Atti Datini 2011 Harlaftis

FONDAZIONE
ISTITUTO INTERNAZIONALE DI STORIA ECONOMICA F. DATINI

PRATO
DOVE VA LA STORIA ECONOMICA?
METODI E PROSPETTIVE
SECC. XIII-XVIII
WHERE IS ECONOMIC HISTORY GOING?
METHODS AND PROSPECTS
FROM THE 13
TH
TO THE 18
TH
CENTURIES
Atti della Quarantaduesima Settimana di Studi
18-22 aprile 2010

a cura di Francesco Ammannati
Firenze University Press
2011
Dove va la storia economica? Metodi e prospettive. Secc.
XIII-XVIII = Where is Economic History Going? Methods
and Prospects from the 13th to the 18th centuries : atti della
Quarantaduesima Settimana di Studi, 18-22 aprile 2010 / a
cura di Francesco Ammannati. Firenze : Firenze University
Press, 2011.
(Atti delle Settimane di Studi e altri Convegni ; 42)

http://digital.casalini.it/9788864532875
ISBN 978-88-6453-287-5 (online)
ISBN 978-88-6453-283-7 (print)
La Settimana di Studi stata realizzata con il contributo di:
Ministero per i Beni e le Attivit Culturali
La pubblicazione del presente volume stata realizzata con il contributo di:
Ministero per i Beni e le Attivit Culturali
La Fondazione Datini si dichiara fin dora disponibile ad assolvere i suoi obblighi per
lutilizzo delle immagini contenute nel volume nei confronti di eventuali aventi diritto.
2011 Firenze University Press / Fondazione Istituto Internazionale di Storia
Economica F. Datini
Universit degli Studi di Firenze
Firenze University Press
Borgo Albizi, 28
50122 Firenze, Italy
http://www.fupress.com/
Printed in Italy
INDICE
Domenica 18 aprile APERTURA DEI LAVORI
GIAMPIERO NIGRO, LIstituto Datini e la storia economica (secc. XIII-XVIII) ..... pag. 3
GIAMPIERO NIGRO, The Datini Institute and the Economic
History (13
th
-18
th
Centuries)........................................................................................... 13
Luned 19 aprile VECCHIE E NUOVE SENSIBILIT NELLE DIVERSE AREE LINGUISTICHE: LE
TEMATICHE / OLD AND NEWINSIGHTS IN THE DIFFERENT LINGUISTIC REGIONS: THE
TOPICS
ALBERTO GROHMANN, Vecchie e nuove sensibilit nella storiografia
economica italiana: le tematiche..................................................................................... pag. 25
LAURENT FELLER, Histoire du Moyen ge et histoire conomique
(X
e
-XV
e
sicle) en France .............................................................................................. 39
JAN DE VRIES, Old and New Insights: a Personal Perspective .................................. 61
EROL ZVAR, Economic History in Turkey................................................................ 79
MIGUEL NGEL LADERO QUESADA, La historia econmica medieval hispnica .. 105
MARK HBERLEIN, Pre-Industrial Economic History in Germany:
Trends, Problems and Prospects.................................................................................... 143
JACEK KOCHANOWICZ, ANNA SOSNOWSKA, Economic History of Pre-industrial
Poland: An Obsolete Subject? ........................................................................................ 153
HILARIO CASADO ALONSO, The Economic History of Spain in the
Early Modern Ages .......................................................................................................... 173
Discussant
MARCO BELFANTI ............................................................................................................ 191
Marted 20 aprile VECCHIE E NUOVE SENSIBILIT: GLI STRUMENTI / OLD AND NEW
INSIGHTS: TOOLS
MARK ORMROD, Government Records: Fiscality, Archives
and the Economic Historian .......................................................................................... pag. 197
PAULINO IRADIEL, Fuentes de derecho privado: protocolos notariales
e historia econmica ........................................................................................................ 225
MATHIEU ARNOUX, Histoire conomique et sources littraires ............................... 249
INDICE
VIII
RAMON JOSEP PUJADES I BATALLER, Explotacin econmica y aprehensin intelectual
del espacio en la baja edad media y el Renacimiento: el potencial informativo
de la cartografa y los textos tcnicos de carcter geogrfico para los historiadores
de la economa .................................................................................................................. pag. 263
GERHARD JARITZ, Old and New Insights: Iconographic Sources............................ 289
ALESSANDRA MOLINARI, Fonti materiali, archeologia e storia economica del
medioevo: verso quali modelli interpretativi?............................................................... 307
BARTOLOM YUN CASALILLA, Reading Sources throughout P. Bourdieu
and Cyert and March. Aristocratic Patrimonies vs. Commercial Enterprises
in Europe (c. 1550-1650) ................................................................................................ 325
CATHERINE VERNA, Quelles sources pour quelles entreprises
du XIII
e
au XV
e
sicle? ................................................................................................... 339
LUCIANA FRANGIONI, Le fonti aziendali Datini per la storia
(seconda met XIV secolo inizi XV secolo) ............................................................. 373
GELINA HARLAFTIS, International Business of Southeastern Europe and the
Eastern Mediterranean, 18
th
Century: Sources, Methods and Interpretive Issues .. 389
Mercoled 21 aprile VECCHIE E NUOVE SENSIBILITA: I RAPPORTI CON LE ALTRE
DISCIPLINE / OLD AND NEW INSIGHTS: RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER SUBJECTS
PAOLO MALANIMA, Storia economica e teoria economica......................................... pag. 419
MARK THOMAS, Economic History and Mathematical-Statistical Sciences ............ 429
GUILLAUME DAUDIN, Quantitative methods and Economic History ...................... 453
ANTHONY A. WRIGLEY, Economic History and Demography................................. 473
MICHAEL NORTH, Economic History and Cultural History ..................................... 497
Gioved 22 aprile DOVE VA LA STORIA ECONOMICA? METODI E PROSPETTIVE (SECC. XIII-
XVIII) / WHERE IS ECONOMIC HISTORY GOING? METHODS AND PROSPECTS (FROM THE 13
TH
TO THE 18
TH
CENTURIES)
TAVOLA ROTONDA CONCLUSIVA
SANTIAGO LPEZ, Investigaciones de Historia Econmica IHE
Journal of the Spanish Association of Economic History ........................................ pag 511
MATTS MORELL, Scandinavian Economic History Review....................................... 515
HANS POHL, Vierteljahrschrift fr Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte.
Quarterly Review for Social and Economic History ................................................... 527
HANS POHL, Where is German Economic History Going? ...................................... 531
ANTONIO DI VITTORIO, Dove si proietta la storia economica italiana .................... 533
LAURENCE FONTAINE, La crise du paradigme conomique...................................... 537
SERGEJ PAVLOVI KARPOV, Dove va la storia economica russa? .............................. 543
ADAM MANIKOWSKI, Dove va la storia economica polacca?..................................... 547
Abstracts............................................................................................................................ 549
Gelina Harlaftis
International Business of Southeastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, 18
th
Century: Sources, Methods and Interpretive Issues
It is highly rewarding to know that Francesco di Marco Datini, that remarkable
merchant from Prato of the 14
th
century would have completely understood what is
going to be discussed in this paper. Datini was involved in the land and sea trade
between southeastern Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, Black Sea and Italy and
the Western Mediterranean.
1
It is remarkable how much we know about the trade
of this area from the 13
th
to the 15
th
century and how little we know concerning the
period from the 16
th
to the 18
th
century of the east of Europe and the east of the
Mediterranean. In some strange way this area still seems not to form an integral
part of the Mediterranean area, at least not in Western European historiography.
The geographical term southeastern Europe is used to include present day
Hungary, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia/Erzegobina, F.Y.R.O.M. (Former Yugoslavian
Republic of Macedonia), Montenegro, Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Rumania, Greece
and Turkey. By definition southeastern Europe in the 18
th
century is the area
included within the three empires the Ottoman, Hapsburg and the Venetian
Empires with its conquests mainly of the Ionian islands and a small part of Western
Epirus- and surrounded by four seas - the Black, Aegean, Ionian and the Adriatic
Seas. For the purpose of this paper a mainly geographic term is used rather than the
term Balkan, because the latter came into use towards the end of the nineteenth
century and has various interpretations concerning which countries are included or
excluded.
2

1
Francesco di Marco Datini. The Man the Merchant, ed. G. NIGRO, Firenze 2010 (Firenze University
Press and Fondazione Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica F. Datini).
2
The term Balkan was used to describe the mountain range of ancient Aimos that one had
to cross from Central Europe to Constantinople and it was under the false assumption that it was a
single mountain range that expanded throughout southeastern Europe. The area that was under the
Ottoman rule in the 18
th
century was described as European Turkey. The term Balkan started to
be used more commonly from the end of the nineteenth century onwards. See M. MAZOWER, The
Balkans, London 2000 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson), introduction; V.K. GOUNARIS,
. [The Balkans of the Greeks. From Enlightenment to
the First World War], Thessaloniki 2007 (Epikentro), p. 15. M. Palairet in his study of the Balkan
Economies in the nineteenth century excludes Rumania and Greece; see M. PALAIRET, The Balkan
Economies c. 1800-1914. Evolution without Development, Cambridge 1997 (Cambridge University Press).
See also N. TODOROV, , 15
-19
. [The Balkan City, 15

th
-19
th
Centuries], Athens 1986
(Themelio), (Greek translation); B. JELAVICH, History of the Balkans. 18
th
and 19
th
Centuries, Cambridge
1987 (Cambridge University Press). Grothusen points out that southeastern Europe is many a time
defined as the Ottoman Empire, the Danubian Principalities, Greece and Serbia. There is, however, a
debate by the Rumanians that they should not be considered as part of the Balkans. See K.-D.
GELINA HARLAFTIS 390
The subject of the current paper is international business of southeastern
Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean, that is land and maritime trade in the 18
th
century, the century that has marked the internationalisation of the area. The first
section examines the general picture of the land and sea trade of the area as
depicted by the research undertaken. The sources and their subsequent problems
are then addressed including issues of accessibility, fragmentation and methods of
use. The next section looks at methodology in handling and approaching the
research concluding with the issues that have dominated the interpretation of the
activities of trading companies carrying out international business in the area finally
proposing ways to re-examine key questions and research methods.
1. The general picture of international trade
At the heart of this research are the trading companies. In the area under
examination these were mobile groups of organised entrepreneurial families
involved in the long-distance land and sea trade of the area. It was during the 18
th
century that southeastern Europe experienced impressive economic growth in sea
and land trade and the main carriers of this trade formed an organic part of the
Ottoman Empire and of the Eastern Mediterranean.
3
The expansion of organised
groups of trade and shipping families to the West to Western Mediterranean and
northern European ports- and to the East to the Russian Empire and to India
and the formation of entrepreneurial networks became more evident from the areas
of the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the 18
th
century. Moreover after the
end of the 18
th
century this impressive growth was reinforced with the opening of
Black Sea navigation and the Black Sea grain trade.
Two groups of merchant families were formed. The first was of land origin and
became specialised in the land trade. The second group was of maritime origin and
became specialised in the sea trade. A brief look at their origins and activities will
assist in understanding what kind of archives need to be researched.
Land trade of southeastern Europe was carried out under difficult conditions.
Even as recently as the twentieth century the area between the Adriatic and the
Black Sea was described as wild Europe.
4
This is a highly mountainous region
and it is precisely on these mountain ranges of the southwestern Balkan peninsula
that the main Conquering Balkan Orthodox merchants began their activities; the
knowledge of the mountains and land routes gave them freedom of activities and

GROTHUSEN,
[Basic thoughts on the effects of industrial revolution in the cities of southeastern Europe] in
E 19
(Modernisation and Industrial Revolution

in the Balkans in the 19
th
century], Athens 1980 (Themelio Publications), pp. 17-30; from the Proceedings
of The Symposium for the Industrial Revolution, Hamburg, March 1976, organised by the
International Association for the Studies of Southeastern Europe (AIESEE).
3
An Economic History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1914, H. INALIK, D. QUATAERT eds.,
Cambridge 1992 (Cambridge University Press).
4
M. MAZOWER, The Balkans, cit., p. 32.
INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS OF SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE 391
mobility. They were a Babel Balkanique:
5
Greeks, Macedonian-Vlachs, Macedo-
nian-Slavs, Vlachs, Serbs, Hercegovinans, Bosnians, Bulgarians, and Orthodox Al-
banians. However, the Babel had a common language of communication for
education and business, Greek, and a common religion, Greek Orthodoxy: the
Greek language is necessary and inevitable : to be in the society of the Greeks, for
the education of the faith, for the education in the Letters and for trade.
6
So they
called themselves Greeks; the only group that did not like to be called Greek
were the Serbs.
7
However the economic notion proved dominant to the religious
notion; Greek first and foremost meant to be a mobile merchant, and in this way,
as Stoianovich put it even a Jew could be a Greek.
8

The Hungarian historian dn Fves writes that in Hungarian, Greek
(grg) can mean four different things:
9
a) the real Greeks, that is the people that
belonged to the gender of the Greeks, b) the Orthodox Balkan people who used
Greek as a common language (Macedonian Vlachs, Albanians, Bulgarians,
Hercegovinans and Bosnians, c) all the Orthodox people (and this includes Serbs),
d) the word Greek in some regions in Hungary means merchant. It seems that

5
Borrowed from E. ZACHOS-PAPAZACHARIOU, Babel Balkanique, in Cahiers du Monde Russe et
Sovietique, XIII, 1972, n. 2, 145-179.
6
D.N. DARVARIS (1806) in ANGELIKI CONSTANDAKOPOULOU,
(1750-1850). [The Greek Language in the Balkans (1750-
1850). The four-language lexicon of Daniel Moschopolitis], Ioannina 1988 (Dodoni, Epistimoniki Epetirida
Filosofikis Sxolis, Parartima no. 39), p. 12. Daniel Moschopolitis wrote a highly interesting lexicon,
published in 1802 to teach Greek it is not really a dictionary, but more of a method of learning the
language-- in the multi-ethnic environment of southeastern Europe; his lexicon is in four languages,
Greek, Vlach, Bulgarian and Albanian, ibidem. See also M. STASSINOPOULOU,
18
19
.
[Balkan polyglossy in the Hapsburg Empire in the 18
th
and 19
th
centuries], in --
[Diaspora-Networks-Enlightenment], EADEM, M.-CH. CHATZIIOANNOU eds., Athens 2005
(Tetradia Ergasias 28, Institute for Neohellenic Research, National Hellenic Research Foundation),
pp. 17-32. Trade manuals that guided the merchant further in his profession appeared during this
period; see T. SKLAVENITIS, ,
, 15
-20
. [The trade manuals

during the period of Venetian and Turkish conquests, Mentalities of the Balkan people, 15
th
-20
th
centuries. Economic
perceptions and economic behaviours], Athens 1988, (I. Zacharopoulos). G. PAPAGEORGIOU, O
( 18
- 19
).
[The modernisation of the Greek merchant according to European patterns (end of
the 18
th
beginning of the 19
th
century]). A trade manual by Athanassios Psalidas], Athens 1990 (Tolidis). For
the languages in south-eastern Europe see also S. SKENDI, Language as a Factor of National Identity in the
Balkans of the Nineteenth Century, in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 119, 1975, n.
2, pp. 186-189.
7
T. STOIANOVICH, The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant, in Journal of Economic History,
XX, 1960, 2, pp. 269-279.
8
Ibidem.
9
. FVES, [Greeks in Hungary], Thessaloniki 1965 (Association of
Macedonian Studies, Institute of Balkan Studies). For Greeks in Hungary also see Z. CS, Marchands
grecs en Hongrie aux 17
e
-18
e
sicles, in tudes Historiques Hongroises, publies l occasion du 17
e
Congrs
International des Sciences Historiques, Budapest 1990, II, pp. 41-58. M. BUR, Das Raumergreifen
balkanischer Kaufleute im Wirtschaftsleben der ostmitteleuropischen Lnder im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, in
Brgertum und brgerliche Entwicklung in Mittel- und Osteuropa, ed. V. BCSKAI, Budapest 1986 (Studia
Historiae Europae Medio-Orientalis).
the Hungarians, seeing that all the people that came from the Balkans spoke Greek
and had more or less the same dress code and behavior, could not distinguish them
and so called them all Greeks.
10
Likewise Rumanian historians record the same
attitude in their sources. In her recent book Pakucs states that merchants who were
engaged in the oriental trade with Sibiu recorded in the customs registers, despite
their composite ethnic and juridical status, are generically called Greeks by the
Sixteenth-century Transylvanian sources. This name stems from their Balkan-
Levantine origin, from their mainly Eastern Orthodox religion, but first and
foremost from the fact that they traded in oriental goods. They were the active
commercial partners of the Saxon towns.
11
The Greek language as the lingua franca of the area was also the written language
of communication and business. The recently published archive of the infamous
Ottoman Albanian Ali Pasha of Ioannina reveals that correspondence with his
officials and his family was carried out in Greek. Furthermore the excellent recent
study by Andreas Lyberatos on Philipoupoli (Plovdiv), reveals that Bulgarian
merchants, wrote either in Greek or in Bulgarian in Greek letters, in a kind of
BulGreek in the same way that modern Greeks write their e-mails or mobile
phone messages in Greeklish, that is Greek in Latin letters.
12

The importance of the commercial role played by the non-Muslim Ottoman
subjects between East and West in the Ottoman and Hapsburg Empires during
the 17
th
and 18
th
centuries is well highlighted and documented. Orthodox Christian
merchants of the 18
th
and early 19
th
centuries settled in the regions streching from
Dutch Amsterdam to French Marseilles, Tuscan Livorno and Venice, Hapsburg
Trieste, Vienna, Hapsburg/Hungarian Pest, Transylvanian Braov and Sibiu, to
Ottoman Salonica, Smyrna, Constantinople.
13
In the Russian Empire after the great
surge of imperial expansion under Catherine the Great, Ottoman Greek
merchants traded under special concessions between Polish and Jewish merchants
to the west and Greeks and Armenians to the east expanding along the entire coast

10
From the mid-18
th
to the mid-19
th
centuries, Balkan townsfolk wore strikingly similar
clothes. See D. ANTONIJEVIC, Unity and Diversity of Folk Cultures, Septieme Congrs International d Etudes
du Sud-est Europeen, Thessalonique, 29 aot-4 septembre 1994, Comit National Hellenique, Athens
1994 (AISEE), pp. 41-57.
11
M. PAKUCS-WILLCOCKS, Sibiu Hermannstadt. Oriental Trade in Sixteenth Century Transylvania,
Kln Weimar Wien 2007 (Bhlau Verlag), p. 149. See also GH. LAZAR, Les marchands en Valachie,
XVII
e
-XVIII
e
sicles, Bucarest 2006 (Institutul Cultural Romn), pp. 10-15.
12
. -- [Archive of Ali Pasha of
Gennadios Library. Publication, annotations, indices], I-IV, V. PANAYOTOPOULOS with the collaboration of
D. DIMITROPOULOS, P. MICHAILARIS eds., Athens 2007-2009 (Institute of Neohellenic Research,
National Research Foundation). A. LYBERATOS, o,
19 [Economy, politics and national ideology. The formation of
national parties in Philipoupoli of 19
th
century], Herakleion 2009 (University of Crete publications).
13
O. KATSIARDI-HERING, Christian and Jewish Ottoman Subjects: Family, Inheritance and Commercial
Networks between East and West (17
th
-18
th
c.), in La famiglia nelleconomia europea. Secc. XIII-XVIII / The
Economic Role of the Family in the European Economy from the 13
th
to the 18
th
centuries, Atti della Quarantessima
Settimana di Studi, 6-10 Aprile 2008, ed. S. CAVACIOCCHI, Florence 2009 (Fondazione Istituto
Internationale di Storia economica F. Datini, Prato, Serie II - Atti delle settimane di Studi e altri
Convegni, 40, Firenze University Press), pp. 409-440.
of the Black Sea and thus controlled all the trade of the area from the early 18
th
century.
14
Immigration of the Christian population of the Ottoman Empire to Hapsburg
and the Russian Empires was encouraged in the 18
th
century and can, to a large
extent, be attributed to the classic pattern of the Eastern Question. In accordance
with which a Great Power extended protection to a selected minority in the
Ottoman Empire in the hopes of extending its influence in the region. Moreover,
the conquests of the Ottoman lands by the Hapsburg and Russian Empires were
followed by policies that ultimately favoured Greek traders. Both countries
needed to expand their commercial and maritime activities and consolidate their
influence in the Ottoman lands. At the beginning of the century, the Austrians
conquered half of Serbia and part of Wallachia, resulting in the Treaty of
Passarowitz in 1718 that secured land and sea trade between the Ottoman and
Hapsburg Empires by Ottoman and Hapsburg subjects establishing a preemptive
duty of 3% on import and exports and guaranteed free navigation on the Danube.
15
Ottoman subjects took advantage of the treaty and the needs of the Hapsburg
Monarchy for Ottoman goods, agricultural and handicraft products and developed
the trade.
Until the end of the 17
th
century the bulk of the trade of the southeastern
European peninsula was carried out by sea via Raguza and Durazzo mainly by Ra-
guzan and Venetian merchants and shipowners. The prosperity of Raguza which
enjoyed special concessions from the Ottomans lasted until the 18
th
century at
which point it went into decline.
16
In the 18
th
century the land routes of southeas-
tern Europe became safer and more profitable and the sea trade from the Adriatic
ports declined. The main axis in land trade shifted to the Vienna-Salonica axis with
the main north-south land-trade artery following the route Belgrade-Zemun
(Semlin)- Budapest-Vienna-Leipzig. The other east-west artery followed the route
from Constantinople, Adrianople (Edirne), Philipoupoli and joined the north route
in Belgrade. Equally, sea trade in the Eastern Mediterranean shifted from the
southeastern Mediterranean ports to the Smyrna-Constantinople-Trieste triangle;
the large Levante ports, including Salonica, however, did not export the bulk of the
cargoes. The main exporting areas to the West proved to be the small chelles of the
Aegean and Ionian seas. For example in the Aegean the main grain exporting area
was the practically uninhabited bay of Volos, while the ports of Epirus became the
main exporting area of the Ionian Seas directly linked with the mountain traders:
Preveza and Vonitsa in Amvrakikos bay.

14
S.K BATALDEN, Seeking God: the Recovery of Religious Identity in Orthodox Russia, Ukraine, and
Georgia, DeKalb 1993 (Northern Illinois University Press); A.J. RIEBER, Merchants and Entrepreneurs in
Imperial Russia, 1982 (University of North Carolina Press), p. 52. V. ZAKHAROV, Zapadnoevropeiskie
kuptsi v rosssiiskoi torgovle XVIII veka, Moscow 2005.
15
O. KATSIARDI-HERING, H [The Greek Community in Trieste, 1751-
1830], I-II, Athens 1986 (University of Athens, Department of Philosophy), pp. 4-7.
16
B. MCGOWAN, Economic life in Ottoman Empire 1600-1800, Cambridge 1981 (Cambridge
University Press), p. 20. See also A. DI VITTORIO, S. ANSELMI, P. PIERUCCI, Ragusa (Dubrovnik) una
repubblica adriatica: saggi di storia economica e finanziaria, Bologna 1994 (Cisalpino).
The main carriers of land trade to the north proved to be Greeks and Vlachs.
17
There were three groups of trading families that carried out the land trade from the
Ottoman Empire to the north and were established in the Hapsburg Empire and
Transylvania and from there on to Russia and Germany. The first group came from
Western Macedonia, the second from Epirus and the third from Thessaly.
18
They
all came from villages or small towns near rivers in the mountain ranges of the
south of the peninsula. They established trading groups made up of family
members in Transylvania (Sibiu and Braov), in Hungary (in Pest and in a series of
small towns along the trade routes such as Tokaj, Kecskemet, Miskolcz, Eger and
Debrecen) and in Austria (Vienna). Further networks from there extended to
Poland and Russia (Lvov, Nin Moscow), Leipzig and Amsterdam.
19
Their main
strength lay in the fact that they were the producers, the carriers, the traders and the

17
Vlachs speak a language of Latin origin similar to the languages of western Europe and
Rumania. Greeks of the 19
th
century called Vlachs Koutsovlachs, Germans called them
Aromunen and Serbs Cincari. They called themselves Greco-Vlachs or Macedono-Vlachs.
See A. KOUKOUDIS, K. STEPHANOPOULOS, [Studies of the Vlachs], Thessaloniki
2000-2001, (Zitros). See also I. PAPADRIANOS, [The Greek Settlers in
Semlin], Salonica 1998, p. 31.
18
O. KATSIARDI HERING, The Greek Diaspora: Geography and Typology in Greek Economic History
15
th
-18
th
c., ed. S. I. ASDRACHAS, vol. 1, Athens 2003, (Cultural Foundation of Piraeus Bank). A.
VAKALOPOULOS, [The Western Macedonian Emigrants during
the Turkish Conquest], Thessaloniki 1958 (Association of Macedonian Studies, Institute of Balkan
Studies).
19
V. SEIRINIDOU, , 1780-1850, [Greeks in Vienna, 1780-1850], unpublished
Ph.D. thesis, Athens 2002 (Department of History and Archaeology, University of Athens). K.
PAPAKONSTANTINOU, ' 18 .
[Greek commercial businesses in central Europe during the second half of the 18
th
century. The
Pondikas family], unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Athens 2002 (Department of History and Archaeology,
University of Athens). I. MANTOUVALOS, ., .
( 18 -19

.) [Aspects of the Greek diaspora. From
Monastir to Pest. Entrepreneurship and bourgeois identity of the Manos family (end of 18
th
- beginning of 19
th
century)], unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Athens 2007 (Department of History and Archaeology, University
of Athens). G. LAZAR, Les marchands en Valachie, XVII
e
-XVIII
e
sicles, Bucharest 2006 (Institutul
Cultural Romn). Paul Cernovodeanu, Comerul rilor romne n secolul al XVII-lea (The commerce of the
Rumanian regions in the 18
th
century) in Reviste de Istorie, 33, 1980, n. 6, pp. 1071-1098. O. CICANCI,
Companiile Greceti din Transilvania i commenul european in anii 1636-1746 [The Greek companies in
Transylvania and the European trade:16361746], Bucharest 1981 (Editura Academiei). EADEM, Les grecs
macdoniens. Contribution la vie sociale des Principauts Roumaines, in Historical Yearbook, I, 2004, pp.
121-128. A. KARATHANASIS, L Hellenisme en Transylvanie. L activit culturelle, nationale et religieuse de
companies commerciales hellniques de Sibiu et de Braov aux XVIII-XIX sicles, Thessaloniki 1989 (Institute
for Balkan Studies). D. TSOURKA-PAPASTATHI, , 1636-
1848. [The Greek Company of Sibiu of Transylvania. Organisation and Law, 1636-1848],
Thessaloniki 1994 (Institute for Balkan Studies). M. DAN, S. GOLDENBERG, Marchands balkaniques et
levantins dans le commerce de la Transylvanie aux XVI
e
et XVII
e
sicles, in Actes du Premier Congrs des tudes
sud-est europennes, Vol. III, Sofia 1969, pp. 641647. L.A. DEMNYI, Le commerce de la Transylvanie avec les
rgions du sud du Danube effectu par la douane du Turnu Rou en 1685, in Revue roumaine dhistoire, VII,
1968, n. 5, pp. 761-777. EADEM, Le rgime des douanes et des commerants grecs en Transylvanie au cours de la
priode de la principaut autonome (15411691), in Makedonika, 15, 1975, pp. 62-113. EADEM,
Marchandises orientales en Transylvanie et limitations des prix in Actes du IIe Colloque International dHistoire:
conomies mditerranennes: quilibres et intercommunications. XIIIe-XIXe sicles, Vol. II, Athens 1985 (Centre
de Recherches Nohellniques), pp. 113-122.
financiers of the trade; a trade that transported wool, cotton, red thread, woolen
cloth, woolen coats and covers, hides, furs, candles, copper and golden artifacts.
Large land caravans, with wagons and horses, mules and wagons of 100, 200 or
over 1000 animals traversed the difficult land routes of southeastern Europe. They
had to stop at the Ottoman-Hapsburg border river port towns of the Danube and
its tributaries, Zemun, Panevo (Serbia), and Orsova (Rumania) to pass through the
lazarettos and the customs in order to continue further north. The caravans were
escorted by armed men and travelled for eight hours a day on the 35-day trip from
Salonica to Vienna.
20
The international trade of the Ottoman Empire not only
stretched to the north and the west, but also to the east. The trade to the east took
place along land trade routes of southeastern European produce traded by Greek
and Armenian traders on to Asia Minor, the Arabian provinces and India.
21

Maritime trade of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea also came
under the control of the local traders, mainly Greeks, Orthodox Albanians and to a
lesser degree by the the so-called Illyrians.
22
The fleet dei Greci that was made
up of Ottoman or Venetian subjects, that arose in the Western Mediterranean ports
from the early eighteenth century, developed to become the most dynamic
Mediterranean local fleet and the main carriers of the Levante sea trade during the
last third of the century.
23
It was the international conjuncture at that time which
allowed for the great leap forward leading to the rise of the fleet of the Greci as
they are recorded in the western editerranean archives. The eighteenth century is
characterised by competition amongst the Great Powers for control over the
Mediterranean and expansion to the East to penetrate the lands of the Ottoman
Empire; the Hapsburgs and the Russians by land and the English and the French
by sea. If in the eastern Mediterranean the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718 and the
concessions given to the Hapsburgs by the Ottomans opened the Balkan land
routes to central and western Europe, the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 in the Western
Mediterranean gave the first Mediterranean colonies to the British, Gibraltar and
Minorca.
Despite the penetration of the British, the French remained the main carriers of
the Levant sea trade up until the Napoleonic Wars. The colonial expansion of the
British in the Mediterranean triggered the Anglo-French wars and the continuous
warfare between the two Great Powers left space for the rise of the commercial and

20
K. PAPAKONSTANTINOU, Greek Commercial Businesses in Central Europe, cit., pp. 109-112, V.
SEIRINIDOU, Greeks in Vienna, cit., p. 64.
21
A. LYBERATOS, Economy, Politics, cit.
22
The terms Illyrians, Illyrisch according to the content given by Germans meant south-slav
and in the Hapsburg Empire this meant Serbians and Croats. See V. SEIRINIDOU, Greeks in Vienna, cit.,
p. 256.
23
Based on new archival research see G. HARLAFTIS, The fleet dei Greci. Ottoman and Venetian
Greeks in the Mediterranean sea trade, eighteenth century, in Making Waves in the Mediterranean, M. DANGELO,
G. HARLAFTIS, C. VASSALLO eds., Messina, forthcoming. See also
18
. (The Rise of Greek Shipping in the Mediterranean of the Eighteenth Century), G.

HARLAFTIS, K. PAPAKONSTANTINOU eds., forthcoming. The article written by George Leontaritis 35
years ago, has been the most successful attempt at an overall view of the Greek merchant marine
during the time of the so-called Turkish conquest. G.B. LEON (LEONTARITIS), Greek Merchant Marine
(1453-1850), in Greek Merchant Shipping (1453-1850), ed. S.A. PAPADOPOULOS, Athens 1972.
maritime activities of the local Levant seafarers at the end of the century. So,
although around 1780, 50% of the European sea trade and transport with the
Ottoman Empire was handled by the French (with the Dutch and Hapsburgs
following), by the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the continental blockade, an
important part of this seatrade had been taken over by the Greeks. The eastern
maritime invasion this time conquered the grain imports of the Western
Mediterranean port towns and was able to start participating in the sea trade of the
northern European routes, particularly those to Amsterdam. Archives reveal that
reaching not only the Italian and French markets but also the Spanish, meant that
the Ottoman and Venetian Greek vessels could follow the long-haul trade with
Spanish America and across the Atlantic.
24
With the main interest of western European historians focusing on the French,
English, Dutch and Venetian presences in the Mediterranean, there is almost no
literature on the seafarers of the Levant, the Venetian and Ottoman (including
Orthodox Albanian) Greeks and the Raguzans. In Greek historiography the rise of
Greek shipping is attributed to the second half of the 18
th
century.
25
There was also
a significant upsurge of Raguzan shipping activities in the second half of the 18
th
century.
26
Needless to say, all ships, whether Ottoman, Venetian Greek or Raguzan
were armed, and all ships that arrived at the Western Mediterranean ports from the
Levante had to go through the lazarettos in Malta, Messina and along the western
Italian coast; the trip from the eastern to Western Mediterranean lasted an average
of 35-40 days.
27
The main cargoes transported from the Levant were grain, cotton and olive oil.
The opening of the Black Sea market after the two Russo-Turkish wars of 1769-
1774 and 1788-1792, the penetration of the Russians to the northern coast of the
Black Sea and the imperial Russian policy to draw Greek settlers from the Greek
archipelago to southern Russia increased the sea trade from the Black Sea to the
Mediterranean. The unprecedented commercial traffic further established Greek
diaspora communities involved in trade, shipping and finance from Odessa to
Alexandria, Trieste, Tunis, Malta, Livorno, Marseille and Amsterdam. By 1821 the

24
G. HARLAFTIS, The Eastern Invasion. Greeks in the Mediterranean Trade and Shipping in the Eighteenth
and Early Nineteenth Centuries, in Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudels
Maritime Legacy, M. FUSARO, C. HEYWOOD, M.-S. OMRI eds., London 2010; E. MARTN CORRALES,
Greek Ottoman Captains in the Service of Spanish Commerce in the Late Eighteenth Century, in Ibidem.
25
LEON (LEONTARITIS), Greek Merchant Shipping, cit; O. KATSIARDI-HERING,
, 1750-1800 [Austrian Policy and Greek Navigation, 1750-1800], in Parousia, 5,
1987, pp. 445-537; EADEM, : Senigallia (18-
19 ) [Forgotten Horizons of Greek Merchants. The Fair of Senigallia (18
th
century-beginning of nineteenth
century)], Athens 1989; V. KREMMYDAS, E , 1776-1835 [Greek Shipping, 1776-1835], I-II,
Athens 1985. Also Greek Economic History 15
th
-18
th
c., ed. S.I. ASDRACHAS, Vol. 1, Athens 2003 (Cultural
Foundation of Piraeus Bank).
26
Ibidem. Jean Filippini has written the most extensive account of the rise of the Raguzan fleet in
the second half of the 18
th
century. See J.P. FILIPPINI, Il porto di Livorno e la Toscana (1676-1814), I-III,
Naples 1998; see II, p. 84.
27
See G. HARLAFTIS, S. LAIOU, Ottoman State Policy in Mediterranean Trade and Shipping, c.1780-
c.1820: The Rise of the Greek-Owned Ottoman Merchant Fleet, in Networks of Power in Modern Greece, ed. M.
MAZOWER, London 2008 (Hurst), pp. 1-44.
outbreak of the Greek War of Independence, an international entrepreneurial
network of the Greek maritime and commercial diaspora had established in the
main European port-cities, which together with the sailing shipowners based in the
Aegean and Ionian islands dominated the trade and shipping of the area.
28

The importance of Ottoman Greek sailing shipowners was not obvious in the
trade of the major port cities such as Constantinople, Smyrna, Thessaloniki or
Alexandria; the largest part of the trade they were involved in took place in the
small chelles of the Archipelago and Morea from the small ininhabited
bays/islands and the port towns of the Aegean and Ionian Seas. The shift of
importance from the large ports and particularly from southeast Mediterranean to
the Greek chelles had been noted from the end of the 17
th
century by dOrtires in
his Mmoire.
29
From a sample of 556 vessels arriving from the Levante to Livorno
during the period of 1771 to 1815, only 18% came from the large port cities
(Istanbul, Thessaloniki, Smyrna and Alexandria), whereas 24% brought cargoes
from practically uninhabited bays or islands (the bays of Volos, Piraeus, Livadia,
Salona and Arta, Catacolo and Chiarenza in the western Peloponese, Sapienza, the
bay of Mani, Maratonisi, Moschonisia), 15% from inhabited Aegean islands
(essentially Hydra, Spetses, Psara and Mykonos) and the rest from the small port
towns of the western Greek mainland, like, Preveza, Dragomesto, Messolongi,
Patras and Vostizza.
30
Cargoes were transferred from hundreds of loading places by
the local fleets in each maritime area. All Greek seafarers came from a dispersed
city made up of 38 maritime islands of the Ionian and Aegean seas in the
northeastern Mediterranean. Here, beyond political borders, an important fleet
developed distinguished as the fleet of the Greci; a fleet owned by Ottoman or
Venetian subjects. Greek sailing shipowners and captains expanded their activities
by collaborating with the big merchants of Livorno and Genova the two main
centres of Mediterranean transit trade, with grain depots supplying not only the
northern Italian peninsula, but also France, through Marseille, and Spain, through
Barcelona
31
.
Historiography fails to cover the connecting link between the upsurge in mari-
time and land trade in southeastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. It is
only recent research based on archival material from many Mediterranean ports that

28
G. HARLAFTIS, Mapping the Greek maritime diaspora from the early 18
th
to the late 20
th
century in),
Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks. Five Centuries of History, I. BAGHDIANTZ MCCABE, G. HARLAFTIS, I.
MINOGLOU eds., Oxford 2005, pp. 147-169.
29
Memoire de sieur dOrtires touchant le commerce du Levant, reu le 20 aot 1688, in M. FONTENAY, Le
commerce des Occidentaux dans les chelles du Levant en 1686-87, in Chrtiens et musulmans au temps de la
Renaissance, XV
e
-XVII
e
sicles, Paris 1998, pp. 337-370.
30
Amphitrete, sample of Greek ships derived from the Livorno Sanit for the years 1771-1774,
1785-1798, 1810, 1814-1815.
31
For the Livorno grain trade see J.-P. FILIPPINI, Il commercio del grano a Livorno nel Settecento, in
IDEM, Il porto di Livorno e la Toscana (1676-1814), Napoli 1998, Vol. 2, pp. 318-371. For Marseille see C.
CARRIERE, Ngociants marseillais au XVIII
e
sicle. Contribution l'tude des conomies maritimes, Marseille
1973, Vol. 2, pp. 57-67 and R. ROMANO, Commerce et prix du bl Marseille au XVIII
e
sicle, Paris 1956.
For Genova see L. CALOSCI, Gnova y la transformacin del comercio Mediterrnneo de Catalua (1815-1840),
Barcelona 2002-2003 (Departament dHistria i Instituciones Econmiques, Divisio de Ciencies
Juridiques, Economiques i Sociales, Universitat de Barcelona), pp. 34-44.
makes the first attempt to develop an overall model of the connection between sea
and land trade business of the eastern Mediterranean through analysis of maritime
regions and outlining maritime transport systems that connected land and sea (see
end of next section).
32

2. The sources
It is difficult to trace the archives of mobile groups of families that in many
cases were carrying out long-distance land and sea trade within and beyond at least
three empires. Such documentation is heterogeneous and fragmentary and in most
cases archives have to be compiled from many different sources. Archives of family
trading companies have to be sought in the places where they were based in both
the central State Archives and in the local archives. Thus research has to be carried
out not only in the State Archives of Vienna, Budapest, Belgrad, Bucarest, Sofia,
Zaghreb, Dubrovnik, Sibiu, Brasov, Istanbul and Athens, but also in all the
continental and island port towns of various sizes which formed part of the chain
of commerce in a particular area. Furthermore it is largely a question of chance as
to whether a particular merchants archive will be accesible.
This is an area about which western scholars still know little for three main
reasons. The first is of course political. The effects of the Cold War era led to
isolation of most of the countries of southeastern Europe from the mainstream of
western European scholars. These effects led to a lack of mobility of eastern aca-
demics and accessibility to southeastern European archives for westerners. Efforts
have been made to open up communication between East and West triggered by
Economic History Institutions like the International Economic History Associa-
tion, or the Datini International Institution of Economic History through
conferences. However there were very few attendees from eastern European
countries and even fewer who were lingually in a position to communicate with the
West, as the pre-1989 generation knows only too well. Although the way has been
opened, the new generation in Russia, Ukraine, Rumania, Bulgaria and the other
countries still needs to develop its language skills, access funds to travel and to be
able to work in libraries and archives abroad, and even more importantly, to
cultivate the mentality to go beyond national historiography.
The second reason is cultural, mainly the language barrier which is a twofold
issue: firstly a lack of knowledge of the archives source languages and secondly a
lack of a common language of communication. To record the history of the trading
companies of mobile groups of families demands working in the archives of the
East and the West. So in addition to an essential knowledge of western European
languages: Italian, French, English, German, or Spanish to understand the archives
and bibliography it is also necessary to know at least two east European languages:
Hungarian, Serbian, Rumanian, Russian, Greek or Turkish (and be able to read
Ottoman paleography). For example when Greek historian Ioannis Papadrianos
wanted to write about the Greek merchant community in Semlin in Serbia, he had

32
18
. [The Rise of Greek Shipping in the

Mediterranean of the 18
th
century], G. HARLAFTIS, K. PAPAKONSTANTINOU eds., forthcoming.
to carry out his research in Hungarian, Rumanian and Serbian literature and in
addition to the research he carried out in the Greek archives he was also required to
refer to the the archives of Belgrad and Zaghreb which house hundreds of files
written in old gothic style German and in old/ancient Slavic and Greek.
33

Furthermore following such extensive effort the researcher proceeds to write
up his study in his national language with the result that even if important research
has been undertaken in one or all of the countries in question, such research is
finally only accessible to historians of the country in question. Large bodies of
important literature are not accessible to non-nationals and the saga of isolation
continues. National historiography provides a cocoon and many a generation of
historians has not attended international conferences as ignorance and non-
communication nurtures complacency. To be a historian one has to develop many
skills. Not only does one have to be able to travel and move freely to attend
conferences, but one also has to have the ability to understand a language
commonly used to publicise research. The reign of the Soviet Union in Eastern
Europe meant that Russian developed as a significant language of communication
within Eastern Europe. Then were eastern Europeans to learn a foreign language it
would usually be French whereas the academic western world, particularly after the
1970s was rapidly moving towards English. However, the problem of not having a
common language of communication is not only a problem facing Eastern Europe
it also continues to be a problem in the Mediterranean. The plague of complacency
and introversion of national historiography that develops a historical discourse and
discusses within itself is not only a characteristic of the ex-communist countries of
Eastern Europe, but also of the capitalist countries of Greece, Italy, France and
Spain.
Despite the pervasion of such problems one should by no means diminish the
importance of the work done and the great efforts made by southeastern historians
to develop an academic dialogue.
34
Many scholars have shown interest in research-
ing the Ottoman Empire reflecting the natural concern of their own history and
cultural heritage. For example up until 1989 Bulgarians worked to publish an im-
portant amount of studies in French like Todorov or Berov for example, mainly
due to the Ottoman Archives. Communication and discussion took place mainly in
the colloquies and congresses organised by the Association du Sud-Est Europen
or the International Association of South-East European Studies (AIESEE).
AIESEE was founded in Bucharest in 1963 and it was supported by UNESCO. It
was designed as an international non-governmental organisation promoting the
study of the civilisations spread over the Balkan and South-East European spaces,
of their relationship with the other civilisations of Europe or of the rest of the
world thus turning this study into a means for reaching peace and friendship, rising
above the variety of ideologies and political regimes.
35
Its official language was
French but English and other languages were accepted. AIESEE has organised 9
international Congresses of South-East European Studies (Sofia 1966, Athens

33
I. PAPANDRIANOS, The Greek Settlers in Semlin, cit.
34
http://www.aiesee.org/fr/histoire.html (access on 20 June 2010)
35
Ibidem.
1970, Bucharest 1974, Ankara 1979, Belgrade 1984, Sofia 1989, Thessaloniki 1994,
Bucharest 1999, Tirana 2004). As it is affiliated with the International Committee
of Historical Sciences it has also taken an active part in the International Con-
gresses of Historical Sciences.
In addition to the aforementioned conferences National Commissions were
formed and organised colloquiums in Paris, Moscow, Plodded, Venice, Istanbul etc.
It was in the 1960s and 1970s that these meetings were instigated and supported by
leading historians of the time like Nikolai Todorov, Virzinija Paskaleva, Apostolos
Vacalopoulos, Michel Mollat Traian Stoianovich, Robert Martran, Omer Barkan,
Irvin Sangers, Kemal Karpat, Jose-Gentil da Silva, Mihail Berza, Georges Castellan,
Ugo Tucci, Spyros Asdrachas, Philippos Iliou, Nicholas Svoronos and others and a
prolific series of proceedings were published.
36
Academic dialogue also developed
from national institutes and their periodicals. Two such examples are: the Greek pe-
riodical Balkan Studies, published by the Institute of Balkan Studies (
) based in Thessaloniki, that started its biannual
publication in 1960 and the Bulgarian tudes Historiques, published in Sofia by the
Institute of History of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, approximately every
two years starting in the early 1960s. Both periodicals targeted an international au-
dience and contained articles mostly in French but also in German and French.
Nevertheless, just as a slow but constructive dialogue had been established, the
1990s brought a catastrophe and a negation of the past that in a way threw out the
baby with the bathwater particularly regarding economic history. With the change
in the political situation in 1989, a large number of historians in the area turned
away from economic and social history and towards political history or the history
of ideas. In the last decade a hesitant and much less dynamic growth of economic
history has been witnessed, in comparison with what had been achieved in the
period from the 1960s to the 1980s.
The difficulty of the trading companies archives is that they have to be con-
structed from wider evidence on three levels. On the first level one is required to
seek evidence from State archives on a national and local level from a) political in-
stitutions b) economic institutions, b) demographic institutions c) legal institutions
d) religious institutions and e) foreign community institutions.

36
Actes du IIe Congrs International des tudes du Su-Est Europen, Athens 7-13 Mai 1970, two
volumes, Athens 1972; Structure sociale et dveloppement culturel des villes sud-est europenes et adriatiques aux
XVII
e
-XVIII
e
sicles. Actes du Colloque interdisciplinaire, organis par la Commission dhistoire de la vie economique
et sociale dans les Balkans et la Commission dhistoire des idees dans le Sud-Est europen sous les auspices de la
Fondation Giorgio Cini de Venise et du comit italien de l AIESEE, tenu a Venise, 27-30 mai 1971, Bucarest
1975 (AISEE); Istanbul a la jonction des cultures balkanique, mediterranenes, slaves et orientales, au XVI
e
-XIX
e
sicles. Actes du colloque international organis par l AIESEE, en collaboration avec les Commissions internationales
dhistoire maritime et des tudes sur la Mediterrane et les Comits internationaux de lAsie Centrale et des tudes
slaves, Istanbul, 15-20 octobre 1973, Bucarest 1977 (AISEE); Septieme Congrs de l Association
Internationale des tudes du Sud-Est europen, Thessalonique, 29 aot-4 septembre 1994, Comit National
Hellenique, Athens 1994 (AISEE); Unite et diversite des cultures populaires du Sud-Est europen. Actes du thme
majeur n
o
3 VIIe Congrs de l Association Internationale des tudes du Sud-Est Europen, sous la direction
scientifique dAndr GUILLOU, Paris 1996 (Association Pierre Belon).
a) Political institutions: Reports of political authorities in the area on internal
affairs or reports of Consuls of a country. Both give invaluable inside
information. In recent decades, the most systematic information and
statistics historians have used regarding the Eastern Mediterranean and
Eastern Europe have been the French, Italian, Spanish, Duch, German and
English consular reports.
b) Economic institutions: Taxation from the economic authorities, imports,
exports, from Customs Houses, arrivals and departures of ships from the
Health Authorities containing information such as captains and/or owners
of ships, cargoes, mechants assigned to or navigation permits. These are
being increasingly used to identify land and sea trade; for example there are
very detailed Hapsburg and Ottoman records from the 16
th
century, in
Transylvania for the land trade or Istanbul for the sea trade of the late 18
th
century.
37
In order to trace the merchants themselves, there are trading
company catalogues, catalogues of merchants or Chambers of Commerce
in the towns, guilds of merchants, guilds of seamen or communities of
shipowners.
c) Demographic documentation from the central administrative institutions of
the empires is also very important to investigate composition of population
and identify foreign communities.
d) Legal institutions also provide invaluable information such as the judiciary
status of merchants and court cases for fraud or tax avoidance. Statutes of
companies or communities are an important source. The notaries are
another vast invaluable source on an economic and social level: purchases,
sales, chartering, renting, work contracts, and on a social level bequests or
wills along with numerous other documents required by the State.
e) Church/parish archives: Church records of marriages, baptisms and deaths
can prove invaluable in drawing up a picture of the population of different
Christian groups, like the Greeks, Armenians or the Serbians.
f) Foreign community institutions: Foreign communities formed their own
statutes and kept archives on their members, the minutes of their meetings,
on church affairs, community schools, charity, etc.
On a second level information should be sought from beyond the country in
which a trading family was based in the countries in which they traded. In the case
of maritime trade such records as the arrivals in the Health Authorities and
Customs Houses of the port-towns can be researched. Such evidence in western
European Archives also exists printed from the last third of the 18
th
century like the
Avvisi in Genova or Lloyds List in London. Thus in order to trace the trad-
ing/shipping company based on the island of Hydra, one must carry out research in

37
For example Pakucs has examined the trade in the town of Sibiu based on its customs registers
from 1500 to 1597. The source material consisted of 22 such customs accounts, 21 of them being
unpublished. The intrinsic value of these primary sources is evident. See PAKUCS-WILLCOCKS, Sibiu-
Hermannstadt. Oriental trade in sixteenth century Transylvania, Kln-Weimar-Wien 2006.
the Greek State Archives in Athens, in the Turkish State Archives in Istanbul, in
the local Hydra Archives and then search for Hydriots in the western European
port-towns: in Venice, Trieste, Ancona, Malta, Messina, Napoli, Livorno, Genova,
Marseille, Barcelona, Cadiz, Lisbon, Amsterdam as well as in the Russian Black Sea
ports of Odessa and Taganrog. This demands carrying out research in Turkish,
Greek, Italian, Maltese, French, Spanish, English and Dutch archives.
On a third level one should refer to the actual documents of trading houses in
the form of commercial and personal correspondence, account books of business
and family, financial books, bills of exchange, various certificates and state
certificates etc. Such evidence exists but there are only a few identified archives of
family trading companies in Austrian, Hungarian, Rumanian, Bulgarian and Greek
archives. In most cases the researcher has to construct an archive from many
sources in order to be able to trace the activities of the trading company under
examination.
38

In order to address this multi-levelled research, projects need to be organised in
order to combine archives and form databases that will be accesible to researchers.
Such projects have taken place. Two such research projects on land and sea trade
of southeastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean have taken place in Greek
Universities the one was organised by the University of Athens and the other by the
Ionian University. The first project was geared towards qualititative archival
research and brought new insight to the traditional national historiography issues
and archival research; the second was geared towards quantitative analysis, and the
formation of databases in order to construct 18
th
century historical shipping
statistics. Both projects were research programmes that were co-financed by the
Greek Ministry of Education and European Union to promote research in Greek
universities.
The project Greek Communities and the European World (13
th
-19
th
centu-
ries). Patterns of self-administration, social organisation and identity formation
was led by Professors Olga Katsiardi-Hering, Anastasia Papadia-Lala and Maria Ef-
thymiou and had a team of ten Greek researchers of doctorate level, Ph.D. and
post-graduate students. The project dealt with a traditional theme of Greek
historiography, the diaspora Greek communities in Venice, in the Hapsburg
Empire and the Danubian Principalities. The main research areas were a) the
institutional framework of the community organisation b) intra-community features
and c) community activities.
39

Research took place in Venice and mainly covered the period from the 16
th
to
the 19
th
century as represented in published and unpublished archives of Venetian-
conquered lands of Greece, essentially Crete and the port towns of Parga, Preveza
and Vonitsa of the Ionian Sea situated on the Greek mainland. Archival data from

38
A. GUENZI, ercanti senza archivio. La ricostruzione dell'attivit produttiva e del patrimonio de famiglie
imprenditoriali tra seta e finanza (Bologna, dalla fine del Seicento al primo Ottocento), in The Economic Role of the
Family, cit., pp. 509-516.
39
The first results of the outcome of this research have been published in 14 articles in the
journal [Eoa and Esperia], the Journal of the Association of Research for the
relations of the medieval and modern Hellenism with the West, Volume 7, 2007.
the State Archive of Venice was photographed, catalogued and transliterated like
the reports and demands of Embassies sent to Venice, records of marriages and
baptisms and various other institutions and activities of the Venetian colonies etc.
Research also took place in Vienna and in the Hungarian towns of Miskolc,
Storaljajheli and Tokaj and in Rumania in Bucarest, Konstantza, Galatz, Tulcea
and Giurgiu.
Although emphasis was given to institutions of the Greek communities, the
research team working in Hungary and Rumania was specialised in merchant
communities and trading companies. Hence a large part of this programme
collected material that provide information and a full bibliography of the political,
economic and institutional environment of the Balkan traders. A database was
formed and all the archival material photographed and catalogued was transliterated
and classified. At this point it must be said that the Department of History and
Archaelogy at the University of Athens, particularly under the guidance of Olga
Katsiardi-Hering has pioneered in the research of merchant communities and
trading companies in central and southeastern Europe.
40

The project undertaken by the Department of History at the Ionian University
was titled The Maritime History of the Greeks, 1700-1821 and was led by Gelina
Harlaftis. Katerina Papakonstantinou, post-doctorate researcher acted as head
researcher of the project; Sophia Laiou, lecturer at the Ionian University, was in
charge of the research in the Istanbul Archives and Gerassimos Pagratis, lecturer at
the University of Athens, was in charge of the southern Italian Archives. The aim
was to identify, chart and interpret the shipping activities of the fleet of Ottoman
and Venetian Greek subjects in the Mediterranean Sea during the 18
th
century.
Furthermore its aim was to examine the family shipping companies of the islands
and port-towns of the Ionian and Aegean seas that owned and operated those
fleets. The team consisted of 20 individuals amongst which were Greek, Turkish,
Italian, Maltese and Dutch researchers that worked in the archives of Istanbul,
Venice, Trieste, Malta, Messina, Napoli, Livorno, Genova, Marseille, London and
Amsterdam, along with those of Athens, Corfu, Cephalonia, Hydra, Spetses,
Salonica and Crete.
In all ports under examination (with the exception of Venice), Sanit Archives
have survived covering most or all the 18
th
century to the mid-19
th
century. These

40
See the valuable work of Olga Katsiardi-Hering on the Greek merchant community of Trieste,
Senigallia and on Greek diaspora and communities in Central and Southeastern Europe; selectively
here, see O. KATSIARDI-HERING, The Greek Community in Trieste;
Senigallia (18os - 19 ) [Forgotten Horizons of Greek Merchants in the
Senigallia Fair (18
th
-19
th
centuries)], Athens 1989 (D.N. Karavias Publications); EADEM,
(18 - 19 .). E:
(1805) [Craftsmen and techniques of dyeing thread from Thessaly to central Europe (18
th
-
beginning of 19
th
century). Epimetron: The Ambelakia Company], Athens 2003, (Herodotos);
15-21 ., EADEM, I.K. HASSIOTIS, E. ABATZI eds., Athens 2006 (Vouli ton Ellinon). In
addition to her own work Olga Katsiardi-Hering has supervised and trained a number of young Greek
historians who are fluent in eastern and western European languages and have produced excellent
studies on merchant communities and trading companies; see for example V. SEIRINIDOU, Greeks in
Vienna, cit.; K. PAPAKONSTANTINOU, Greek commercial businesses in central Europe, cit.; I. MANTOUVALOS,
Aspects of the Greek diaspora, cit.
include detailed and valuable information registered by the quarantine officials as
declared by the ships captains, concerning the name and type of ship, name of
captain, place of origin, nationality of vessel, number of seamen, port(s) where
cargoes were loaded, kind of cargo and weight, length of journey, ports
approached, merchants to which cargoes were destined. All researchers input
information into a database named Amphitrete specially designed to register ship
voyages of Ottoman and Venetian Greeks to the Western Mediterreanean. For the
period 1700-1821 Amphitrete has 24,000 registered voyages out of which 15,000
concern Ottoman and Venetian Greeks.
In Malta the Sanit archives were found for the whole of the 18
th
century up to
1816 in the National Library of Malta in Valletta. For the port of Livorno most
researchers apart from Jean Pierre Filippini- have looked for the Ufficiali di Sanit
in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze, as the Livorno officials would send such
documentation to the central government. The documents of the Ufficiali di Sanit
archives after 1778 in the Archivio di Stato di Firenze were destroyed in the 1877
Florence flood and it has been stated more than once that the documentation of
the Livorno Sanit archives does not exist after 1778. In the Archivio di Stato di
Livorno, however, all the Sanit books for the port were found with complete
details of the daily arrival of ships from Levant and the Barbary States registered in
the port with all their details from 1767 to 1860.
41
In Genoa, evidence of arrivals of
ships from suspected areas were found in the Archivio di Stato di Genova for the
years 1780-1819. Furthermore, daily arrivals at the port of Genoa from all
destinations were published in the valuable weekly maritime and commercial
journal of Genoa named Avvisi that ran from 1778 to 1797; this journal was
discovered in microfilms in the Biblioteca Universitaria of the University of Genoa.
All the Italian archives of Sanit include arrivals of foreign vessels, excluding their
own national coastal vessels. In Marseille the evidence derives from the rchives
Dpartementales des Bouches du Rhne. Data for Trieste and Ancona was found
in the Archivio di Stato di Venezia, in the series Cinque Savi alla Mercanzia. In
Venice no Sanit has survived and valuable data of Greek-owned ships sailing
under the Venetian flag was drawn from the Archivio di Stato di Venezia from the
series Scuole piccole e suffragi, san Nicolo dei marineri, which is the guild of the
Venetian seamen. As far as Ottoman sources are concerned, evidence was drawn
from five registers located in the Prime Ministry Archive of Istanbul that include
permissions for the ships sailing to and from the Black Sea during 1780-1821.
The database Amphitrete which contained information in six languages was
entirely translated into Greek and has provided invaluable information in mapping
Mediterranean trade and tracing the Venetian-Greek and Ottoman-Greek vessels
back to their places of origin. Family business can thus be traced locally and be
combined with local archives. The Amphitrete database is really a constructed
archive from over twenty sources and provides uniquely combined information
about the activities of a few thousand Ottoman-Greek and Venetian-Greek
shipowners and merchants from the islands of the Aegean and the Ionian Seas,

41
Jean Pierre Filippini in his opus on Livorno trade and shipping clearly refers to these archives
which he has used extensively. See J.-P. FILIPPINI, Il porto di Livorno, cit., 2, pp. 100-101.
which would not have been known or traceable otherwise. Amphitrete also provides
information on British and American shipowners trading in Mediterranean ports.
42
3. Methodology
The methodology adopted to research international business is intertwined with
the interpretative issues involved, that is with the main questions that were posed.
Five types of methodology can be distinguished in discussing international business
in southeastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean. The first approach is
through an overview of the history of the region; the second is connected with
nation building and the role merchants played in this; the third focuses on ethnic
minorities/ethnic communities established in the urban centres of southeastern
Europe; the fourth is via the analysis of the trade of a major port town; and the
fifth is the actual history of the family trading company itself.
The first approach is the analysis of the history of the region. The classic article
by Traian Stoianovich in 1960 remains unprecedented in its attempt to trace the
first formation of a bourgeoisie in southeastern Europe. The term Balkan
Conquering Orthodox Merchant underlines the multinational and multilingual
nature of a new bourgeoisie that was formed in the area whereas the conquered
Christian merchant in the Ottoman Empire is conquering the European
markets.
43
International business of the area has also been approached partially
from a general history view of the region of southeastern Europe interchangeably
referred to as the Balkans.
44
It has also been approached from different economic
aspects by various researchers.
45
However, the majority of literature on long-distance trade and merchants of the
area was initially absorbed by national historiography. Until very recently research
in trade and trading companies has served an introvert national historiography that
does not communicate its findings beyond its borders and has been highly biased
by national historiography and local historians. For example, in the Greek national

42
The results of this research along with the CD of Ampitrete will be published in the volume:
18
. [The Rise of Greek Shipping in the Mediterranean of

the 18
th
century], cit.
43
T. STOIANOVICH, The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant, cit. The Cambridge History of Turkey, 3,
The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839, ed. S. FAROQUI, Cambridge 2006 (Cambridge University Press),
pp. 283-289. EADEM, The Ottoman Empire and the World Around It, London 2006 (I.B. Tauris). H.
INALIK, The Middle East and the Balkans under the Ottoman Empire: Essays on Economy and Society,
Bloomington 1993 (Indiana University Turkish Studies).
44
See footnote 1.
45
B. LJUBEN, Transport Costs and Their Role in Trade in the Balkan Lands in the 16
th
- 19
th
Centuries, in
Bulgarian Historical Review, 3, 1975, pp. 74-98. D. ANOYATIS-PELE, Aperu sur le cot du transport
terrestre dans les Balkans au XVIII
e
sicle (1715-1820), in Actes du IIe Colloque International d' Histoire (Athnes
18-25 Sept. 1983) conomies mditerranennes, quilibres et intercommunications XIII
e
-XIX
e
sicles, Athens 1986
(-), 2, pp. 75-112. M. BUR, Das Raumergreifen balkanischer Kaufleute im Wirtschaftsleben der
ostmitteleuropischen Lnder im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, in Brgertum und brgerliche Entwicklung in Mittel- und
Osteuropa, ed. V. BCSKAI, Budapest 1986 (Studia Historiae Europae Medio-Orientalis). The Origins of
Backwardness in Eastern Europe. Economics and Politics from the Middle Ages until the Twentieth Century, ed. D.
CHIROT, Berkeley 1989 (The University of California Press).
historiography, nation-building has been entirely connected with Greek merchants
in the Russian and Hapsburg Empires, in the Italian states, in France and in
Holland. This is where the Greek Enlightenment took place, this is where all the
ideological trends and organisation of the Greek War of Independence in the 1820s
took place.
46
Their importance in the formation of the modern Greek state put the
study of the Greek merchant communities abroad at the centre of the attention and
research of important Greek historians since the nineteenth century. The formation
of the institutions of these communities and their relations to Greece, the social
and political dimension and, much less so, the economic side have been at the heart
of this kind of ongoing research throughout the past century. This line of research
is true to the period of historicism and traditional national historiography as it has
an entirely hellenocentric view point.
47

All southeastern European national historiography shares a common approach
to this kind of historiography referring to the dark ages of Ottoman rule which
led to backwardness and hindered development of business activities. It emphasises
national issues, reproduces prejudices and negative stereotypes of the other
neighbour, resulting from confrontations of the young national states of the region
and has hindered systematic and unbiased academic comparative research until
recently. In Rumanian literature, for example, the Greek-Levantines, the
Phanariotes, in many cases former merchants, appointed by the Sultan to rule the
twin Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia since the 17
th
century, have been
treated as the agents of the Ottomans that exploited the Rumanian people. It seems
that the dichotomy between the local elite and the newcomers was not as it has
been constructed by national Rumanian historiography and more systematic and
comparative research reveals the multi-cultural aspects of the wealthy families in a
reality that was much more complex but simultaneously unconcerned with national
divisions.
48

46
C.TH. DIMARAS, La Grce aux temps des Lumires, Geneva 1969; P.M. Kitromilidis, Neohellenic
Enlightenment [ ], Athens 1969, (M.I.E.T.); T.C. PROUSSIS, Russian Society and the
Greek Revolution, Illinois 1994, (Northern Illinois University Press).
47
For the trends of Greek historiography see The Historiography of Modern and Contemporary Greece,
I-II, P.M. KITROMILIDES, TR. SKLAVENITIS eds., Athens 2004. For hellenocentric types of Greek
communities see for example Athanasios Karathanasis, L Hellenisme en Transylvanie. L activit culturelle,
nationale et religieuse de companies commerciales hellniques de Sibiu et de Braov aux XVIII-XIX sicles, Institute
for Balkan Studies, Thessalonique, 1989; D. TSOURKA-PAPASTATHI, The Greek Company of Sibiu of
Transylvania. Organisation and Law, 1689-1848, [ , 1636-1848.
], Thessalonique 1994 (Institute for Balkan Studies).
48
By Greek-Levantine Radu Paun defines all non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire,
whether Orthodox, Catholic, Armenian or Jew. It concerns Orthodox people (Greeks, Albanians or
Vlachs), who used to employ Greek as cultural language, thereby being currently identified as
Greeks by Moldavian-Wallachian and western observers alike. R. PAUN, Some Remarks about the
Historical Origins of the Phanariot Phenomenon in Moldavia and Wallachia (16
th
-19
th
Centuries), paper
presented in the International Conference Greeks in Romania in the 19
th
century. October 2008, Alpha Bank
Historical Archives, Nikolae Iorga Institute of History, Bucharest. See also his Stratgies de famille,
stratgies de pouvoir: les Grco-Levantins en Moldavie au XVII
e
sicle, in Social Behaviour and Family Strategies in
the Balkans (16
th
-20
th
Centuries) / Comportements sociaux et stratgies familiales dans les Balkans (XVI
e
-XX
e
sicles), C. VINTILA-GHITULESCU, I. BALUTA eds., Bucharest 2008 (New Europe College-CRIS
It is interesting to note the development of Ottoman and Turkish history. As
Donald Quataert asserts Ottoman history writing in the West began as an offshoot
of European history, mainly by historians interested in the Eastern Question.
49
The Cold War, the opening of the Ottoman archives and the reign of regional
history in the United States sparked the interest in Ottoman studies that developed
quickly from the 1970s. The interpretative framework that was followed had two
main features. The first was the presupposition that the Ottoman Empire and
Turkey were synonymous entities. This line of thought meant that the histories of
the Balkan and Arab provinces of the empire comprised an irrelevant agenda of
these Ottoman historians. It is only recently that the Balkan provinces have begun
to receive serious attention. The second was the great importance given to the
westernisation of the Ottoman economy and, in the light of the neo-marxist
Wallersteinian model of world-system, to the development of capitalism in the
Ottoman lands under the periphery-centre approach. Economic history became a
major area of emphasis in this light and has provided some excellent examples of
scholarship.
50
To my knowledge under this ever dominant influence there are no
works in English on Ottoman-Muslim businesses of southeastern Europe.
The third methodological approach is that of focusing on ethnic minori-
ties/ethnic communities established in urban centres and on the analysis of their
trading networks and social and economic organisation. One part of the discourse
is from the point of view of national/ethnic historiography. For example, on the
one hand Greek historians look exclusively at Greek traders and their communities
in say Hungary or Rumania with the prime purpose of extolling the achievements
of their nationals in the economic, social and intellectual sphere and determining
the links and influence in their home country. On the other hand, Rumanian or
Hungarian historians look at the foreigners presence in their country to see how
this affected the economic, social, political and intellectual development of their
own country.
51
The other problematic aspect of this discourse is global history whereby trade-
diasporas were an early engine of the intergration of global economy, an area that
has been a vibrant field for economic, business, political and social historians,
sociologists and economists since the 1990s. Philip Curtin, who introduced this
debate in 1984 argued that these trade diasporas were cross-cultural brokers who
helped to encourage trade between the host society and their own and supports the

Publishing House). See also O. JENS SCHMITT, Levantiner Lebenswelten und Identitten einer
ethnoconfessionellen Gruppe im osmanischen Reich im langen 19. Jahrnundert, Mnchen 2005.
49
D. QUATAERT, Trends in the History Writing of the Late Ottoman Empire, in The New Ways of History,
G. HARLAFTIS, N. KARAPIDAKIS, K. SBONIAS, V.VAIOPOULOS eds., London 2010 (IB Tauris).
50
S. PAMUK, Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism, 1820-1913. Trade, Investment and Production,
Cambridge 1987 (Cambridge University Press). H. INALIK, D. QUATAERT, An Economic and Social
History, cit.
51
GH. LAAR, Les marchands en Valachie, XVII
e
-XVIII
e
sicles, Bucarest 2006 (Institutul Cultural
Romn); P. CERNOVODEANU, Comerul rilor romne n secolul al XVII-lea [The commerce of the Rumanian
regions in the 18
th
century], in Reviste de Istorie, 33, 1980, n. 6, pp. 1071-1098; O. CICANCI, Companiile
Greceti din Transilvania i commenul european in anii 1636-1746 [The Greek companies in Transylvania and the
European trade: 16361746], Bucharest 1981 (Editura Academiei); EADEM, Les grecs macdoniens.
Contribution a` la vie sociale des Principauts Roumaines, in Historical Yearbook, I, 2004, pp. 121-128.
view that there was a clear dichotomy between host societies and outside trading
groups.
52
The argument here is that national historiographies have masked the
significance of trade diasporas and their entrepreneurial networks. Regional and
long-distance trading networks, always existed in Europe and Asia from the
Mediterranean to the northern European seas, the Indian Ocean, the southeast
Asian seas, but later also stretching across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This
kind of business lay at the heart of the gradual integration of the world into one
global system. From this point of view, researchers have looked at various aspects
of trading diasporas of Greeks, Jews and Armenians in the area.
Apart from an extensive bibliography on the Jews in southeastern Europe,
53
which is available in the English language, Greek historiography, for its own sake,
has developed an important discourse on the Greek diaspora merchant
communities/paroikies in a discourse that has thrived since the 1970s and is
known as the paroikiako phenomenon. Due to the fact that it formed a large
body of important literature on the subject in the last third of the twentieth century,
it held international appeal from a comparative perspective and in the last decade a
series of seminars and conferences were organised leading to the publication of
books and articles on the diasporas of southeastern Europe and the Eastern
Mediterranean, comparing particularly the Greeks and the Jews and including to a
lesser degree the Armenians.
54
It seems that Jews in the 18
th
century were concen-
trated in the port-towns and did not handle the land trade of southeastern Europe
which was left in the hands of Ottoman Greeks, Orthodox Albanians and Vlachs.
The studies on the Greek merchant communities of various important cities
such as Trieste, Vienna, Livorno and Port Mahon for the 18
th
century have
provided all the necessary information not only concerning the environment in

52
P. CURTIN, Cross Cultural Trade in World History, Cambridge 1984 (Cambridge University Press).
See also Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks. Five Centuries of History, cit.
53
A. LEVY, The Sephardim in the Ottoman Empire, Princeton-New Jersey 1992 (the Darwin Press);
E. BENBASSA, A. RODRIGUE, The Jews of the Balkans. The Judeo-Spanish Community, 15
th
to 20
th
Centuries,
Oxford UK-Cambridge USA 1995 (Blackwell); J.I. ISRAEL, Diasporas within a Diaspora. Jews, Crypto-Jews
and the World Maritime Empires (1540-1740), Leiden 2002 (Brill); M. ROZEN, A History of the Jewish
Community in Istanbul. The Formative Years, 1453-1566, Leiden-Boston 2002 (Brill); M. ROZEN, Strangers
in a Strange Land: The Extra-territorial Status of Jews in Italy and the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth to the 18
th
Centuries, in Ottoman and Turkish Jewry. Community and Leadership, ed. A. RODRIGUE, Bloomington 1992,
(Indiana University Turkish Studies, 12), pp. 144-154; IDEM, Contest and Rivalry in Mediterranean Maritime
Commerce in the First Half of the 18
th
Century: The Jews of Salonica and the European Presence, in Revue des
etudes juives, 147, 1988; G. HERING, Die Juden in Salonica, in Sudst-Forschungen, 58, 1999, pp. 23-29.
54
See for example Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks. Five Centuries of History, cit. See also the
international conference, Competing Networks: Greek and Other Commercial Houses in the Mediterranean
during the Long Nineteenth Century, University of Haifa, June 6-7 2006. Also an outcome of an equivalent
conference is the volume Home-Lands and Diasporas. Greeks, Jews and their Migrations, ed. M. ROZEN,
London-New York 2008 (IB Tauris), pp. 169-180; O. KATSIARDI-HERING, Christian and Jewish Ottoman
Subjects: Family, Inheritance and Commercial Networks between East and West (17
th
-18
th
c.), in The Economic Role
of the Family, cit. See also I. HASSIOTIS, :
[Historical Conditions of the Greek and Armenian Enlightenment: Convergencies and
Divergencies] in O [The Greek
World between the time of Enlightenment and the Twentieth century] Proceedings of the 3
rd
European Congress of
Neohellenic Studies], Bucarest, 2-4 June 2006, ed. K. DIMADIS, Athens 2007 (Ellinika Grammata), pp.
335-348.
which the merchants worked, but also with regard to companies, their organisation,
business methods and networks.
55
Linking the foreign merchant communities of
the Mediterranean has also brought out the importance of shipping and the sea-
trade routes from the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea to the Western
Mediterranean.
56

The urban centres and particularly the port-towns constitute the fourth metho-
dology in studying trade and trading companies in the area. The rise in the impor-
tance of the Mediterranean in global trade that was evident in the 19
th
century was
already clearly discernable in the 18
th
century. The traditional economic centres of
the Levante, Aleppo and Alexandria of Tripoli were replaced in a shift to the nor-
theastern Mediterranean. Moreover, the export trade of the Balkans that during the
17
th
century took place from Durazzo and was handled by Raguzan and Venetian
merchants and shipowners declined.
57
There was a significant growth of
commercial centres in southeastern Europe and Western Asia Minor, areas with
Christian populations within the Ottoman Empire.
58
The development of trade
from the chelles of the Aegean Sea and the development of Smyrna and Salonica as
the main exporting ports of the Eastern Mediterranean resulted in linking the
Ottoman Empire with the global economy. Major works on the 18
th
century export
trade of Salonica, Smyrna and Istanbul have been published in French and
English.
59
Nikolaj Todorov has done an excellent study on the economic activities
of the Balkan cities which has been translated from Bulgarian into Greek and is
standard point of reference.
60
The fifth approach is the family trading companies themselves. It is interesting
that although we have an overall picture, we do not really have enough research on

55
O. KATSIARDI, Merchant Community of Trieste; V. SEIRINIDOU, Greeks in Vienna; D. VLAMI,
, . , 1750-1868 [The fiorino, the grain and the
Garden street. Greek merchants in Livorno, 1750-1868], Athens 2000; K. HASSIOTIS,
. [The Alexianos of Minorca.
Contribution to the history of Greek diaspora in the 18
th
century], in Rodonia. Timi ston M. I. Manoussaca, 2 Vols,
Rethymnon 1994, 2, pp. 649-660; N.G. SVORONOS, .
18 [The Greek community of Minorca. Contribution to the
history of the Greek merchant shipping of the 18
th
century], in Mlanges offerts Octave et Melpo Merlier, I-II,
Athens 1956, 1, pp. 323-343. In addition to the aforementioned two articles in Greek, there is also the
study of F. HERNNDEZ SANZ, La colonia griega establecida en Mahn durante el siglo XVIII, Mahon 1925.
56
V. KREMMYDAS, E , 1776-1835 [Greek Shipping, 1776-1835], I-II, Athens 1985; G.
HARLAFTIS, The Eastern Invasion, cit.; G. HARLAFTIS, S. LAIOU, Ottoman State Policy, cit.
57
F.W. CARTER, Dubrovnik (Ragusa). A classic city-state. London-New York 1972; Ragusa e il
Mediterraneo. Ruolo e funzioni di una Repubblica marinara tra Medioevo ed Et moderna. Atti del Convegno
Internazionale, Bari 21-22 Ott. 1988, ed. A. DI VITTORIO, Bari 1990 (Cacucci Editore). A. DI
VITTORIO, Tra mare e terra. Aspetti economici e finanziari della Repubblica di Ragusa in et moderna, Bari 2001
(Cacucci Editore). V. SEIRINIDOU, Greeks in Vienna, cit., p. 42.
58
MCGOWAN, Economic life, cit., p. 27, V. SEIRINIDOU, Greeks in Vienna, cit., p. 34
59
N. SVORONOS, Le Commerce de Salonique au XVIII sicle, Paris 1956; E. FRANGAKIS-SYRETT, The
Commerce of Smyrna in the 18
th
Century (1700-1820), Athens 1992 (Centre for Asia Minor Studies); E.
EDHEM, French Trade in Istanbul in the 18
th
Century, Leiden 1996 (Brill). Very few works exist on the
connections of western port-cities with the Ottomans; see A. DI VITTORIO, Il Commercio tra Levante
Ottomano e Napoli nel secolo XVIII, Napoli 1979.
60
N. TODOROV, The Balkan City, cit.
the main players, the family trading companies. The greatest part of the research at
this micro-level of southeastern Europe is economic and social history, but in some
cases is more social than economic; in other words the analysis is absorbed more
with the social activities of the family and less with the analysis of their economic
activities. As far as I am aware it is almost exclusively Greek historians that have
built up an important body of literature on the trading companies of the land and
sea trade of southeastern and Eastern Europe. This is wonderful for Greek
historiography, but the unfortunate aspect is that almost all of this valuable
literature is only available in Greek. Take for example the following six trading
companies of southeastern European traders established in Pest, Vienna, Sibiu,
Izmail, and Philipoupoli.
The history of the first trading company is based on Hungarian archives and
records the history of a Macedonian Vlach family that established a trading compa-
ny in Hungary in the late 18
th
century. The Manos family came from Moschopoli of
Western Macedonia and established a trading company that survived for three gen-
erations in Pest and developed a vast entrepreneurial network throughout southeas-
tern and central Europe that was further interconnected with other Greek
entrepreneurial networks in southern Russia and England. The study contains tho-
rough analysis of cargoes and amounts carried, of credit, transport and agencies
across the Balkans, along with an insightful analysis of the family life and business
and its intergration in the Hungarian economy and society of Pest. The extensive
company archives are kept in the Budapest archives and contain correspondence,
detailed account books etc. mostly in the Greek language.
61

The history of the second company is based on Greek archives and is the study
of the Greek Georgios Stavrou company from Ioannina in Epirus. Stavrou
established a financial company in Vienna in the 1790s involved in finance and
trade. It dealt with the trade of bills of exchange between Vienna, the Ottoman
Empire, Amsterdam and Italy, provided loans and agency services and dealt with
the cotton trade from Macedonia. After 1812 Georgios Stavrou returned to
Ioannina and became the financier of Ali Pasha until his death. It is interesting to
note that his son Georgios Stavrou was the founder of the National Bank of
Greece.
62
The history of two further trading companies is based on Rumanian and Greek
archives involved in the land and sea trade of the area. The first company was that
run by the Pop family from western Macedonia established in Sibiu, Transylvania
and the second, was run by the Douroutis family from Epirus, and was established
in Epirus, Ancona and Livorno. The book traces the involvement of these two
trading families in trade, finance and shipping. The archives of the Pop family,

61
See I. MANTOUVALOS, Aspects of the Greek diaspora. Another equally interesting study is that on a
Greek family trading company, the Pondikas from Salonica and established in Pest, see K.
PAPAKONSTANTINOU, Greek Commercial Businesses in Central Europe.
62
A. IGGLESI, . [Northern Greek
Merchants at the end of the Turkish Conquest. Stavros Ioannou], Athens 2004.
found in Rumania, are very rich, however, and are far from being exhaustively
researched.
63

The next study is based on Bulgarian archives and has revealed the economic
activities and the symbiosis of Greeks, Armenians and Bulgarians in Philipoupoli
(Plovdiv) in the 18
th
century. From the 17
th
to 19
th
centuries the area produced fine
and coarse (aba) woolen cloth which they traded in Asia Minor, the Arab provinces
and India. Armenian and Greek traders travelled for several years trading the cloth
along the Asian land routes. A Greek trading in India received the surname
Hindistanlis, an Armenian trading in India received the name Hindliyan.
64
It is
also interesting to note the formation of a substantial Greek trading community in
Calcutta in the 1770s, with the majority of the members coming from Philipoupoli.
Trading to the East is still an area that needs research. What this study gives us is an
amazing synthesis of the economic, social and political dimension of the productive
and trading activities of the Philipoupolites mainly in the 19
th
century. It analyses in
depth the activities of two families in the leading group of the aba guild involved in
the production and trading of the aba cloth: the Tsalikof Bulgarian family (or
gender as the writer calls it), and that of the Gioumousgerdani Greek family in
a fascinating story of Greek Ottomans in the turbulent Balkans in the era of
nationalism.
The shipping companies of the Aegean and Ionian seas have evidently attracted
the attention of Greek historians. Vassilis Kremmydas has provided us with the
first studies of shipping enterprise in the late 18
th
century based on Greek and
French archives. The first study concerns the finance of shipping companies of the
island of Spetses by a major financier based in the Peloponnese. The Spetsiot
shipowners traded from Taganrog in the Azov and Alexandria to Barcelona, Cadiz
and Amsterdam from the 1780s-1810. The second study is on the Kalogeras family
from Mykonos acting as a shipping and trade agency in Izmail on the Danube of a
Constantinople trading house with a network extending across the Black Sea ports
and the Eastern Mediterranean. Moreover, Venetian archives in Venice and the
Ionian islands have been a main source of information on Greek shipping and
trading companies in the early modern period and a significant body of literature
has already been developed which is almost exclusively in Greek. This covers
shipping and trading companies of the Ionian islands and the port-towns of
western Greece (Epirus and Macedonia).
65

63
A. DIAMANDIS, [Types of merchants and
forms of conscience in modern Greece], Athens 2007 (Estia).
64
A. LYBERATOS, Economics and Politics, cit., pp. 66-68, 73.
65
For a detailed account of archival sources of early modern involvement of Greeks in sea trade
and shipping mainly based on Venetian archives, see G.D. PAGRATIS, Greek Commercial Shipping (15
th
to
17
th
Centuries). Literature Review and Research Perspectives, in Journal of Mediterranean Studies, 12, 2002,
n. 2, pp. 411-433. The most detailed study on Ionian business in sea trade in the early modern period
based on the Venetian notarial arhives of Corfu is that of IDEM,
, 1496-1538 [Maritime trade in Venetian-ruled Corfu, 1496-1538], Unpublished PhD thesis, Ionian
University-Corfu, 2001. See also CH. PANAYOTOPOULOU,
[Greek shipowners and seamen recorded in the
oldest financial registers of the Greek Confraternity of Venice], in Thesavrismata, 11, 1974, pp. 308-328; M.
PANAYOTIS, - . .
4. Interpretative issues
The economic and social history of the area under examination was absorbed
by the discourse of the development of world capitalism, of the formation of the
centre and periphery, a historiography that followed a Marxist approach.
Southeastern Europe was of course on the periphery of Europe along with all
countries in the Eastern Mediterranean. From the unequal exchange between centre
and periphery where the centre exploits the periphery an extensive bourgeois
class of merchants emerged that acted across the boundaries of empires and
countries. This debate was closely connected to the appearance of the Dependency
School, which emerged in the late 1950s to explain the development of capitalism
in backward nations, particularly in Latin America.
66
Merchants and shipowners of
southeastern Europe were regarded as agents of capitalism, they assumed the role
of internal forces that function as go-betweens and sell them out to the
external forces, i.e. the developed capitalist countries. As such, these agents, that
really formed an emerging bourgeoisie held a negative role because they were held
responsible for the backwardness and the dependence and have been described as
an adulterated bourgeoisie, Trojan horses of foreign consortia, agents of
imperialism, and comprador bourgeoisie.
67
The negative aspect of this trend was
this black and white attitude which on the one hand brought forth the issue of a
total backwardness of the Ottoman Empire which was held responsible for the
dependence and underdevelopment of the area and of the nations that were formed
subsequently in the 19
th
and 20
th
centuries. However, this merchant class in the
Balkans as it was consolidated in the 18
th
century functioned as the intermediary

(1732-1737) [The commercial co-operation between the Venetian firm of Taroniti-Theotoki and the
brothers G. and Th. Georgivalos], in Mnimon, 8, 1980, pp. 226-302; V. KREMMYDAS,
. [A history of the Greek merchant house
of Venice Selekis and Saros. A statistical approach], in Thissavrismata, 12, 1975, pp. 171-199; E. LIATA,
. 17
18 [A Greek merchant in the West.

His career in the 17
th
and 18
th
century], in Rodonia. Timi ston M. I. Manoussaca, 1, Rethymno 1994, pp. 279-
297. For the trade of north-western Greece along the north land-routes and the western sea-routes,
see , (18
.)
[Contribution to the history of the trade of the Epirots with Venice (18
th
c.)], in Epirotika Chronika, 41,
Ioannina 2007, pp. 9-37; IDEM, (18
.) [Greek capote makers in Venice (18

th
c.)], in Deltion tis Istorikis kai Ethnologikis Etaireias tis Ellados, 27, 1984, pp. 20-24. Zacharias
Tsirpanlis, (1720-1721) [Merchants from Ioannina and the
commercial policy of Venice (1720-1721)], in Charisteion Seraphim Tika, Archiepiskopou Athinon kai pasis
Ellados, Thessaloniki 1984, pp. 473-499. G.D. PAGRATIS, 16
(1550-1567) [Merchants from Ioannina in the middle of the 16

th
century (1550-1567)], in
Thesaurismata, 28, 1998, pp. 129-173.
66
G. PALMA, Dependency: a Formal Theory of Underdevelopment or a Methodology for the Analysis of
Concrete Situations of Underdevelopment, in World Development, 6, 1978, pp. 881-924; C. TSOUCALAS,
Dpendance et reproduction. Le role social des appareils scolaries en Grce, Paris 1975.
67
A large body of literature developed by Greek historians, political and social scientists on this
issue for the period 18
th
to 20
th
centuries. See N. PSIROUKIS, Greek Settlers in Modern Times, Athens 1974
(Epikairotita); N. POULANTZAS, La crise des dictatures (Portugal, Grce, Espagne), Paris 1975 (Maspero); C.
MOSKOFF, The National and Social Consciousness in Greece, 1830-1909, Salonica 1972; N. MOUZELIS,
Modern Greece: Facets of Underdevelopment, London 1978 (Macmillan).
between the Ottoman State and the European markets and was the catalyst for the
integration of the Ottoman Empire in the capitalist economy.
In the light of this neo-marxist framework of the dependency theories and the
Wallersteinian model of world system, the bourgeoisies of southeastern Europe
were regarded as a comprador class and agents of imperialism in the area. This kind
of periphery-centre approach still has a great influence on Ottoman and Turkish
economic historians.
68
Greek, Serbian, Croatian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Rumanian,
Turkish economic historians, sociologists, political scientists and development
scholars followed this trend from the 1960s to the 1980s. The positive aspect of
this trend is that it made an effort to view the Balkans/southeastern Europe as a
total area of research and not from a fragmented nationalistic point of view. A large
number of valuable studies came out of that early stage.
69
However, as the
aforementioned was the result of the development of economic and social history
from the 1950s to the 1990s, the detailed micro-picture and business/company
history was regarded with a certain scorn, and hence there have been extremely few,
if any studies of individual businesses in the early modern period.
What business history has to do is first to remove the baggage of the past, the
guilt from either the comprador bourgeoisie or the agents of imperialism.
Then it has to bring forward the economic dimension once again. New questions
need to be asked, new questions set at the heart of research, the main actors of the
economic activities, the company itself, and try to connect the global with the local.
Most of the histories of the trading companies of southeastern Europe and Eastern
Mediterranean are from more of a social rather than economic point of view
connected mainly with the formation of markets, institutions, and the family. There
are two issues that need to be re-examined, the first is the use of theory and the
second a change in the methodology of archival research.
The first issue concerns the implementation of theory. Historians are notorious
in sticking closely to their archives and avoiding theory. Theory is needed because
the real world is so complex wrote a brilliant theorist of the firm Edith Penrose in
1989. It was Penrose that noted as early as 1959 that more economic activity

68
S. PAMUK, Ottoman Empire and European Capitalism; cit.; H. INALIK, D. QUATAERT, An Economic
and Social History, cit.
69
T. STOIANOVICH, The Conquering Balkan Orthodox Merchant; cit., A.-F. PLATON, Geneza burgheziei
n Principatele Romne (a doua jumtate a secolului al XIX-lea). Preliminariile unei istorii [The birth of the
bourgeoisie in the Rumanian Principalities (second half of the XVIIIth century-first half of the XIX
th
century. The
preleminaries of a history], Iai, 1997 (University Editions A. I. Cuza); Z.P. PACH, Le commerce de Levant et
la Hongrie au XVI
e
sicle in ed. V. Zimnyi, La Pologne et la Hongrie aux XVI
e
-XVIII
e
sicles, Budapest 1981
(Textes du Colloque Polonohongrois de Budapest), pp. 45-55. N. TODOROV, La gense de capitalism dans
les provinces Bulgares de l Empire Ottoman au cours de la premire moiti de XIX sicle, in tude Historiques,
I, 1960, pp. 221-251; N. TODOROV, V. PASCALEVA, Le dveloppement social, conomique et cutlurel de la ville
bulgare du XVe au XIX sicles, in Structure sociale et dveloppement culturel des villes sud-est europenes et
adriatiques aux XVII
e
-XVIII
e
sicles: Actes du Colloque interdisciplinaire/organis par la Commission dhistoire de
la vie economique et sociale dans les Balkans et la Commission dhistoire des ides dans le Sud-Est europen sous les
auspices de la Fondation Giorgio Cini de Venise et du Comit italien de l AIESEE, tenu a Venise, 27-30 mai
1971, Bucarest 1975 (Association internationale d tudes du Sud-Est europen), pp. 103-28. See also
N. SVORONOS, Le Commerce de Salonique au XVIII
e
sicle, Paris 1956 and H. INALIK, Capital Formation in
the Ottoman Empire, in Journal of Economic History, 29, 1969, n. 1, pp. 97-140.
seemed to be occurring inside firms rather than in the market. In her Theory of the
Firm (1959) she mentions that the firms are a better site of learning than the
markets.
70
As many of us are aware there has been a great upsurge of business
history internationally in the last twenty years.
71
This upsurge however, has affected
almost exclusively the 19
th
and 20
th
century historians, although in the French
business history there is a notorious influence from medieval historians.
72
The
histories of international business of the Mediterranean before and after the 19
th
century are a sailing ship and a steamship carefully navigating the same routes
taking care to avoid collsion. I believe the use of theoretical approaches used in the
business history of the 19
th
and 20
th
century will be of great benefit to the early
modern historian studying international business. Institutional economics, agency
theory and economic sociology, to name a few provide concepts and tools that help
classify, clarify and intergrate a family companys activities within the wider picture.
It is this kind of study that can help us understand the dynamics of important
regional economies and the connection of micro, meso and macro enterprise.
73
The theory does not have to be complicated and inaccesible for historians; it
can adopt the analytical approach of concepts that will assist analysis, taxonomy
and typology and will help identify the economic activity of the basic economic
unit: the family firm. In the early modern trading companies one can investigate the
internal organisation and strategies of the firms, the expansion of the networks, the
development of a certain business culture and specialisation in a certain region, the
official and unofficial development of institutions, the formation of business elites
and their relation to the political powers, in home and host countries, the cross-
border collaboration of merchant communities in the opening of new frontier
markets. The role of the family as a business unit can be further explored in its
business and society, welfare and philanthropy connections. Furthermore the inter-
national businesses in the Mediterreanen can also be intergrated in the new global
history which explores the multifaceted nature of the globalisation process.
74

The second issue concerns the way research continues to be carried out
statically, in one country, in one archive. It is my belief that a shift in the way
archives are handled and the way questions are asked will bring fresh impetus to the
study of international land and sea trading businesses in the Mediterranean.
Accounts of trading companies should not just be mere biographies or narratives of
historical events based on a set of archives found in ones own country and serving
the purpose of national historiography. The way archives are sought and researched
should change. The lack of archives is not an issue here. There are archives out
there, everywhere; archives for trading companies can be compiled but historians

70
N.R. LAMOREAUX, D.M.G. RAFF, P. TEMIN, Economic Theory and Business History, in G. JONES, J.
ZEITLIN, The Oxford Handbook of Business History, Oxford 2008 (Oxford University Press), pp. 37-66.
71
F. AMATORI, G. JONES, Business History around the World, Cambridge 2003 (Cambridge University Press).
72
P. FRIDENSON, Business History and History, in G. JONES, J. ZEITLIN, The Oxford Handbook of
Business History, Oxford 2008 (Oxford University Press), pp. 9-36.
73
F. AMATORI, G. JONES, Business History, cit., p. 7.
74
P. FRIDENSON, Business History, cit., p. 28. See also G. JONES, Globalisation, in IDEM, J. ZEITLIN,
The Oxford Handbook of Business History, cit., pp. 141-168.
have to follow the routes of the traders and seek them in more than one country.
What is lacking is a close and concerted collaboration of historians of a certain area
which is necessary if they are to overcome the problem of the volume and
dispersion of the archival material. What is needed is cross-country collaborations
with research projects in multiple archives by teams of researchers. It is our
obligation in the era of globalisation to teach and train our young researchers that
they have to do research beyond their national borders. What is self-evident is still
not yet put into practice.

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FONDAZIONE

ISTITUTO INTERNAZIONALE DI STORIA ECONOMICA F. DATINI

. [The Balkan City, 15

(Modernisation and Industrial Revolution

. [The trade manuals

. (The Rise of Greek Shipping in the Mediterranean of the Eighteenth Century), G.

. [The Rise of Greek Shipping in the

. [The Rise of Greek Shipping in the Mediterranean of

18 [A Greek merchant in the West.

.) [Greek capote makers in Venice (18

(1550-1567) [Merchants from Ioannina in the middle of the 16

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