o_19heefouak9i9v4do11ac41pi7a.pdf

ANTONELLA VIOLA
a uniform style of business organization. However, when it comes to Greek traders
in India, especially the Anglo-Greeks, it must be noted that things may have been
different. The requirements of the Indian market and the specifics of each Indian
region and territory –for instance, operating in Calcutta was in some ways different
from working in Madras– gave rise to necessary forms of adaptation to the new environment.
Forms of adaptation were not always minor, or simply the occasional
side-effect of variations between the local environments in which these traders had
to operate; behind any form of ‘adjustment’ there was often a complex process of
knowledge of the local market, implying familiarization with a new business culture
with all its rules and values, adoption of some of its practices, and close relations
with trustworthy and competent local brokers. Although the British Empire undoubtedly
smoothed the process of adaptation to the Indian economic environment
for the benefit of its economic operators (and Anglo-Greek companies were among
them), it is also true that to successfully handle extensive business throughout the
Indian subcontinent required knowledge of and cooperation with native traders as
well as a correct understanding of their ways of conducting business. This meant
that strategies had to be adjusted in order to operate in the Indian market. Adjustments
could be slight, amounting to occasional changes in the usual way of planning
and conducting business, but they could also be profound modifications with a
more lasting character. Even trading networks which represent the hallmark of
Greek Diaspora traders underwent important changes in India; rules about whom to
trust were changed when cooperation with Indian economic operators was deemed
indispensable to finalize a business transaction, and when the access to production
channels implied trust-based collaborative relations with local traders.
On the other hand, to dismiss completely the community as the main subject of
exploration would be unwise. A study of Greek traders in India taken as a Diaspora
group would surely emphasize similarities based upon cultural factors, ethnic bonds,
and religious affiliation, as historiography on Diaspora traders usually does. An
analysis of the Greeks in India as a segment of a larger Greek mercantile Diaspora
would prove particularly helpful in grasping the socio-economic ties which bound
them together as well as the formation and structuring of their extensive trading
networks. Conversely, an approach exclusively based on the ‘firm’ as the main unit
of analysis would allow us to explore from within how Greek companies in India
operated in the local market, which links they forged with local economic operators
and how they organized their business in practice. Certainly each company had its
own evolutionary trajectory, and its own way of coping with the Indian market, Indian
economic operators and their business practices. An exploration of the Greek
traders in India as individual firms, however, would be somehow reductive, and the
articulated system of close connections that these traders developed with each other
would be lost while focusing on the firm’s behaviour, organization and patterns of
Cabe, I., B., Harlaftis, G., and Pepelasis Minoglou, I. (eds), 2005, op.cit.; Minoglou Pepelasis, I.,
‘Toward a typology of Greek-Diaspora entrepreneurship’, in Mc Cabe, I., B., Harlaftis, G., and
Pepelasis Minoglou, I. (eds), 2005, op.cit.
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