful personalityof Bengal trade and politics in the eighteenth century.73 The indigenous histo-rian Gulam Hussain noted that Khwaja Ashraf Kashmiri, son of Mir Afzal, wasa nephew of Wajid.74 Though S. C. Hill refers to him as Armenian, Dutch andFrench sources refer to him as a ‘moor,’ a term indicating Muslim,75 and his-torians have wondered about this confusion. Sushil Chaudhury, who has writtenextensively on Wajid, has noted that there is no evidence to show that Wajid,who was undoubtedly an Armenian, had ever converted to Islam. Chaudhuryassumes that Wajid perhaps added ‘Muhammed’ to his name to enhance his

68 E. Maclagan, The Jesuits and the Great Mogul: 271-72; cf. Letter from the presidentFremlen &messrs. Breton, Robinson and Wylde at Swally Marine to the Company, December29, 1640: “. . . the greater part of whom [Armenians] here call themselves ‘Mussulman’ . . .”.English Factories in India, ed. W. Foster, 13 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906-27), vol.6: 281.

69 The Travels of Pietro Della Valle in India. From the old English translation of 1664 byG. Havers, ed. With a life of the author, an introd. And notes by Edward Grey. 2 vols.(London: Hakluyt Society, 1892); v.1:126-30.

70 P. du Jarric, Akbar and the Jesuits: 135.71 Ibid.72 E. Maclagan, The Jesuits and the Great Mogul: 194. The name Dominic Pires is not

Armenian. Seth suggests that this was perhaps an adopted name.73 For details on Khoja Wajid see below.74 Saiyid Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai, Seir i Mutakherin, 2 vols. (Lahore: 1975), vol.

2: 400. 75 See the letters from the Dutch chief Bisdom quoted in S. C. Hill, Bengal 1756-57,

passim. Jean Law, the chief of the French factory at Kashimbazar in 1756-57 also referred toWajid as a ‘Moor’: Wajid ‘passed for the Nawab’s [Siraj-uddaula] confidential agent with the Europeans; a sufficient reason for this belief was founded on the very considerable losseswhich this Moor had just suffered by the English capture of Hugli’; see S. C. Hill, Bengalin 1756-57, vol. 3, Appendix III, translation of the first part of the memoir of Jean Law: 187.


business prospects.76 Writing about Bengal in 1757, Rajat Ray wondered howthe Muslim Mir Afzal could be related to the Armenian Wajid, as matrimonialrelationships between the Armenians and Muslims were not usual.77 It isextremely interesting to note that Thomas Khojamall, the eighteenth centuryArmenian historian, who referred to Khoja Petrus and Khoja Gregory—twoother well known Armenian personalities in Bengal in the eighteenth century—did not mention Khoja Wajid.78 Curiously enough, Seth, who was at pains inputting together the history of the Armenians in India, did not have much to sayabout Wajid.79 Repeated reference to him as ‘moor’ in the records of the DutchEast India Company, and the silence of Armenian sources about this personal-ity leads one to think, in the light of the history of the Armenians sketchedabove, that either Khoja Wajid or his father had embraced Islam at some pointof time.80

Armenians seem to have lived in close social contact with Christians of otherdenominations. The Jesuit fathers considered all Armenians of northern India tobe under their charge and paid special attention to the conversion of Armeniansto the Catholic Church.81 Though Armenians were initially opposed to the activity of the fathers, it was possible for the latter to convert some of the Armenians. It should be noted that Mirza Zu’lqarnain, after his forced conver-sion to Islam, converted to the Catholic Church. Letters written by Jesuit fathersfrom Goa attest to the good relationship between Mirza Zu’lkarnain, then gov-ernor of the province of Sambhar in Rajasthan and the Jesuits. Zu’lkarnain wasreferred to as ‘the pillar of Christianity’ extending his liberality not only to theJesuits, but also to the rest of the Christians. Mirza was a generous supporterof the conversion of the indigenous population by the Jesuits, who spoke of himas ‘brother’ and procured for him the title of ‘Founder of Agra College.’82 Even

76 S. Chaudhury, ‘Khwaja Wazid in Bengal Trade and Politics’, The Indian HistoricalReview, (July 1989-Jan. 1990), v. XVI, no. 1-2: 137-48.

77 R. K. Ray, Polashir Shorojontro o Sekaler Somaj (The Conspiracy of Plassey and theContemporary Society) (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1998): 161.

78 I am grateful to Sebouh Aslanian for drawing my attention to this point.79 Seth refers to Khoja Wajid only in passing, with reference to the question of monopoly

in salt. Armenians in India: 364-65.80 Scholars like Baghdiantz Mccabe, Khachikian and Zekiyan relate that if an Armenian

was converted, he was not considered Armenian any more. Zekiyan adds that as Armeniansdid not have a state, nationality was not the issue, while adherence to the church was. Thiswould also explain why Wajid’s grave cannot be found either in Chinsura or in Calcutta.

81 E. Maclagan, The Jesuits and the Great Mogul: 271-72.82 The Travels of Peter Mundy, 1608-67 in Europe and Asia, 5 vols. (London: Hakluyt

Society, 1907-36), vol. 2: Travels in Asia, 1628-1634, Appendix E; also Seth, Armenians inIndia . . ., 22-87.




the Great Mughals were not in a position to (or did not) make a distinctionbetween Christians of different denominations. Pleased with Captain WilliamHawkins, the envoy of King James II, Jahangir wanted him to settle down inIndia and offered him all accommodations, including a wife. Extremely embar-rassed, but not daring to refuse the imperial offer, Hawkins replied that as aChristian he could marry only a Christian woman. But the emperor outwittedhim by finding a match in the daughter of a lately deceased Armenian, andHawkins felt obliged to obey the emperor.83

When the Dutch and the English were struggling to initiate commerce in thewestern Indian Ocean and Mughal India from their base at Surat, Armenianswere thus already established in the field. But the settlement of Armenians inNew Julfa and other places in Persia which coincided with the arrival of thewestern European companies in the Indian Ocean, acted as a boost to the firstmajor eastward surge of Armenian trade. The proximity of India, the main trad-ing partner of Iran,84 prompted an increasing number of Armenian merchants tofrequent India. There is evidence to show that Armenians, together with Persianmerchants continued to use the overland route to India in the seventeenth cen-tury.85 A Dutch source written in 1630 claimed that Armenians and Persianstransported indigo from Byana in huge quantities and textiles from the regionaround Agra and Delhi to Isfahan via the overland route to Persia and Turkey.86

An estimate made in the 1630s put the ratio of textiles, indigo and sugarexported overseas to Persia to those taken overland at 70:30. Van Santen main-tains that this list underestimated the overland trade as it did not include thequantity of indigo from Byana transported overland, especially because thesame list also indicated that transporting cotton piece-goods from the areaaround Agra and Delhi overland to Isfahan was cheaper (20% of the cost) thantransporting them by caravan to Surat, then to Bandar Abbas by ship, and againto Isfahan by caravan (27% of the cost).This list suggests that it would be moreprofitable to send textiles coming from the centres of production in north Indiaoverland.87 It was noted that every year 20- to 25,000 camels, carrying chiefly

83 See Purchas: His Pilgrims (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1905-07), vol. III: 15-16.84 Willem Floor, The Economy of Safavid Persia (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2000): 245.85 See Henry Bornford’s account of his journey from Agra to Tatta [? March 1639] in

English Factories in India, vol. 6: 134-138. 86 N.A., V.O.C. 1099, Surat-Heeren XVII, 30 July, 1630, 312v.87 Another estimate put the cost of both the routes at about 50%. H. W. Van Santen, De

VOC in Gujarat en Hindustan, 1620-1660, Ph.D. thesis, Leiden University (Meppel: 1982):64-65.


piece-goods, arrived at Isfahan from India.88 In 1638 the Dutch factors at Suratnoted that Armenian and Muslim merchants carrrying more than 100 cartloadsof indigo and textiles overland to Persia could not pass the region aroundKandahar due to a war in the region, and were forced to return to Surat forshipment to Persia on board Dutch and English ships.89 Due to the import of alarge quantity of cotton textiles in Isfahan by a caravan consisting of 6,000camels in 1644, there was little demand for the textiles carried by the DutchCompany.90 In 1668 Nicolaes Witsen, the famous burgomaster of Amsterdamwas informed by a certain Armenian merchant of Julfa about the major placesalong the overland route connecting Persia and India.

Table. Distance between Isfahan and the major cities in India as calculated by an Armenianmerchant of Julfa, 166891

From To Distance in miles

Isfahan Kandahar via Mashed 375 Isfahan Kandahar via desert route 250 Kandahar Multan 160 Multan Lahore 50 Lahore Agra 110

It has been assumed that the growth of the overseas trade of Surat in the sec-ond half of the seventeenth century did not automatically imply an increase inthe total export from India. Bulk of the commodities that had earlier been takenoverland, was being shipped from Surat at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries.92 The rebellion at Kandahar (1709),followed by the Afghan occupation of Persia (1722-30) and then by the inva-sion of India by Nadir Shah made the roads unsafe and had a negative impacton overland trade. The Indo-Gangetic plains and the sub-Himalayan zones,

88 Ibid.89 Generale Missiven, vol. 1: 725.90 H. W. Van Santen, De VOC in Gujarat en Hindustan: 65.91 Nicolaes Witsen, Noord en Oost tartarye, of te bondig ontwerp van eenige dier landen

en volken, welke voormaels bekent zijn geweest. Beneffens verscheidene tot noch onbekende,en meest nooit voorheen beschreve Tartersche en nabuurige gewesten, landstreken, steden,rivieren, en plaetzen, in de Noorder en Oosterlyke gedeelten van Asia en Europa enz. 2 vols.(Amsterdam: Halma, 1705), vol. 1: 426. I am grateful to René Bekius for drawing my atten-tion to this work.

92 H. W. Van Santen De VOC in Gujarat en Hindustan: 65; for the question of the con-tinuity of overland trade from India in the seventeenth century see R. J. Barendse, TheArabean Seas: 154-64; Willem Floor, The Economy of Safavid Persia: 200-10.




however, continued to be connected with Persia and Central Asia through Kabuland Kandahar during the period that followed.93

Seth found only one tombstone of an Armenian woman at Surat in the six-teenth century (dating from 1579), and the fact that no Armenian woman wasburied at Agra between 1611 and 1777 led him to conclude that no Armenianladies travelled to India with their husband in those days.94 This is inaccurateand simplistic, because Seth was aware of the presence of Armenian women inIndia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.95 Subsequent to their settle-ment in New Julfa, Isfahan, the number of Armenian merchants settling in Indiawith their families seems to have increased.. This was particularly so in majortrading settlements like Surat where quite a few Armenian women were to befound already in the first half of the seventeenth century.96 The relationshipbetween the Armenians and the two northwest European nationalities at Suratwas rather close. A Catholic Armenian called Iskandar Beg, the interpreter ofthe English lodge at Surat, worked as interpreter for Pieter van den Broeckewho arrived there as director of the Dutch East India Company in 1620.97 WhenDella Valle was in Surat with his Georgian wife, he was touched by the demon-stration of affection on the part of the English president Thomas Rastel, whooften sent Della Valle his own coach and his interpreter. It was the time whenJan Pietersz. Coen, the governor-general of the Dutch East Indies, who consid-ered women as a pre-condition for trade, advocated the policy of populatingBatavia. After initial attempts of shipping marriageable women or entire fami-lies to Asia had failed, the Dutch decided to follow the Portuguese example.98

Della Valle noticed that many of the Dutch Company’s servants, contrary tothose of the English, were married, and quite a few to Armenian women. Hewas informed that this pattern was encouraged in order to populate Batavia:

At Batavia Dutchmen settled with their family enjoyed many privileges. That is whymany of them are married to women from Syria, Armenia, India and other countries.99

93 Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal India: Awadh and the Punjab 1707-48(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986): 141-43.

94 M. J. Seth, Armenians in India: 126.95 Ibid. e.g. 263.96 The large proportion of women among the Armenians of Surat drew attention of an

Englishman even two centuries later. Anonymous, ‘Surat—its past and present’ CalcuttaReview, (1848) 9, January-June: 136.

97 See Om Prakash, Dutch Factories in India, 1627-1623, v.1 (Delhi: Munshiram Mano-harlal, 1984): 19n.

98 L. Blussé van Oud-Alblas, Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and theDutch in VOC Batavia (Leiden: KITLV, 1986): 158-62.

99 The travels of Pietro della Valle in India. vol. 1: 29.


At Surat, he lodged at the palatial building owned by the director Van denBroecke, who sent the young Armenian wife of one of the Dutch factors,accompanied by a few female servants for the convenience of Mrs. DellaValle.100 The way Van den Broeke mentioned the Armenians in his journal leadsone to think that in the early stage of settlement in India the Dutch were quitefriendly to the Armenians, who, together with other Europeans, formed part ofone Christian society.101 On Christmas Day in 1621 the slave girl of SebaltWonderaar, the senior merchant of the Dutch lodge, was baptised along withCatherina, the girl child of the well known Armenian Yadgar. As godfather,Van den Broecke was witness to the event.102 On his trip to Ahmedabad, whereArmenians were active in the indigo trade, Van den Broecke stayed at theirsarai.103 On another occasion in 1626 the baptism of an Italian child by theDutch priest David Sijmonssen took place in the house of Iskander Beg. Thistime, too, Van den Broecke was the godfather and Angela, the wife of Yadgar,was the godmother.104 Next year Yadgar’s daughter Marican was married toIssack Scholliers, an assistant in the Dutch lodge. The junior merchant PaulusStigel van Neurenberg married the daughter of Khoja Rafael. Van den Broecke,who looked upon the girls as his own daughters, gifted them with 600 and 500guilders respectively as presents on this occasion.105 The merchant AnthoniClaesz. Visscher was married to Mariam Gomez, an Armenian woman fromBaghdad.106 When in 1621-22 the Dutch Company was facing a shortage ofcapital, the Company could borrow money from Mariam at an interest of 1 percent per month. It has been assumed that before it was shifted to another build-ing, the lodge of the Dutch at Surat was initially set up in the house of MariamGomez.107 Some Armenians informed Van den Broecke that Huijbert Vissnich,the Company chief in Persia, was not performing his duty and was giving pref-erence to his own interests above those of the Company.108 Della Valle, alongwith the English and other Christians of Surat, was present at the wedding party

100 Ibid. vol. 1, 28.101 Cf. H. W. van Santen, De V.O.C. in Gujarat en Hindustan: 10.102 Pieter van den Broecke in Azië, 2 vols. ed. W. Ph. Coolhaas (’s Gravenhage: Martinus

Nijhoff, 1962-63); vol. 1, journaal: 265.103 Ibid. vol. 2: 268.104 Ibid. vol. 2: 265, 325.105 Ibid. 331.106 The travels of Pietro Della Valle . . ., vol. 1: 120, 123, 124.107 De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert over Mughal Indië, 1627: Kroniek en Remons-

trantie, ed. D. H. A. Kolff and H. W. van Santen (’s Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979):22, n. 78.

108 Pieter van den Broecke . . ., vol. 2: 5.




of the assistant Willem Jacobsz. and Mariam, the daughter of an Armenian mer-chant from Ahmedabad.109 A critical insight into the situation in Gujarat, Persiaand Arabia written in the 1630s suggested that the Dutch could attract theArmenian merchants who were deserting Goa and other Portuguese settlementsbecause of the lack of trade at those places; inviting entire Armenian familieswith nice promises and civil measures and employing them at the Company’sfactories at Dabhol and Surat would help the Company to populate those set-tlements.110 The Dutch-Armenian marriages, the attitude of Van den Broecketowards these marriages and the relationship between the English directorThomas Rastel and his Portuguese fiancée, have inspired Kolff and Van Santento reflect on the homogenous nature of the pluriform Christian ‘nation’ atSurat.111 When an Armenian merchant was framed by the Bohra community ofSurat in a murder case that actually involved the servant of the Armenian mer-chant, Aga Piri appealed to the chiefs of all the European Companies in thename of Christianity. ‘Christians are obliged,’ Piri pointed out to the director ofthe Dutch lodge, ‘to stand by and protect each other if need be, as all treeswhether bearing fruit or not deserve dewdrops from the heaven.’112

What was the situation like in European settlements like Madras and Cal-cutta? As per the agreement signed between Khoja Panous Kalantar, an eminentmerchant of Isfahan and the East India Company in London in 1688, Armenianswere to trade and settle at all English ports on the same terms as Englishfreemen, and possess all rights enjoyed by British subjects. Though the agree-ment was not put into effect due to the opposition of the Armenian merchantsof New Julfa, the spirit of the Company’s over-enthusiastic messages about theutility of the Armenians had set the tone of the day and paved the way for anew phase of Armenian settlement in India.113 Whenever there were forty Arme-nians resident in a town under the jurisdiction of the Company, a temporary

109 The travels of Della Valle vol. 1: 120, 123, 124.110 N. A. Collectie Sweers, inv. no. 9, ‘Corte Remonstrantie van de gelegentheijd van Guseratte,

Perzien en Arabien ook eenighe noodwendighe procedures welke in die quartieren dienengehouden te worden tot preservatie, versekeringe ende ook verbeteringhe der comptoiren ennegotien van Guseratte ende Persia, als mede tot restauratie van de gelden schade in Mocha,pr consequent tot merkelijke voordeel van honorable Comp. en affbreuke des algemeijnenvijants, addresserende, ff.119-125. I am grateful to Ms. Natalia Tojo for drawing my atten-tion to this document.

111 De Geschriften: 17-25.112 N. A. Dag Register, Surat, VOC 1549, f.505v, 507; for a description of Surat in the

late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, see Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants andthe decline of Surat, c. 1700-1750, Wiesbaden, 1979, ch. 1.

113 See Armenian Merchants e.g. documents 116, 117, 122, 136, 140, 146, 148, 184.


church was to be built for their use, and ground granted them for the erectionof a permanent place of worship, the Company allowing £50 a year for sevenyears for the maintenance of a priest.114 In the 1680s and 1690s, the EnglishEast India Company was recommending that its employees attract Armenians tothe English settlements and encourage their trade in every possible way.Armenians were allowed to freight the Company’s Europe-bound ships withcommodities like shellac, stick lac, pig-iron and wax. As India goods were verymuch in demand, the Company was sure it would profit from the freight.115

Experienced Armenians like Aga Piri were entrusted with training freshlyarrived factors of the Company in language and the method of trading.116 As theArmenians were familiar with the centres of production and market places inIndia, they were in a position to procure goods at a cheaper rate.117 Moreover,they would populate the settlements:

It is undoubtedly our interest to make our garrisoned ports in India marts for nations,which will in a few years aggrandize our revenue, and with that our strength 200Armenian Christians living in Madrass [sic] by whom we get money in every thing theyeat or drink or trade for as well as by the ground rents of the houses they live in, andto whom we pay no wages being as good a security to our garrison and trade as hiredEnglish soldiers . . .118

It should be remembered here that as the central political power in India wasdisintegrating towards the end of the seventeenth century and the centre of grav-ity was shifting towards the littoral, the growth of the European settlements pro-vided the Asian merchants with alternate bases of operation. Since the Englishleft the port to port trade in Asia to private enterprise already in the late 1660s,many private Asian merchants serving the Europeans in numerous ways,crowded the English settlements. Because the Dutch Company was a direct par-ticipant in the intra-Asian trade, ship owning merchants often avoided their set-tlements. The tendency to seek support in European settlements was particularlynoticeable in Coromandel where the close proximity of the ports made it possi-ble for Indian merchants to operate from more than one base at a time.119 Theregulations of the European Companies prohibiting trade with rival establish-ments could be avoided through a network based on kinship. As they wanted to

114 H. D. Love, Vestiges of old Madras: 1640-1800: traced from the East India Company’sRecords preserved at Fort St. George and the India Office and from other sources, 4 vols.(London: Murray, 1913), v.1: 543.

115 Armenian Merchants, documents 116, 117, 120, 124, 127, 131, and passim.116 Ibid, document 156.117 Ibid, e.g. documents 121, 141, 142.118 Ibid. no. 163, Company in London to Fort St. George, 3 January, 1693/94.119 B. Bhattacharya, ‘The Chulia merchants of southern Coromandel’.




attract local shipping magnates to their ports, Indian merchants could use theCompanies against one another.120 Armenians followed the same pattern. Formerchants trying to escape the wrath of indigenous elites, too, the European set-tlements were a place of refuge. A case in point was that of the Armenian mer-chant Khwaja Nazar. As there were some proceedings against him in thenawab’s (Shuja Khan) darbar in Murshidabad, the English in Calcutta, whilestopping him from sailing for Europe, also made it sure that he did not fall inthe hands of the nawab’s people. They were determined

not to submit [sic] their merchants being carried off the place which would be of theutmost ill consequence to the Hon’ble Company’s affairs as it would be a precedent forthe darbar to demand every man of substance out of the place.121

The English were willing to pay as much as Rs. 20,000 to make up the case,but the nawab demanded Rs. 50,000. The case was later settled by Nazar’s vakilat the darbar.122

In 1691, Elihu Yale noted that recently ‘a few more’ Armenians had come tosettle in Fort St. George, while more were expected.123 In 1696, the councilnoted that though there were a few Armenians constantly residing at Madras,many of them were annually sailing to Bengal, Manila, Aceh, Persia and otherplaces, and/or trading with the king’s camp, Zulfiqar Khan’s camp and Gol-conda and thus by the bulk of their trade contributed greatly to the revenues ofFort St. George.124 One year later the council noted that Khoja Gregory’s [resi-dent of Madras] invitation to his countrymen at Julfa to repair to and reside atMadras

has mett with a good effect esteeming it our advantage to have Madrass as populousespecially with Christians as possible.125

By 1711 Armenians had become ‘numerous and opulent’ in Madras.126 Withthe growth of the ports of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta in the eighteenth cen-

120 Ibid.121 Bengal Public Consultations, 17 April, 1733, quoted in S. Bhattacharyya, The East

India Company and the Economy of Bengal (from 1704 to 1740), (Calcutta: Graphic ArtPress, 1969): 55. Khoja Nazar built the Armenian Apostolic Church (called St. Nazareth afterhim) in Calcutta in 1724. In analysing the relationship between the nawab and the English,Bhattacharyya presents other cases as well, ibid. 55-60.

122 Ibid. 59.123 Armenian Merchants, document 139.124 RFSG, Despatches to England, vol. 1: 1694-96, 35.125 Armenian Merchants, document 239.126 RFSG, Despatches to England, vol. 2: 147.


tury, European, especially English settlements became the major habitat of theArmenian community in India, though many of them were settled at places likeSurat, Hugli, Saidabad, Patna and Dhaka. Most of the promises made by theEnglish were geared to securing their own trade and revenue; yet the threemajor Armenian churches that were built in India in the course of the eighteenthcentury were at the three principal English settlements along the coast.127 Whenthe council of Fort St. George wanted to levy a land tax for the construction ofa town wall in 1718, the Armenians pleaded exemption from payment on theground that they were only six in number.128 The number is misleading, as wehave noted above that there was a constant flow of Armenians in and out of thetown. As many Armenians travelled frequently to distant places organizing thebusiness, the number of permanent residents of a place could have been small.The survey seems to have included only very wealthy Armenian residents own-ing extensive landed property. The eminent Armenian, Khoja Sultan David,owned landed property in Madras.129 The legendary merchant Khoja Petrus Woscan,who constructed the Marmalong bridge and the fifty-six stone staircases leadingto the mount of San Thome, owned at least forty-two houses in Madras. Ormenoted that north of the White Town in Fort St. George were many good build-ings belonging to Armenian and rich Indian merchants.130 It is possible that suchwealthy merchants, dealing in real estate, provided housing to the lesser mem-bers in the diaspora, albeit against the payment of rent.131 The church alsooffered lodging to travelling Armenians.132 However, the course of events in theeighteenth century had changed the situation in Madras. Armenians were sus-pected to have assisted the French when the latter attacked Fort St. George in

127 The church at Saidabad was built in 1758. 128 H. D. Love, Vestiges of old Madras, vol. 2: 162.129 Khoja Shawmir Sultan’s petition on behalf of his father Khoja Sultan David and him-

self for permission to continue in the White Town was rejected. Their house in Charles Streetwas rented by the Company for ‘public purposes’. Only Khoja Petrus Woscan was allowedto continue at his Choultry Gate Street redidence. ibid. 405, 426, 494.

130 Robert Orme, Military Transactions, vol. 1: 65.131 The ‘last will of Petrus Uscan’. He expressed the wish that Armenian merchants com-

ing to Madras for trade should feel obliged to stay in those buildings. The income from therent would be invested in the welfare of the town of New Julfa and the Armenians there.Khoja Petrus Aratoon, the eminent merchant of Bengal and brother of Khoja Gregory ownedtwelve houses, nine in Calcutta and one each in Serampore, Chinsura and Dacca. CalcuttaHigh Court, O.W. 2623. Ghulam Husain noted that Khoja Wajid, the Armenian merchantprince of Bengal, had a harem with 125 women. The information may not be entirely cor-rect, but it is possible that many relatives and other families were housed in the same build-ing, hence many women. Ghulam Husain Khan Seir ul Mutakherin vol. 2, 400 fn.

132 H. M. Nadjarian, Life story of Mr. A. M. Arathoon (Calcutta, 1958): 9.




1746, and by 1750 the English Company ordered the council of Fort St. Georgeto direct the Armenians to leave the White Town, where no Armenian was tolive in future. The chapel and other buildings built by Petrus Woscan at Veperywere transferred to the Danish missionaries.133 Those who possessed landedproperty in the White Town, were to sell it to European Protestants. However,as ‘very useful people,’ Armenians were to be allowed to inhabit the BlackTown.134

Calcutta, the second city in the British colonial empire, also suffered from thephenomenon of dualism reflected in the Europeans’ concern for defence andsecurity, manifested in the fort and the fence.135 In the colonial period, the fencegradually fell down. The fort, with its accommodational function, became anembellishment, the urban area began to grow and spread and the componentelements began to interpenetrate, resulting in the development of new areas.136

The Black Town gradually drove wedges into the White Town, especially intothe intermediate zone, or the ‘Grey Town’ where the Portuguese, Greeks andArmenians were settled from the pre-colonial times.137 As late as 1758 the Courtof Directors were anxious not to discourage Armenians and other inhabitants ofCalcutta from settling within their bounds, especially the Armenians, as ‘no badconsequences from their residence’ were apprehended.138 Many of the mag-nificent buildings in the White Town of Calcutta were built by the Armenians.The Grand Hotel, the Nizam Palace, the Park Mansions—to name only a few—bear testimony to the zeal of the Armenian pioneers of the real estate businessin Calcutta.139 The formation of bigger Armenian settlements around the churchdid not reduce social contact between Armenians and western Europeans. As faras Armenian-European marriage is concerned, it is interesting to note that in allthe cases that have come down to us, the brides were Armenian and the bride-grooms European.140

133 H. D. Love, Vestiges of old Madras, vol. 2: 403-404, 467.134 Ibid. 426.135 P. Sinha, Calcutta in Urban History (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1978): 7-8.136 Ibid.137 Ibid.138 J. Long, Selections from Unpublished Records of Government: for the years 1748 to

1767 inclusive. Relating mainly to the Social Condition of Bengal with a map of Calcutta in1784. Ed. M. Saha (Calcutta: Mukhopadhyay, 1973): 161.

139 I owe this information to P. T. Nair. 140 Records of Fort St. George registered only 9 marriages between Armenian and western

European individuals between 1680-1800. See H. Dodwell ed., List of marriages registeredin the Presidency of Fort St. George, 1680-1800 (Madras: Madras Government Press, 1916).One well-known marriage in Surat in the late eighteenth century was that between Hripsimah,


Whether in the traditional port towns like Surat, or in the ‘White,’ ‘Grey,’ or ‘Black’ town of the European settlements, until at least the middle of theeighteenth century Armenians provided a major source of strength for theEuropean presence in India. It should be remembered that the presence of the Europeans in the Asian waters opened up various possibilities and opportu-nities for expanding the existing networks of Asian trade. The English Companyexplicitly mentioned how by catering to their trade, Armenians themselveswould also profit.141 A more important element, so far as the intra-Asian tradewas concerned, was the private trade of the Europeans. The next section willfocus on the interaction of Armenians and Europeans in the field of commercein India.

COMMERCIAL RELATIONSHIP WITH EUROPEANS: COMPETITION

OR CO-OPERATION?

Considering the relationship between Armenians and Europeans, it should bepointed out that the potential of conflict was very much present as theEuropeans in the Indian Ocean, while wooing the Armenians, were at the sametime aiming at the commerce which had so far been the mainstay of the liveli-hood of many Armenians.142 Ferrier noted the importance of the Armenians andother local merchants as suppliers of credit to the European Companies inPersia.143 Herzig, in his study of the Armenian merchants of New Julfa, hasmaintained that Armenian merchants’ relationship with their European counter-parts was ambivalent. On the one hand, Armenians were suspicious of the Europeansand often openly hostile towards them. On the other hand, they co-operated withthe European Companies. In the final analysis, ‘Julfa Armenians were morewilling to have financial dealing with foreigners than to enter into trading part-nership with them.’144 Baghdiantz Mccabe’s position is that it was the Compa-nies that solicited co-operation of the Armenians, not the other way round. As

the daughter of the wealthy Armenian merchant Eleazer Woskan, and Robert Henry Leembruggenof the Dutch East India Company. Hripsimah was first married to an old Armenian calledStephen Agabob. Following the death of the latter she was remarried to Leembruggen. SeeM. J. Seth, Armenians in India: 263-66.

141 See Armenian Merchants, no. 245 for the Company’s arguments in connection with thetrade in Persia.

142 The tension of the Europeans could be noted in their account of Armenians. See note2 above; also see documents 5, 23, 79, 107 and passim in Armenian Merchants . . .

143 See his ‘The Armenians and the East India Company in Persia in the seventeenth andearly eighteenth centuries’, The Economic History Review, 2nd series, 26 (1973): 38-62.

144 E. M. Herzig, The Armenian Merchants of New Julfa, Isfahan: 203-6, 212.




the trade carried on by the European Companies was no match for that of theArmenians, East India Companies were no competitors of the Armenians, andconsequently, Armenians did not have to enter into any trading partnership withthem.145 Bekius has shown, on the other hand, that Armenians both competedand co-operated with Europeans.146

In India, as we have seen, Armenians intermarried with western Europeansand flocked to the European towns.147 What was the role of the Armenians inthe networks of European trade in the Indian Ocean? The capital that the Arme-nians possessed seems to have gone a long way to rid European trade of itswant of ready money in Persia and Mughal India. Kolff and Van Santen havepointed to the greater relevance of the marriages between Armenians and Europeansin this respect. That so many servants of the Dutch East India Company—muchmore than their English counterparts—got married to Armenian women, was, intheir opinion, an attempt to get access to the credit and extensive network oftrade of the Armenian merchants.148 Marriage relationships often went hand inhand with business interests. It was noted that the married servants of the DutchCompany bought textiles at a low cost and sold the same to the Company at ahigher price through middlemen.149

This however, does not imply that it was only the Europeans who neededArmenians, and not the other way round. It is true that Armenians were alreadyestablished in the trade of the Indian Ocean. Many of them possessed their ownshipping.150 Yet, starting from the procurement of goods at the centres of pro-duction, transporting them to the port of embarkation, getting them ready forshipping, and reaching the ultimate destination, the ‘market’ where the goodswere disposed at a reasonable profit, was a long drawn and extremely intricateprocess. In his study of Indonesian trade and society, Van Leur noted that inthe primarily agricultural societies of Asia, agricultural surplus was extracted bythe state. The trade that was carried on here was small-scale and in luxurygoods, by merchants whom he termed peddlers.151 Steensgaard, who studied the

145 I. Baghdiantz Mccabe, Shah’s silk: 327-47.146 R. Bekius, ‘Armenian merchants in the textile trade.’147 Armenian Merchants enumerates 114 cases where Armenians served the English East

India Company in different capacities between 1617 and 1708/09. index 3, 283-84.148 De Geschriften: 21-22.149 Ibid.150 It was part of the policy of the English East India Company to employ small vessels

owned by Armenians for coasting trade, Early Annals of the English in Bengal vol. 3: 141.151 J. C. Van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian social and economic

history (The Hague: Van Hoeve, 1955): 133. Van Leur’s thesis has been criticised by many

JESHO_665Bhaswati_277-322 5/23/05 4:28 PM 6

caravan trade of the Middle East, upheld Van Leur’s characterization of Asiantrade by characterizing Asian merchants as peddlers and the markets as ped-dlers’ markets.152 Due to limited production, supply in the peddlers’ market waslimited and could not be adjusted to the fluctuation in demand. To this wasadded the hazards in the transportation of the commodities from the centres ofproduction to the ports of shipment.153 Not only was overland transport slow; itwas exposed to the dangers of the road. Hence the payment of protection costto the local rulers of all the territories through which the caravans passed. Whileall this pushed up the cost of transport, delay in reaching the port might meanmissing a sailing season. As markets were non-transparent and informationincomplete, prices fluctuated making trading operation extremely insecure.154

Analysing the modus operandi of the merchants in early modern India, ChrisBayly noted that when operating in a market that was intransparent, and whensupply and demand were unpredictable, a merchant often divided his invest-ments among various partners and pursuits with a view to spreading the risk andsharing the profit. While many of the Armenian merchants trading on behalf ofa principal were peddlers,155 merchants like Zachary Avetik, Khoja CatchickKhojamal, Khoja Minas,156 Khoja Petrus, and many others like them seem tohave been like those merchants termed by Bayly as ‘port-folio capitalists.’157 In

historians. See e. g., M. A. P. Meilink Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence in theIndonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962);K. N. Chaudhuri, The Trading World of Asia and the East India Company, 1660-1670 (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 136-37, 138-39.

152 N. Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution: 22-31.153 The cost of transporting cloth from Agra to Surat, including the customs duties, could

amount to 40 per cent of the cost price. See R. J. Barendse, The Arabian Seas, 1640-1700(Leiden: Centre for Non-Western Studies, 1998), 135.

154 Even a very wealthy merchant like Abdul Ghafur of Surat at the beginning of the eight-eenth century was also not free from such insecurity, a reason that inspired Ashin Das Guptato characterise that merchant prince as peddler. See his Indian Merchants and the decline ofSurat, introduction.

155 See e.g. Calcutta High Court, O.W. no. 4926. The merchant Abraham Isaac who passedaway in Calcutta on August 18, 1796 had a credit of little over Rs. 1,512. It is possible thathe started as an agent of Khoja Petrus Aratoon who was paid Rs. 200 toward the dischargeof a bond. The cost of the other transactions made by Isaac varied from Rs. 2 to Rs. 48.

156 See below.157 C. A. Bayly, ‘Indian merchants in a Traditional setting: Varanasi 1780-1830’, in C. A.

Dewey and A. G. Hopkins ed., The Imperial Impact: Studies in the Economic History of Indiaand Africa (London: Athlone Press for the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 1978): 186;also S. Subrahmanyam, The Political Economy of Commerce in Southern India, c. 1550-1650(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993): 299-300, 327-36; also S. Subrahmanyam and C. A. Bayly, ‘Portfolio capitalists and political economy in early modern India’, in S. Subrahmanyam ed. Merchants, Markets and Trade in Early Modern India, 1770-1870: 242-65.




spite of all the elements of tension and conflict involved, Armenians, like manyother groups of Asian merchants, co-operated with Europeans because the pres-ence of the latter provided Asian merchants with further opportunities of spread-ing the risks.158 This being said, it should be added that Armenian merchantsappear to have acted in different capacities and were dexterous at keeping theaccounts separate. From the reading of their testaments it would appear that thenetwork based on extended kinship was trusted so far as investment in theirown trade was concerned. The actual carrying out of the trade, however, waspart of a broader framework and it is here that the Armenian merchants co-operated with Europeans in numerous other accounts by lending money, actingas agents or suppliers, freighting their ships, sailing as nakhuda on boardEuropean ships, and providing cover when necessary. During 1693-94, follow-ing a ban on the trade of the Europeans, De Keijser, the Dutch director at Surat, bought 200,000 pounds of indigo and 30,000 pieces of chadar Dariabadiunder the cover of Aga Piri.159 Such cover was indispensable so far as trade toManila was concerned. Though wills and testaments do not throw much lighton this aspect—except when an unrecovered due was involved—, traces of suchco-operation are to be found in the archives of the European companies. Longbefore the agreement of 1688, Armenians freighted Asia-bound ships of theEnglish Company. The Dolphin, which left London on April 29, 1646 andreached Swally in November of the same year, carried Armenians.160 In theeighteenth century, Armenians were using Danish company ships for theirEurope trade. Their agents carried piece goods from Bengal and Coromandel toEurope and took back Dutch and English broad cloth to Tranquebar. This tradewas organized by Armenians in Holland, Khoja Baba Sultan, the correspondentof Aga Piri Kalantar of Madras in London, and two Armenians of Madras.161

The Companies, of course, encouraged the procedure as some empty space inthe Asia-bound ship was utilised in this way, and the Armenians had to payfreight charges. But it also ensured direct shipping of goods and persons andwas less hazardous than the route via the Levant and then Middle East. In theAsian waters the ships belonging to European Companies ensured security

158 The dichotomy in the relationship between the English at different levels of theCompany on the one hand and the Armenian merchants on the other has not escaped theattention of Baladouni in the introduction to Armenian Merchants . . . XXXII-XXXIII.

159 N.A., De Keijser and the Council at Surat to the Directors, 11 December 1694 (copy)VOC 1548, f.656.

160 See English Factories in India, vol. 8 (1646-1650): 86 and vol. 11 (1661-1664): 328;also Armenian Merchants . . . documents 62, 65, 67, 68, 71 for similar evidence.

161 RFSG, Despatches to England, vol. 3 (1711-14): 18. It is possible that Khoja Zachary,mentioned above, was one of the Madras Armenians involved in this trade.


against pirates and other dangers at sea.162 Especially in the seventeenth centuryboth the Dutch and English Companies often chartered whole ships to local merchants for voyages to the Persian Gulf. The Sulleiman, belonging to theArmenian Khoja Minas of Surat, was hired by the French (in huur bij deFransen). In Basra, Muslim merchants freighted their money, and goods andsailed on board the same ship for Surat.163 The Armenians, with their contactsin India, took the responsibility for collecting the piece goods and other com-modities and loading them on the company’s ships.164 Khoja Minas, who ownedat least five ships himself, freighted English company ships.165 The George thatleft Surat for Gombroon in December 1669, was permitted to carry any horsethat would be shipped by the agent of Khoja Minas.166 Minas had purchasedtwo ships from the English who again rented the ships and sent them toPersia.167 While soliciting the ‘favour and assistance’ of Khoja Israel Sarhad, the leading Armenian merchant in Bengal, in obtaining a good freight of finepiece goods in Bengal for the Sedgewick he was planning to send to Persia inSeptember 1700, Thomas Pitt referred to his acquaintance with Sarhad and hisuncle Khoja Panous Kalantar in London.168 In December 1702 Sarhad offeredthe English company Rs. 38,000 for freighting the Colchester for a voyage toGombroon and Basra.169 The same year the council of Fort St. George let outthe Phoenix to an Armenian for a voyage to Persia via Bengal.170 The Frenchship Pontchartreijn renamed Queen Louise carried freightgoods worth Rs.300,000 belonging to Armenian merchants.171 All the three ships that arrived in

162 Armenian Merchants, document 209.163 N.A. Dag Register, Surat, 29 August, 1685, VOC 1409, ff.1616-1617.164 Armenian Merchants, document 257. The English Company servants in Bengal stated

that Armenians bought textiles 10 to 20 per cent cheaper than them. R.F.S.G., Despatches toEngland, v.1, (1694-96): 35.

165 R. Maloni, European Merchant Capital and the Indian Economy: a Historical Recon-struction based on Surat Factory Records, 1630-1638 (Delhi: Manohar, 1992), 367-69.

166 English Factories in India, vol. 13 (1668-69): 204.167 N.A., Surat-Batavia, 4 March, 1268, VOC 1264, ff.1275-87.168 C. R. Wilson, Early Annals of the English in Bengal, 1: 369-71.169 S. Chaudhuri, ‘Bengal merchants and commercial organisation in the second half of the

seventeenth century’, Bengal Past and Present, 90 (1971): 182-216. For Armenian merchantsfreighting Dutch company ships on the Surat—Bandar Abbas run see R. J. Barendse, TheArabian Seas . . . 159-60.

170 RFSG, Despatches to England, vol. 2 1701/02—1710/11, 2. Compare: ‘. . . It isexpected that the Armenians will freight the Little London for Persia’, ibid. September 12 and October 9, 1706: 52-53.

171 This was in 1704. The ship could not, however, sail to Persia as it hit the shore near Point Palmyras and had to unload the goods at Tranquebar. Generale Missiven, vol. 6,ed. W. Ph. Coolhaas, (1698-1713): 271, 336.




Tranquebar from Denmark in 1709 were to be freighted by the Armenians toPersia.172 Again, in 1737 Armenian merchants of Madras freighted the Galatea,under Captain Mylne to Kung and Bushire.173 Similarly, Armenian merchantstaking passage on board European ships in Asia was common.174 In the wakeof troubles in Persia in the early eighteenth century, the agent of the English atthat place proposed that the subjects of the king of Persia and their effects atFort St. George be seized. The Council of Fort St. George maintained that sucha step would put a stop to the freighting of the Company’s ships that year anddrive away all Armenians from their settlements.175

The other routes where Armenian and European interests were intertwinedwere the routes to Southeast Asia, Manila and China. When the Dutch EastIndia Company decided to close their factory at Pegu, one Portuguese and oneArmenian were entrusted with the task of collecting the outstanding debts of theCompany amounting to more than f.30,000.176 Researches of G. B. Souza havepointed to the involvement of Armenians in the commerce carried on by thePortuguese of Macao to Manila and India.177 Using European bottoms for con-signing goods to factors, mostly a relative or a member of the community set-tled at ports like Mergui, Pegu and Manila seems to have been common.178

Throughout the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries Armenians assistedEuropeans in their investment in India. At least till the middle of the eighteenthcentury European merchants needed Asian merchants, including Armenians. Itwas a relationship of accepting each other for mutual profit.

ARMENIANS AS EMISSARIES

Equally, if not more important aspect of Armenian-European relationship wasthe role of the Armenians as emissaries of especially the English to theMughals. Sending emissaries to the head of a state is a practice common sinceancient times. In the early modern period, the trading companies sent embassies

172 Ibid.: 689.173 H. Furber, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800 (Minneapolis, Minn.: University

of Minnesota Press, 1976): 285.174 English Factories in India, vol. 6: 106.175 RFSG, Despatches to England, vol. 3: 56.176 Generale Missiven, vol. 4 (1675-1685): 446.177 ‘Cinnamon, silver and opium: Foreign shipping and trading activities at Batavia, 1684-

1792,’ unpublished paper presented to the 11th Annual Conference of the World HistoryAssociation, Seoul, Korea, August 15-18, 2002.

178 In 1712 the St. Juan that left Madras for Manila carried goods freighted by Armenianand Indian merchants, RFSG, Despatches to England, vol. 3: 56.


to heads of various countries for trading privileges. The embassy of Sir ThomasRoe to the court of Jahangir is a well known case. It was a period when manyattributes of Persian culture were visibly adopted by the courts in countries inSouth and Southeast Asia.179 Familiarity with Persian offered the Armenianseasy access to the Mughal court and made them extremely suitable as emis-saries. We have noted above that Emperor Akbar had employed an Armenianas his interpreter. When the king of Ethiopia sent an embassy to the Mughalemperor, he appointed Khoja Murad, an Armenian, to head the delegation.180 SirWilliam Norris, on his embassy to Aurangzeb, had the advantage of gaininginformation about the court (through his accessory Pedro Pereira) from an Armenianwho had been to the Emperor’s camp twice and had lived there some time inattendance on the Dutch envoy.181 In the late 1690s, the English companywanted to send a delegation to Zabardast Khan, General of the Mughal’s forceswho was suppressing the revolt of Sobha Singh in Bengal. In order to securethe rights of the company against the activities of the interlopers, the Englishcompany approached Khoja Israel Sarhad, the nephew of Khoja Panous, whowas sent to the camp of Zabardast Khan as the ‘Political Agent’ of the English.Sarhad procured a parwana from the general for the governors of Hugli andBalasore to prevent the interlopers from taking part in the trade of Bengal.182 Inspite of that, interlopers also were able to secure some trading favours for them-selves from the same general. At this the English decided to send another del-egation, also headed by Khoja Sarhad, who was accompanied by Mr. Walsh. Itwas this delegation that secured for the English the right to farm the three town-ships of Sutanuti, Govindpur and Calcutta in Bengal in 1698 for the sum of Rs.16,000.183 At the camp, Sarhad was able to win the friendship of the youngprince Farrukhsiyar. On September 22, 1698 the Sutanuti council noted that Mr. Walsh and Khoja Sarhad went back from the camp having ‘finished allbusiness to our greatest satisfaction.’184 They had promised the young princethree small pieces of brass cannon.185

179 S. Subrahmanyam, ‘Persianization and Mercantilism: two themes in the Bay of BengalHistory, 1400-1700’, in Prakash and Lombard eds., Commerce and Culture. . . .

180 E. J. Van Donzel, Foreign Relations of Ethiopia, 1642-1700: documents related to thejourneys of Khodja Murad (Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut, 1979).I am greatful to Dirk Kolff for drawing my attention to this work.

181 H. Das, The Norris Embassy to Aurangzeb, (1699-1702) (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1959):211-12.

182 C. R. Wilson, ed., Old Fort William in Bengal. A Selection of Official Documents deal-ing with its History. Indian Records Series, 2 vols. (London, 1906) vol. 1: 25-27.

183 Ibid., 36-38.184 Ibid.185 Ibid.




Khoja Sarhad, who was engaged in sea-borne trade, and acted as vakil oragent of (his cousin) Aga Piri Kalantar of Fort St. George, seems to have beenless successful in trade and was indebted to Aga Piri for a considerable sum.Unable to recover his dues, Aga Piri appealed to the English in Bengal to obligeKhoja Sarhad to adjust his accounts.186 This debt was not recovered as late as1709.187 The next we hear of Khoja Sarhad is in 1713 when the Englishintended to send a deputation to Farrukhsiyar, now Emperor at Delhi, for therenewal of their privilege of trading free of duties in return for a lump sum pay-ment of Rs. 3,000.188 At the meeting held on January 27, 1714 the council notedthe reasons for appointing Khoja Sarhad on the mission to the court of theGreat Mughal. By his prudent conduct, Sarhad had been able to procure thegrant of Calcutta for the English. Secondly, Sarhad knew the Emperor person-ally who would be favourably disposed to him as the latter had presented theEmperor with diverse toys in his youth. More importantly,

It is absolutely necessary that some person who is perfect master of the Persian lan-guage and understands our affairs very well, and what may be useful for us, be sent,and we know no man so qualified in both these respects as Cojah Surhaud. He is there-fore, the fittest man we can send.

The council apprehended that sending Sarhad as vakil, and inferior to theEnglishmen in the embassy would draw the Emperor’s attention to the Arme-nian. Therefore, on June 5, 1714, the Calcutta council unanimously agreed that

Cojah Surhaud, whose interest &c. at Court has already had the good effect of procur-ing us the Hasbull-Hukum and several other useful orders from Court be sent to assistin suing for the King’s Phirmaund, and that he sit and vote in the Council along withthe three English gentlemen . . .

Consequently, Mr. John Surmon was appointed the first, Khoja Sarhad sec-ond and Mr. John Pratt third in the embassy to Farrukhsiyar. Sarhad was to tryto confirm all the privileges that the English enjoyed in the Mughal’s domin-ions to date in a new farman. He was to see that the boundary of the Englishterritory would be extended towards the south so as to include Kidderpore andthe shore on the other side of the river in Howrah. He was also obliged to try

186 RFSG, Despatches to England, vol. 2: 67.187 Ibid.188 The following information on the Surmon Embassy (including the quotations) is based

on Early Annals of the English in Bengal, vol. 2: 157-58. The Dutch referred to him as the ‘notorious Armenian bankrupt’ (berugten Armeensch banquerottier), Generale Missiven,vol. 7 (1713-1725): 106.


to obtain the island of Diu off Masulipatnam for the council of Fort St. George.A reward of Rs. 50,000 would be given to Sarhad if he was successful in allthese efforts. He would not get anything if he failed. Secondly, Sarhad was toobtain for the English the privilege to trade free of customs at Surat for whichhe would get another Rs. 50,000. Also in this case he was not to receive any-thing if he was not successful. But in any case Sarhad was to try to get the cus-toms duty paid by the English at Surat reduced to 2.5 percent. Mr. EdwardStephenson was appointed secretary and accountant to the negotiation with theresponsibility to take down the minutes of consultation. Dr. William Hamilton,the company’s surgeon, cured Farrukhsiyar from a malignant distemper he hadbeen suffering from. The farman that Farrukhsiyar granted the English in 1717was more respected than the old one and made them the most favoured nationin Bengal. The following decades saw the growth of Calcutta, its fleet and thecountry trade of the British.189 Even before the formation of the embassy, theFort William Council, however, was not unanimous about the inclusion ofKhoja Sarhad in it. It was apprehended that Sarhad, if not well looked after,would play tricks and enrich himself at the cost of the Company.190 His attitudeduring the journey evoked suspicion and irritation among the English.191 Thesuccess of the Surman Embassy was ascribed to the services of Dr. Hamilton.192

The service of the Armenians was, however, indispensable in all politicalnegotiations of the English in India in the eighteenth century. The council ofFort St. George often consulted Aga Piri, among others, for their negotiationwith the governor of Golconda.193 When it was considered necessary to sendpresents to the nawab of Arcot, Khoja Petrus and Hodjee Addy were entrusted

189 M. J. Seth quoted from William Bolts to show that contemporary Englishmen knew the contribution Sarhad made in getting the farman renewed in 1717. See Armenians in India . . . 427. Compare the following statement made by C. R. Wilson about KhojaSarhad: ‘He is said to have been personally known to Prince Farrukhsiyar, the son of PrinceAzîmush-shân, from whom he procured permission to rent the three townships. He afterwardsplayed a conspicuous, but not altogether creditable part in the Surman Embassy to Delhi inthe years 1715 to 1717’, Old Fort William: 25, n. 3.

190 Early Annals, vol. 2: 154-55; W. K. Firminger, Historical Introduction to the BengalPortion of the Fifth Report (Calcutta: Indian Studies Past & Present, 1962): 87.

191 After the sanad from the diwan at Murshidabad was obtained, Sarhad had left for Patnawhen the rest of the embassy was still in Murshidabad; when the embassy left Delhi afterthe imperial firman had been obtained, Sarhad stayed on in Delhi. C. R. Wilson, EarlyAnnals, vol. 2: 193, 214, 281.

192 W. K. Firminger, Historical Introduction: 87.193 RFSG, Diary and Consultation Book, 1713: 4, 24, 56, 67, 70, 71.




with the task of procuring items suitable for the occasion.194 Khoja PetrusAratoon, popularly known as the Armenian Petrus of Clive, was an Armenianmerchant-diplomat of Saidabad, a town in the silk producing region near thecourt at Murshidabad. He appeared on the scene after the siege of Calcutta bySirajuddaula in 1756. Together with a Jewish friend, he supplied provisions tothe English at Fulta for six months before the arrival of Robert Clive andAdmiral Watson from Madras. He was employed as confidential agent by Cliveto negotiate with Mir Jafar for overthrowing Siraj-uddaula. Petrus was neverrewarded for his services to the Company.195 He was employed again for nego-tiating with Mir Qasim for deposing Mir Jafar. But the English never com-pletely trusted Khoja Petrus who, in their eyes, was a spy of the nawab inCalcutta. This was due to the fact that Khoja Gregory, a brother of Petrus, wasthe commander-in-chief of the army of Mir Qasim. When war broke outbetween the English and Mir Qasim in 1763, Petrus was kept as a hostage byMajor Adams in his camp lest Ellis, the chief of Patna, and English troops suf-fer at the hands of his brother.196 A few members of the council in Calcuttawanted to have Petrus ousted from the town on the grounds that he was a spyof the nawab. Vansittart, president of the council of Fort William, pointed outthat it would be arbitrary to order a merchant of long standing out of the set-tlement. Petrus was forbidden to act as vakil to the nawab in future.197

The role of Khoja Wajid during the Plassey Conspiracy marked the culmi-nation of the Armenian-European relationship prior to the establishment of colo-nial rule in India. It is well known that Plassey witnessed how the vested inter-ests of the officials of the court, indigenous merchants, bankers and foreigntrading companies combined to create a rupture that changed the course of thehistory of India. According to Orme, Wajid was ‘the principal merchant of theprovince’ of Bengal.198 He was settled in Hugli and had transactions with theFrench and the Dutch through lodges at both Chandernagore and Chinsura. His

194 Ibid. 1743: 55.195 M. J. Seth, Armenians in India: 328-32.196 H. Vansittart, A Narrative of the Transactions in Bengal 1760-1764, ed. by A. C.

Banerjee and B. K. Ghosh (Kolkata: K. P. Bagchi, 1976) henceforth Narrative, passim; S. C. Hill, Bengal in 1756-1757, passim. M. J. Seth, The Armenians in India . . . for KhojaPetrus; for a recent biography of Khoja Gregory see B. Bhattacharya, “Between Fact andFiction: Khoja Gregory alias Gurguin Khan, the ‘evil genius’ of Mir Qasim”, in J. J. L.Gommans and O. Prakash eds. Circumambulations in South Asian History: essays in honourof Dirk H. A. Kolff (Leiden: Brill, 2003): 133-58.

197 James Long, Selections from Unpublished Records: 421, document 647 and note.198 Robert Orme, Military Transactions, vol. 2: 58.


step brother Jubbo lived in Chinsura.199 Through his lodges at Patna and Surathe was engaged in inland trade. Wajid owned five ships and had extensive over-seas trade with Mocha and Basra. In 1756, Collet and Watts described KhojaWajid as the ‘greatest merchant in Bengal’ having ‘great influence with theNabab.’200 He had close contact with the Jagat Seths and other merchants ofPatna.201 He had large stakes in the salt trade of Bengal and the opium trade ofBihar. Through his contacts in the nawab’s darbar, he was able to secure thesalt farm in 1752 and the saltpetre farm in 1753. During the few years beforethe battle of Plassey, Wajid enjoyed the monopoly of saltpetre and salt. As theleader of the Asian merchants, he mediated in conflicts between Asian and Europeanmerchants. On behalf of the nawab, he maintained diplomatic negotiations withthe Danish, Dutch, English and French Companies. He represented the Frenchin the nawab’s darbar and Monsieur Law, the chief of the French factory atKashimbazar who kept a watchful eye on the affairs of the court in Murshi-dabad, described him as a ‘confidential agent with the Europeans.’202 It appearsfrom the letters Siraj wrote to Wajid that the nawab confided in the latter,through whom he negotiated with the Europeans.203 When the English plunderedHugli during the dispute with Siraj, Wajid was in favour of having the disputesettled through the mediation of the French. But as war with the French wasimminent, Clive did not agree to the proposal and wanted Wajid and the bankerfinancier Jagat Seth to settle the dispute.204 As the English attacked Chan-dernagore, Wajid wanted the nawab to assist the French with his troops andarranged a meeting between Law and the nawab.205 For a long time Wajidwanted to counterbalance the English with the French in the nawab’s court. Butthe growing political and military power of the English manifested in theiractivity in Coromandel—as pointed out by Clive in his letter to Wajid—and therecapture of Calcutta and the plunder of Hugli seems to have persuaded Wajidnot to alienate the English and to join in the conspiracy against the nawab. He

199 S. C. Hill, Bengal in 1756-57, vol. 2, no. 167.200 S. Chaudhuri, ‘Merchants, companies and rulers: Bengal in the Eighteenth Century’, in

Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, v. XXXI, 93-94.201 K. Chatterjee, Merchants, politics and society in early modern India: Bihar: 1733-1820:

72.202 S. C. Hill, Bengal in 1756-57, vol. 3, Appendix III, translation of the first part of a

memoir by Monsieur Jean Law, chief of the French factory at Kashimbazar: 187.203 S. C. Hill, Bengal in 1756-57, vol. 1: 3-5.204 Letter from Khoja Wajid to Clive, in S. C. Hill, Bengal in 1756-57, vol. 2: 110 (no.

166) and Clive’s letter to Khoja Wajid, ibid. 125-6 (no. 175).205 Nawabi troops, were, however, not sent.




sent his chief gumastah, Shibbabu, to Clive who informed Pigot in Madras thathe was conspiring with powerful persons including Jagat Seth and KhojaWajid.206 It was Wajid who told Watts that he had seen the nawab writing tothe French commander Bussy asking him to proceed for Bengal. He againinformed the English that Bussy had written the nawab that he would not beable to go to Bengal and that on receiving this news, the nawab had asked Lawto leave Patna for Murshidabad. Arriving at Bhagalpur, Law informed Wajidthat he was on his way to Murshidabad. This letter also was handed over to theEnglish by Wajid. Within two years after the battle of Plassey (1757) thatyielded the English political power in Bengal, Wajid was imprisoned on the groundsthat he was conspiring with the Dutch and the French.

CONCLUSION

This paper has sought to examine the relationship between Armenian mer-chants and the increasing European trade that paved the way for creating thecolonial empire in India. In doing so, it has been necessary first to understandhow the Armenian merchants organized their trade. Mobility and flexibility hadalways been characteristics of this ethno-religious network, and these character-istics reached their height in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thedeportation of a large number of Armenians to Persia by Shah Abbas in thebeginning of the seventeenth century was instrumental in a major eastwardsurge of Armenians. It coincided with the arrival of the European Companies inAsia when Armenians, as neutral Christians, could make use of the increas-ing European—in addition to Asian—shipping in the Indian Ocean region.Familiarity of the Armenians with the trading world of Asia added a differentdimension to their relationship with Europeans—the English in particular—andhelped the Armenians in further extending their activities. Unlike the modernjoint-stock European Companies, Armenians were part of a pre-modern struc-ture of trade operating on the basis of extended family and other kinship net-works. Both the structures co-existed with each other, but the parameters of thetwo structures were totally different. Whereas the Companies drew their strengthfrom the state that backed them, private networks of trade maintained by mem-bers of the community remained the source of strength of the Armenians. Onecannot compare the two structures; one can only emphasize their differences.

206 Letter from Clive to Pigot, Bengal in 1756-57, 2: 368-69, (no. 371).


The second issue evolved around the relationship between the Armenians andEuropeans. The logic of the growth and development of European trade in Asiawas that while from the sixteenth century onwards there had been a section ofAsian rulers and merchants who opposed the Europeans, there were placeswhere they received co-operation, exemplified in the classic cases of Calicut andCochin. The different forms of co-operation between the Asians and theEuropeans in the Asian waters in the early modern period led the American his-torian Holden Furber to term this period as ‘the age of partnership.’207 Writingextensively on the Armenians in India M. J. Seth showed in the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries how the English owed their position in India tothe Armenians. He called Khoja Sarhad Israeli, the merchant who negotiatedwith the nawab of Bengal and then with the Mughal Emperor to obtain territo-ries and privileges that really laid the foundation of British empire in India, asthe ‘political stepping stone’ of the English. Baghdiantz Mccabe, in her workon the Armenians in Persia, has dismissed the notion of co-operation betweenArmenians and Europeans stating that co-operation was exception and not aregular practice. According to her, the position of Seth was politically moti-vated, guided by the idea to attract the attention of the Imperial crown to thestate of the Armenians in India and elsewhere.

Our study of the last wills and testaments of Armenian merchants, Companydocuments and contemporary travel accounts confirms the position of Seth.Armenians in India, and elsewhere in Asia, formed part of the existing struc-ture of trade. In that structure, as pointed out by Siraj-uddaula, the nawab ofBengal, merchants of foreign origin traded side by side with indigenous mer-chants. When the Mughals, and their representatives in different parts of India,welcomed the presence of Europeans, it was in this light. This paper has triedto show that Armenian support for European endeavour went far beyond thehorizons of mere trading activities. Indeed, as M. J. Seth noticed, Khoja Sarhadwas the political stepping stone for the English in India. But Sarhad himself washardly aware of the future implications of the benefits he was securing for theEnglish. It was only gradually that leading Armenians and indigenous mer-chants would comprehend the difference between the prevalent structure and thenew overpowering structure that was being imposed on them. Khoja Wajid, the

207 H. Furber, ‘Asia and the West as partners before ‘Empire’ and After’, Journal of AsianStudies, v. XXVIII, 1969 (4), 711-21; this was the theme of the collection of essays in B. B.Kling and M. N. Pearson ed., The Age of Partnership: Europeans in Asia before Dominion(Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1979). For further discussion on this issue, see S. Subrahmanyam, Political Economy of Commerce.




merchant prince of Bengal sounds almost helpless when we hear him chargingthe English during the course of a legal case between the English and the lead-ing merchants Amirchand-Deepchand in 1744:

you have overset the custom of merchants.208

But by that time the die had already been cast. Individual merchants,Armenians and Indians alike, were not able to influence the larger economicdecisions and acting in self interest, they assisted Europeans. When matterscame to a head in the middle of the eighteenth century, they had reached apoint of no return.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alam, Muzaffar, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal India: Awadh and the Punjab 1707-48,(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986).

Anonymous, ‘Surat—its past and present’ Calcutta Review, (1848) 9, January-June.Arasaratnam, S., Merchants, Companies and Commerce on the Coromandel Coast, 1650-

1740, Delhi, 1986.Babur-Nama: (Memoirs of Babur) tr. from the original Turkish text by Annette Susannah

Beveridge, (rep. Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint, 1970): 202.Baghdiantz Mccabe, Ina, Shah’s Silk for Europe’s Silver: the Eurasian Trade of the Julfa

Armenians in Safavid Iran and India (1530-1750) Atlanta: Scholars Press (University ofPennsylvania Armenian Texts and Studies no. 15) 1999.

Baibourtian, V., International Trade and the Armenian Merchants in the Seventeenth Century,(Delhi: Sterling Publishers, 2004).

Baladouni, Vahe, and Margaret Makepeace, ed. Armenian merchants of the seventeenth andearly eighteenth centuries: English East India Company sources, (Philadelphia: AmericanPhilosophical Society, 1998).

Barendse, R. J., The Arabian Seas, 1640-1700, (Leiden: Centre for Non-Western Studies,1998).

Bayly, C. A., ‘Indian merchants in a ‘Traditional setting’: Varanasi 1780-1830’, in C. A.Dewey, C. J. and A. G. Hopkins ed., The Imperial Impact: Studies in the EconomicHistory of India and Africa (Commonwealth Papers/University of London, Institute ofCommonwealth Studies no. 21), London: Athlone Press for the Institute of CommonwealthStudies, 1978.

Bekius, René, ‘Armenian merchants in the Textile Trade in the 17th and 18th centuries: aGlobal Enterprise’, (unpublished) paper presented at the Conference ‘Carpets and textilesin the Iranian World, 1400-1700’, organised by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and theIran Heritage Foundation, 30-31 August, 2003, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Bhattacharya, B., ‘The Chulia merchants of southern Coromandel in the eighteenth century:a case for continuity’, in Commerce and culture in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1800, ed. OmPrakash and D. Lombard, (Delhi: Manohar, 1999): 285-305.

——, ‘Between Fact and Fiction: Khoja Gregory alias Gurgin Khan, the ‘evil genius’ of MirQasim, in Jos Gommans and Om Prakash ed., Circumambulations in South Asian History:Essays in honour of Dirk H. A. Kolff, Brill’s Indological Library, no. 19 (Leiden: Brill,2003), 133-58.

208 K. Chatterjee, Merchants, Politics and Society: 77.


Bhattacharyya, S., The East India Company and the Economy of Bengal (from 1704 to 1740),(Calcutta: Graphic Art Press, 1969).

Blussé van Oud-Alblas, L., Strange Company: Chinese Settlers, Mestizo Women and theDutch in VOC Batavia, Leiden, Verhandeling KITLV, No. 122, 1986.

Braudel, F., Civilization and Capitalism, vol. 2, The Wheels of Commerce, Trans. S.Reynolds, (London: Harper & Row, 1982): 150.

Van den Broecke, Pieter. Pieter van den Broecke in Azië, 2 vols. ed. W. Ph. Coolhaas, (’s Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962-63).

Chatterji, K., Merchants, politics and society in early modern India: Bihar: 1733-1820(Leiden: Brill, 2003).

Chaudhuri, K. N., The English East India Company: the study of an early Joint-StockCompany, 1600-1640, London: Cass, 1965.

——, The trading world of Asia and the East India Company, 1660-1670, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1978

——, ‘The Engish East India Company in the 17th and 18th centuries: a pre-modern Multi-national Organization’ in Blussé, L. and F. S. Gaastra ed. Companies and Trade: Essayson Overseas trading Companies during the Ancien Régime, (Leiden: Leiden UniversityPress, 1981).

Chaudhury, S., ‘Bengal merchants and commercial organisation in the second half of the seventeenth century’, Bengal Past and Present, 90 (1971): 182-216.

——, ‘Khwaja Wazid in Bengal Trade and Politics’, The Indian Historical Review, (July1989-Jan. 1990), v. XVI, no. 1-2: 137-48.

——, ‘Merchants, companies and rulers: Bengal in the Eighteenth Century’, in Journal of theEconomic and Social History of the Orient, v. XXXI, 93-94.

Dale, S. F., Indian merchants and Eurasian trade, 1600-1750 (First Indian edition, 1994), 7-13.

Das, H., The Norris Embassy to Aurangzeb, (1699-1702), (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1959).Das Gupta, Ashin. Indian Merchants and the decline of Surat, c. 1700-1750, Wiesbaden,

1979.Deloche, Jean, Transport and Communications in India prior to Steam Locomotion, 2 vols.,

tr. From the French by James Walker, Delhi, 1993-94.Dodwell, H., ed., List of marriages registered in the Presidency of Fort St. George, 1680-

1800, (Madras: Madras Government Press, 1916).Van Donzel E. J., Foreign Relations of Ethiopia, 1642-1700: documents related to the jour-

neys of Khodja Murad (Istanbul: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut, 1979).Ferrier, R., ‘The agreement of the EIC with the Armenian Nation, Revue Etude Armeniennes,

(1970), N. S. VII, 427-43.Firminger, W. K., Historical Introduction to the Bengal Portion of the Fifth Report (Calcutta:

Indian Studies Past & Present, 1962.Floor, Willem, The Economy of Safavid Persia, (Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2000).Foster, W., ed. English Factories in India, 13 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906-27).Fryer, John, A New Account of East India and Persia, being nine years travels, 1672-1681,

edited with notes and an introd. by William Crooke, 3 vols. (London: the Hakluyt Society,1909-15).

Furber, H., “Asia and the West as partners before ‘Empire’ and after”, Journal of AsianStudies, v. XXVIII, 1969 (4), 711-21.

——, Rival Empires of Trade in the Orient, 1600-1800, (Minneapolis, Minn.: University ofMinnesota Press, 1976).

Generale Missiven van Gouverneurs-Generaal en Radan aan Heren XVII Veregnigde OostIndische Compagnie, Rijks geschiedkundige publicateën, (’s Gravenhage: MartinusNijhoff).

Grover, B. R., ‘An Integrated Pattern of Commercial Life in the Rural Society of North Indiaduring the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ in S. Subrahmanyam ed., Money and




Market in India, 1100-1700, Themes in Indian History Series, Delhi, 1994, 219-255(reprinted from Proceedings of Indian Historical Record Commission, XXXVII (1966).

Hanway, J., An Historical account of the British Trade over the Caspian Sea, 4 vols. London:1753.

Herzig, Edmund, The Armenian Merchants of New Julfa, Isfahan: a Study in Pre-ModernAsian Trade, D. Phil. Thesis, Oxford, 1991.

——, ‘The family firm in the commercial organisation of the Julfa Armenians’, in EtudesSafavides, ed. J. Calmard, (Paris Teheran: Institut Français de recherche en Iran, 1993),287-303.

——, ‘The deportation of the Armenians in 1604-1605 and Europe’s myth of Shah Abbas1,’ Pembroke papers 1, (1990), 59-71.

Hewsen, Robert H., Armenia: A Historical Atlas, (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,2001)

Hill, S. C., Bengal in 1756-57. A selection of public and private papers dealing with theaffairs of the British in Bengal during the reign of Siraj-uddaula ed. with notes and anhistorical introd. 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1905).

Hosten, H., S.J., ‘Jesuit letters and Allied Papers on Mogor, Tibet, Bengal and Burma. MirzaZ‚’l qarnain, a Christian Grandee of three Great Moghuls, with notes on Akbar’s Christianwife and the Indian Bourbons’, in Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal (1916), V, no.4:115-94.

Du Jarric, P., Akbar and the Jesuits. An account of the Jesuit Missions to the Court of Akbar,tr. with introduction and notes by C. H. Payne, (London: Routledge & Sons, 1926).

Khachikian, L., ‘The ledger of the Merchant Hovannes Joughayetsi’, Journal of the AsiaticSociety of Bengal, 8, no. 3, (1966): 153-86.

Kling, B. B. and M. N. Pearson ed., The Age of Partnership: Europeans in Asia beforeDominion, (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1979).

Kolff, D. H. A. and H. W. van Santen, ed., De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert overMughal Indië, 1627: Kroniek en Remonstrantie (’s Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979).

Lang, David Marshall, The Armenians: a people in exile, (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981).Van Leur, J. C., Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian social and economic history,

(The Hague: Van Hoeve, 1955).Levi, Scott C., The Indian diaspora in Central Asia and its trade, 1550-1900, (Leiden: Brill,

2002).Long, J., Selections from Unpublished Records of Government: for the years 1748 to 1767

inclusive. Relating mainly to the Social Condition of Bengal with a map of Calcutta in1784. Ed. M. Saha, (Calcutta: Mukhopadhyay, 1973).

Love, H. D., Vestiges of old Madras: 1640-1800: traced from the East India Company’srecords preserved at Fort St. George and the India Office and from other sources, 4 vols.(London: Murray, 1913).

Maclagan, E., The Jesuits and the Great Mogul (London: Burns Oates & Washbourne, 1932).Markovits, Claude, ‘The Tata paradox’, in Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia,

ed. Burton Stein and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, SOAS Studies on South Asia: Understand-ings and Perspectives Series, Delhi, 1999.

——, The global world of Indian merchants, 1750-1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara toPanama, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Cambridge Studies in IndianHistory and Society no. 6.

Matthee, R. P., The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600-1730, (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1999).

Meilink Roelofsz., M. A. P., Asian Trade and European Influence in the IndonesianArchipelago between 1500 and about 1630 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962).

Moraes, G. M., A History of Christianity in India: from Early Times to St. Francis Xavier,A.D. 52-1542, (Bombay: Manaktalas, 1964).


Mundadan, A. Mathias, History of Christianity in India, vol. 1: From the Beginning upto themiddle of the Sixteenth century (up to 1542), (Bangalore: Theological Publications inIndia, 1984): 407.

Mundy, Peter, The Travels of Peter Mundy, 1608-67 in Europe and Asia, 5 vols. (London:Hakluyt Society, 1907-36).

Nadjarian, H. M., Life story of Mr. A. M. Arathoon, (Calcutta, 1958).Nair, P. T., A Tercentenary History of Calcutta, vol. 1: Calcutta in the 17th Century

(Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1986).S. Neill, A History of Christianity in India, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1984-85).Orme, Robert, A History of the Military Transactions of the British nation in Indostan, 2 vols.

(London, 1775-77).Pires, Tome, The Suma Oriental, 2 vols. (London: the Hakluyt Society, 1944).Prakash, Om., Dutch Factories in India, 1627-1623, v. 1, (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal,

1984).Purchas: His Pilgrims (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1905-07).Ray, R. K., Polashir Shorojontro o Sekaler Somaj (The Conspiracy of Plassey and the

Contemporary Society) (Calcutta: Ananda Publishers, 1998).Russell, J., ‘Two Armenian graffities from Ziârat, Pakistan’, Revue Etude Armeninnes, (1988-

89), XVI, 471-75.Van Santen, H. W., De VOC in Gujarat en Hindustan 1620-1660, (Meppel, 1982).Seth, Mesrovb., Armenians in India: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day, (London, 1897).——, Armenians in India: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day; a Work of Original

Research, (Delhi: Oxford and IBH Publications, 1983).Sinha, P., Calcutta in Urban History, (Calcutta: Firma KLM, 1978).Souza, G. B., ‘Cinnamon, silver and opium: Foreign shipping and trading activities at

Batavia, 1684-1792’, unpublished paper presented to the 11th Annual Conference of theWorld History Association, Seoul, Korea, August 15-18, 2002.

Steensgaard, Niels, Asian Trade Revolution in the Seventeenth Century, (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1974).

——, ‘The Dutch East India Company as an institutional innovation’, in Dutch Capitalismand World Capitalism, ed. M. Aymard, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)235-57.

——, ‘The Companies as a specific institution in the history of European expansion’ inBlussé, L. and F. S. Gaastra ed. Companies and Trade: Essays on Overseas Trading Companiesduring the Ancien Régime, Comparative Studies in Overseas History, No. 3, (Leiden:Leiden University Press, 1981): 245-64.

Subrahmanyam, S., The Political Economy of Commerce, Southern India 1550-1650, (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

——, ‘Persianization and Mercantilism: two themes in Bay of Bengal history, 1400-1700’, inCommerce and culture in the Bay of Bengal, 1500-1800, ed. Om Prakash and D. Lombard,(Delhi: Manohar, 1999): pp. 47-85.

—— and C. A. Bayly, ‘Portfolio capitalists and political economy in early modern India’, inS. Subrahmanyam ed. Merchants, Markets and Trade in Early Modern India, 1770-1870:242-65.

Tabatabai, Ghulam Husain Khan. Seir ul Mutakherin, 2 vols. (Lahore, 1975).Tavernier’s Travels in India, Tr. from French by V. Ball, 2 vols. (London, 1889).Tuzuk I Jahangiri, tr. By Alexander Rogers, ed. By Henry Beveridge, 2 vols. (Delhi:

Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968).Della Valle, Pietro, The Travels of Pietro Della Valle in India. From the old English trans-

lation of 1664 by G. Havers, ed. With a life of the author, an introd. And notes by EdwardGrey. 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1892).




Vansittart, H., A Narrative of the Transactions in Bengal 1760-1764, ed. by A. C. Banerjeeand B. K. Ghosh, (Kolkata: K. P. Bagchi, 1976).

Wessels, C., Early Jesuit Travellers in Central Asia, 1603-1721, (The Hague:: MartinusNijhoff, 1924).

Wilson, C. R., ed. Old Fort William in Bengal. A Selection of Official Documents dealingwith its History. Indian Records Series, 2 vols. (London, 1906).

——, ed. Early Annals of the English in Bengal: being the Bengal Public Consultations forthe first half of the 18th century, 3 vols. (London: W. Thacker, 1895-1919).

Witsen, Nicolaes. Noord en Oost Tartarye, of te bondig ontwerp van eenige dier landen envolken, welke voormaels bekent zijn geweest. Beneffens verscheidene tot noch onbekende,en meest nooit voorheen beschreve Tartersche en nabuurige gewesten, landstreken, steden,rivieren, en plaetzen, in de Noorder en Oosterlyke gedeelten van Asia en Europa enz. 2vols. (Amsterdam: Halma, 1705).
