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GREEK TRADERS IN BRITISH INDIA, 1840-1920<br />
different from those they were provided with at home. These public goods included<br />
‘peace, safe access to international waterways, international laws for the protection of<br />
property rights, an open regime for foreign trade, and an international monetary system’<br />
23 . Such services were, for obvious reasons, not readily available to non-Anglo-<br />
Greek firms, which happened to work in a binary system characterized by at least two<br />
levels of interaction: interaction with colonizers on the one hand and with the colonized<br />
(Indian traders) on the other. Being trapped within such a system, they had to<br />
develop different strategies in order to accommodate themselves and their activities to<br />
the colonial context in which they were working.<br />
The diverse conditions under which Greek traders operated in India draws an<br />
important demarcation line between those companies which benefited from certain<br />
facilities and those which did not. This becomes a powerful argument when it<br />
comes to investigating the evolutionary trajectories of single firms: how they were<br />
structured, how they worked in practice, what their market strategies were, and so<br />
forth. An analytical approach to the growth of Greek firms in the Indian context<br />
would probably highlight such differences and would stress divergences in the patterns<br />
of structuring and management among firms. An approach of this sort would<br />
almost certainly be particularly helpful in uncovering and explaining issues regarding<br />
each firm’s internal dynamic, but would probably lose sight of the complex<br />
non-economic factors that marked the evolution of Greek companies in India. More<br />
specifically, it would be unable to view the Greek traders as a group which had a<br />
number of specific shared characteristics justifying the expression ‘Greek traders in<br />
India’ and allowing us to speak of them as a group. In spite of individual differences<br />
that can be detected in the developmental patterns of each firm, Greek traders<br />
in India shared a number of features which contribute to their identification as a<br />
'socio-cultural entity'. These features were a set of culturally connoted attitudes,<br />
ideas and relationships.<br />
One of the most visible characteristics of the Greek traders in India was their<br />
marked tendency to organize their economic and commercial activities around trading<br />
networks. This tendency, which characterized other mercantile groups and was not<br />
exclusive to the Greeks, reached a high degree of complexity and efficiency in the<br />
Greek case. Looking more closely at the way they structured and organized their<br />
business in South Asia, it immediately becomes clear that this tendency had solid<br />
roots in their social and cultural background and in established habits of operating<br />
within a close network of personal and family relations. In effect, the entrepreneurial<br />
strategies and business organization displayed by Greek traders in India reflected, to a<br />
great extent, a tradition of ethnically based cooperation 24 which eventually evolved<br />
23 Patrick O’Brian, ‘The Pax Britannica and the international order 1688-1914’, in Shigeru<br />
Akita and Takeshi Matsuda (eds), Looking back at the 20th Century: the Role of Hegemonic State<br />
and the transformation of the Modern World-System (Proceedings of the Global History Workshop,<br />
Osaka University of Foreign Studies, Osaka, 1999).<br />
24 Tai Landa, J., Trust, Ethnicity and Identity, Beyond the New Institutional Economics of Ethnic<br />
Trading Networks, Contract Law, and Gift-Exchange, Ann Arbor, 1995; Epstein, Gil S., and<br />
~ 415 ~
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