o_19heefouak9i9v4do11ac41pi7a.pdf

DESPINA VLAMI
proved that network analysis was a much more appropriate methodology for an investigation
of the Greek merchants’ life and activity, demonstrating as it does a social
and business network expanding in a wide geographical area and relating individuals,
families and enterprises through business, family and social transactions 2 .
At this point the role of women emerged out of a need to unpick all aspects of the
Greeks’ personal, family and social life and verify their connection to business.
The earliest evidence concerning Greek women who had migrated and had been
established in Greek merchant communities abroad came out of an analytical interest
in demography and family organization. The elaboration of the data provided by
parish registers –kept in local Greek Orthodox churches– and additional information
from notarial and state archives, integrated women into the history of the Greek
merchant migration –it gave them a past 3 . The results of these analyses proved that
there was a significant correspondence of marriage behaviours and strategies of
family organization in Trieste, Livorno, London, Marseilles and Vienna, while the
high level of professional, social and ethnic endogamy that characterized Greek merchant
communities prompted an investigation of the women’s lives, social and economic
status and geographical origin 4 .
quiers, usuriers, et paysans; réseaux de credit et stratégies du capital en Grèce, 1780-1930, Paris 1988;
and G. B. Dertilis, ‘Entrepreneurs grecs: trois générations, 1770-1900’, in F. Angiolini & D. Roche
(eds), Cultures et formations négociantes dans l’Europe moderne, Paris 1995, pp. 111-30.
2 Network theory has provided an ample methodological framework in many studies of
Greek diaspora business, as in Gelina Harlaftis, ‘Εμπόριο και Ναυτιλία τον 19 ο αιώνα. Το
Επιχειρηματικό Δίκτυο των Ελλήνων της Διασποράς. Η ‘Χιώτικη Φάση’ 1830-1860’,
Μνήμων, 15 (1993), p. 69-127; Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou, ‘The Greek Merchant House of the
Russian Black Sea. A 19 th century Example of a Traders’ Coalition’, International Journal of
Maritime History, 10, 1 (1998), pp. 1-44; and Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou & Helen Louri, ‘Diaspora
Entrepreneurial Networks of the Black Sea and Greece, 1870-1917’, Journal of European
Economic History, 26 1 (1997), pp. 69-104. Also Olga Katsiardi-Hering, ‘Τα δίκτυα της ελληνικής
εμπορικής διακίνησης’, in Sp. J. Asdrachas et al., Ελληνική Οικονομική Ιστορία ΙΕ΄-ΙΘ΄
αιώνας, v. 1, Athens 2003, pp. 461-81; V. Kremmidas, Έμποροι και εμπορικά δίκτυα στα
χρόνια του Εικοσιένα (1820-1835). Κυκλαδίτες έμποροι και πλοιοκτήτες, Athens 1996;
Maria Α. Stassinopoulou & Maria Christina Chatziioanou (eds), Διασπορά-Δίκτυα-
Διαφωτισμός, [Τετράδια Εργασίας ΚΝΕ/ΕΙΕ 28], Athens 2005.
3 From an extensive literature on women migration, in particular with reference to the
Irish diaspora to the United States of America (eighteenth-nineteenth centuries), see D. H.
Akenson, ‘Women and the Irish Diaspora: the Great Unknown’, in The Irish Diaspora: a
primer, Belfast 1993, pp. 157-87 and M. Cohen, ‘The migration experience of female-headed
households: Gilford, Co. Down to Greenwich, New York 1880-1910’, in P. O’Sullivan (ed.)
Irish women and Irish migration, London 1995, pp. 130-45. For general issues concerning
methodology of research see M. Boyd, ‘Family and personal networks in international migration:
recent developments and new agents’, in R. Cohen (ed.) The Sociology of Migration, Cheltenham-Brookfiled
1996, pp. 296-330, and C. Jansen, ‘Some sociological aspects of migration’,
in J. A. Jackson (ed.) Migration, Cambridge 1969, pp. 60-73, 68.
4 Katsiardi-Hering, Η ελληνική παροικία, pp. 77-84, 123-32; D. Mangriotis, ‘Η δημογραφική ι-
στορία της ελληνικής εμπορικής παροικίας του Λονδίνου, 1837-1881’, Ιστορικά, 3, 6 (1986), pp.
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