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These great corporations are a good thing. They are the government of the country, they work for their own account and behalf without having to go abroad, . . . [they provide] work and enable all of them to work. All these things cannot be supported under the Turk, nor can they come about, for he is without order and justice and if the capital (sermaye) is a thousand, he calls it ten times as much, so as to confiscate it, to impoverish the others, not appreciating that the enriching of his subjects is the wealth of his Empire. But these [the Dutch] maintain with justice and he [the Turk] is wholly unjust and cannot achieve anything but spoil.1
Written by a prominent Greek merchant2in Amsterdam, these lines graphically express his appreciation of the Dutch infrastructure for international trade, namely the presence of large commercial corporations and the possibility of accumulating capital, and his equally balanced dissatisfaction with the inability and unwillingness of the Ottoman administration to provide such infrastructure. The author of these lines, Ioannis Pringos (Johannes Brink in Dutch sources) hailed from the small Ottoman region of Zagora, adapted successfully to Amsterdam and amassed a fortune there. During the Russo-Ottoman war (1768-74) he had great sympathy for Russia. In Amsterdam, he collected hundreds of books and in his native Zagora he established a library where pioneers of the Greek Enlightenment, including Rigas Velestinlis, spent considerable time. Taken at face value, the lives and activities of merchants such as Pringos could and did serve a number of nationalist perspectives. Kordatos saw in Pringos a pioneer of 'Romaic bourgeoisie' ([...]) which, he thought, was essential for an understanding of the 'Romaic nationalism' in the time of Rigas.3Acknowledging this view, Stavrianos claimed that Pringos and other Balkan merchants in Europe 'tended to be radical-minded because of their contacts with the West,' and made important contributions to 'Balkan national development.'4On a broader level, these views were on a par with the general image of the Greek merchants as a new social group that made the Greek Revolution financially sustainable and helped to spread the ideas of the...