o_19heefouak9i9v4do11ac41pi7a.pdf

GREEK TRADERS IN BRITISH INDIA, 1840-1920
pora community? Shall we simply focus on the developmental patterns of single
firms? How should we relate the activities of big companies to those of smaller and
therefore less powerful firms?
Let us start with a general consideration about the concept of Diaspora and
how it should or could be applied to the Greeks in India. This paper hints that all
the Greeks who left their place of origin and moved to India, settling and working
there for a variable number of years, can be considered to some extent as part of a
Diaspora 38 . But the concept of Diaspora in itself poses some problems (especially
when used as an alternative to nation-based historical narratives) without further
clarification on how it should be worked out and applied, as Chatziioannou
rightly pointed out in a recent work 39 . The main problem with applying uncritically
the concept of Diaspora when studying Greek traders in India is that much
is lost in terms of the specific links which each trader forged within the Indian
market with other traders who were not necessarily Greek. This loss would be
particularly detrimental to an in-depth analysis of the commercial links that the
Greeks were able to establish with Indian traders, for instance. Furthermore, aspects
related to the internal and specific developmental trajectories would be undervalued
or simply left out in favour of an analysis of the socio-economic dynamics
within the diasporic community. Diaspora mercantile communities are too
often regarded as monolithic entities. The prevailing focus on the community and
links within the community which exists in many works on trade Diasporas underestimates
the individual capacity to establish independent connections with culturally
and ethnically different actors. Generally speaking, when contacts between
different mercantile communities are explored in the framework of the Diaspora
studies, the idea that this is something mostly collective is prevalent. In a nutshell,
the communal logic that is undoubtedly the prime mover and the vital element of
Diaspora groups is supposed to be all-embracing. Hence individual economic operators
are thought of as working within a system which is often considered as
able to control and determine every aspect of the economic exchange inside and
outside the community. Even if this was the case for the Diaspora mercantile
communities of the Early Modern period, things were certainly different in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when individual merchants enjoyed
greater margins of freedom within Diaspora communities, due also to changes in
transport and communications and the enforcement of better legal instruments for
the conduct of economic and commercial transactions.
It has been claimed that the Greek mercantile Diaspora was usually characterized
by a ‘high degree of homogeneity’ 40 and that the Diaspora traders generally adopted
38 For a definition of the Greek Diaspora see Hasiotis, I. K., ‘Continuity and change in the
Modern Greek Diaspora’, in Journal of Modern History, No. 6, 1989, pp. 9-24.
39 Chatziioannou, M. C., ‘Greek Merchants in Victorian England' in Tziovas, D. (ed.), Greek
Diaspora and Migration since 1700. Society, Politics and Culture, Farnham, 2009.
40 Harlaftis, G., A History of Greek-owned Shipping: the Making of an International tramp Fleet,
1830 to the Present Day, London, 1996; id., ‘Mapping the Greek maritime Diaspora’, in Mc
~ 421 ~