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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2016

EDMUND HERZIG
EDMUND HERZIG*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, United Kingdom Email: [email protected]
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Extract

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

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , January 2016 , pp. 44 - 51
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ‘One Asia, or Many? Reflections from Connected History’, p. 11, in this volume.

2 The global character of this network is well picked out in the title of a recent study: Aslanian, Sebouh, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2010)Google Scholar.

3 Steensgaard, Nils, The Asian Trade Revolution: The East India Companies and the Decline of the Caravan Trade(Chicago, Illinois: Chicago University Press, 1973)Google Scholar; Braudel, Fernand, Civilization and Capitalism 15th–18th Century, Vol. 2, The Wheels of Commerce, trans. Reynolds, S. (London: Fontana, 1982)Google Scholar; Curtin, Philip D., Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Edmund Herzig, ‘The Armenian Merchants of New Julfa, Isfahan: A Study in Pre-Modern Asian Trade’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1991.

4 See Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean, Chapters 3 and 4, for a discussion of the circuits of Armenian trade.

5 Subrahmanyam, ‘One Asia, or Many?’, p. 34.

6 Ibid., footnote 37.

7 Khachikian, Levon, ‘Le registre d’un marchand arménien en Perse, en Inde et au Tibet (1682–1693)’, Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 22e Année, No. 2 (Mar–Apr, 1967), pp. 231–278Google Scholar (pp. 265–266).

8 Aslanian, Sebouh, ‘Trade Diaspora versus Colonial State: The Armenian Merchants, the English East India Company and the High Court of Admiralty in London, 1748–1752’, Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies, Volume 13, No. 1 (Spring 2004), pp. 37–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Francesca Trivellato's work on the Jewish diaspora in the Mediterranean points the way for such research: The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and Cross-Cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009).

10 Better comparisons for Philippe de Zagly are to be found among the dramatis personae of Subrahmanyam, S., Three Ways To Be Alien: Travails and Encounters in the Early Modern World (Hanover, New Haven: University Press of New England, 2011)Google Scholar or perhaps in Davis, Natalie Zemon, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds (London: Faber, 2007)Google Scholar.

11 This account is based entirely on the article by Gulbenkian, Roberto, ‘Philippe de Zagly, marchand arménien de Julfa, et l’établissement du commerce Persan en Courlande en 1696’, Revue des Études Arméniennes, Vol. 7 (1970), pp. 361–399Google Scholar; reprinted in idem, Estudos Históricos, Vol. 1, Relações entre Portugal, Arménia e Médio Oriente (Lisbon: Academia Portuguesa da História, 1995), pp. 15–81.

12 Subrahmanyam, ‘One Asia or Many?’, p. 41.