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ANTONELLA VIOLA
size, shipping companies, and individual merchants coming from different places
and engaged in various activities. Many of these companies were established by
Anglo-Greek merchants; other Greek companies were originally from the Ottoman
Empire and were closely connected to its economic and trading circuits; others,
mostly shipping companies, were from Greece.
The arrival of Greek trading companies in nineteenth-century India was preceded,
approximately a century before, by the settlement of several merchants in
north-eastern India, especially in Calcutta, Dhaka, Kurnoul, Meerut and Naraingunge.
3 According to the sources available, the very first Greek merchant who established
himself in India seems to have been one Hadjee Alexios Argyree. Originally
from present-day Plovdiv in Bulgaria, 4 he arrived in Bengal in 1750 and
died there in 1777. 5 In the mid-eighteenth century a small Greek mercantile community
began to grow in Bengal, as testified by the East India Company's records.
In the nineteenth century, however, the commercial presence of Greek traders
changed to a remarkable extent. The change was both numerical and qualitative
and their influence on the Indian economy grew substantially as a consequence.
From the 1830s onwards an increasing number of Greek trading companies established
themselves in the main Indian seaport cities, first of all in Calcutta and
Bombay. At the end of the nineteenth century Greek traders were present in large
as well as smaller cities, and their businesses included a wide range of diverse activities
in the thriving import-export sector. They handled both large-scale economic
activities and small-scale retailing businesses. Most of the Greek firms operating
on the Indian subcontinent during the British Raj were Anglo-Greek companies,
many of which had been founded by merchant families from Chios. These
merchants had left the island in the early 1820s, at the time of the Greek War of
Independence and had fled to other Mediterranean seaports before moving to
3 Konstantinos Pandajee, Panioty Alexander, Demetrios Elias, Antonis Foscolo, Emmanuel
Panioty, Ioannis Athanass and a few others were the Greek merchants active in eighteenthcentury
Bengal. Their names were recorded in the East India Company’s registers. Calcutta
Directory and Annual Register (1780-1800), and Bengal Almanac and Annual Directory for 1814-
1820, Asia, Pacific and Africa Collections (APAC), British Library (BL), UK.
4 On the Greeks in Plovdiv, see Lyberatos, Andreas, ‘The “Memorial about Christian
population of Plovdiv” by K. Moravenov. Attempt for a systematic verification and quantification
of a qualitative source’ (in Greek), in Ta Iστορικά – Historica 43 (Dec. 2005), 335-72.
On the Greeks in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Plovdiv see also Σπυρίδων Γ. Πλουμίδης,
Εθνοτική συμβίωση στα Βαλκάναι. Έλληνες και Βούλγαροι στη Φιλιππούπολη, 1878-
1914, Εκδόσεις Πατάκη, Αθήνα, 2006.
5 Anonimous, Historical and Ecclesiastical Sketches of Bengal, from the Earliest Settlement, Until
the Virtual Conquest of that Country by the English in 1757, Calcutta, 1831. See also Λουκάτος,
Σπύρος Δ., Ελληνες και Φιλέλληνες των Ινδιών κατά την Ελληνικήν Επανάστασιν : αι
ελληνικαί παροικίαι της Καλκούττας και της Δάκκας : η φιλελληνική εταιρεία της Καλκούττας,
Athens, 1965; Vassiliades, D., The Greeks in India, New Delhi, 2000; and Abadzi,
Helen 'The Dhaka University Greek Gravestones and the Greek Community', Journal of The
Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 40, 1, Dhaka, 1995.
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