Trade Diaspora versus Colonial State: Armenian Merchants, the English East India Company, and the High Court of Admiralty in London, 1748-1752

The Armenians in seventeenth and eighteenth century India did not always get a “good press” from European and Asian competitors and collaborators, being often disliked as the Jews were in Europe or as the Chinese were in Southeast Asia, for being allegedly grasping and greedy middlemen, or monopolists and engrossers. But as persecuted minorities in their Persian or Turkish-ruled homelands, and as emigrants bereft of the support of a strong colonial power, they inevitably developed techniques which enabled them to survive and sometimes to prosper in unpropitious circumstances.