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The Shah's Silk for Europe's Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India (1530-1750). By INA BAGHDIANTZ MCCABE. University of Pennsylvania Armenian Texts and Studies. Atlanta: SCHOLARS PRESS, 1999. Pp. xii + 414. $44.95.
It has long been known that Armenians were the most successful of all merchants engaged in Safavid Iran's long-distance trade. Yet until recently, all scholarly writings about their activities other than the odd article were either in Armenian or Russian. Change has been sudden and dramatic: Iranian Armenians have become fashionable of late. McCabe's study is one of a number on Iranian Armenians that have recently appeared, and it is one of three in English that concern the Julfan Armenians, the inhabitants of a suburb of Isfahan named New Julfa, who were settled there by Shah `Abbas in the first decade of the seventeenth century.1 As the first book-length study to deal with their status as a political and commercial community, it offers a wealth of new information, in addition to a number of interesting ideas and propositions. This alone makes it a valuable addition to our knowledge and understanding of the position of Armenians in Safavid Iran, their role in its trade and politics, and their fate insofar as it is intertwined with the collapse of the Safavid state in the early eighteenth century. (Despite the subtitle, the book deals only marginally with India.)
The study has several other merits. At pains to give the Armenians agency, the author shows that they were active in EastWest commerce long before Shah `Abbas I (r. 1587-1629), and that the wealthiest among them were in command of vast trading enterprises and served as bankers to monarchs. No less importantly, she divides Armenians into several categories, arguing against the idea that they were a "homogeneous middle class." The Julfans, McCabe rightly claims, were in a class of their own, and the privileges accorded to them certainly did not apply to all Armenians. She has much to say about the administration of New Julfa. She is especially good at demonstrating the links that connected Iran's Armenian community to France, the intricacies of missionary attempts to convert them to Catholicism, and the rifts this produced among the Armenians themselves. She may...