Petrus Woskan, 1680-1750: The Life and Times of an Early Modern Merchant

• Applicant: Bhaswati Bhattacharya, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; Asian Studies ; Empirical Social Research ; Sociological Theory ; Economic and Social History
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509084460

Taking the last will and testament of the Armenian Petrus Woskan (1680-1750) engaged in the trans-regional trade in the Indian Ocean as a point of departure, this project tries to understand the life and career of Petrus, and the likes of him. Unlike the claim in the existing literature that mercantile behavior was regulated by community institutions like family, kin and religion, (Markovits 2000; Greif 2005; Aslanian 2011), the merchant concerned transcended these boundaries as he built his network of cross-cultural trade. What were the options before him? How did the alternative agencies, institutions and the structure help him to navigate his path? What were his legacies? Answering these questions, the project considers the theory of field (Bourdieu 2005) and argues that intra-communal conflicts resulting from individual persuasions in one field (religion) impacts one’s choice in another sphere (trade), forcing the person to seek support elsewhere. The dynamics of the thriving Indian Ocean economy with expanding European presence (Frank 1994; Perlin 1993) including missionary efforts (Liebau Tamcke 2007), cosmopolitan ports (Lefèvre et al 2015; Subrahmanyam 2018), and individual credibility working side by side with community responsibility (Trivellato 2009) helped adventurers like Petrus to build their cross-cultural networks. There are a few gaps in the information regarding the life of the testator. Whilst a major Armenian repository in Iran remains inaccessible, new European sources have been traced. The last wills of a few other Catholic Armenians also confirm that Armenians like Petrus converted and thrived under European protection. Therefore, it is essential to include information from these new European sources which appear to contain the necessary missing information. The project speaks of times and spaces in which migrants in a stranger society could, by dint of their own enterprise, arrange capital and build intra-faith networks of trade spanning at least half the globe (Bhattacharya forthcoming 1). It helps us to understand how individual merchants negotiated the larger processes and structures of world history as they built cross-cultural and trans-regional networks across imperial borders and played historically significant role.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants