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 ; Sociological Theory ; Economic and Social History
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509084460

Khwaja Petrus Woskan, a Catholic Armenian merchant left New Julfa for Madras in 1705 CE. At his death in 1750 CE, he was the most prominent Armenian in the town. The unique autobiographical last will and testament Petrus Woskan wrote is a text-book example of a rags to riches life-story. This project will bring out a critical annotated edition of this unpublished archival document.How did a merchant, who as per his own testimony had not received any help from family or friends, build his career? What do his achievements inform us about the political economy of the Indian Ocean? Contrary to the accepted wisdom that the network of Armenian commerce was an exclusive coalition of Apostolic Armenians of New Julfa (Aslanian 2011), this unique unpublished document offers crucial information on the role of Armenian Catholics in global commerce. It speaks of a cosmopolitan world in which migrants in a stranger society could, by dint of their own enterprise, arrange capital and build networks of trade spanning at least half the globe. It helps us to understand how an individual merchant negotiated the larger processes and structures of world history as he created cross-cultural and trans-regional networks across imperial borders and created a place for himself in it.Additionally, the information on principal–agent relationship in a merchant network and centre-periphery relations in the document calls for a review of the existing knowledge of these aspects of merchant networks (Aslanian 2011; Braudel 1986; Markovits 2001; Khachikian 1998). I argue that it is necessary to understand the larger context with polyglot ports and the global economic connections providing career opportunities to agents of cross-cultural encounters such as the author of the testamentary account. I shall use insights from the current testament, other legal documents pertaining to other Armenian merchants in view of the theories of institutional economics (Greif 2006; Hart 2017, 1995), business history (Dekker, Kipping and Wadhwani 2015; Roy 2018), Anglo-Indian legal history, the field (Bourdieu 2002) and, Asian cosmopolitanism (Lefèvre et al 2015; Subrahmanyam 2018) to explain the organization of commercial activities of Petrus Woskan and his partners. I also underline the importance of etic sources for a reconstruction of the cross-cultural mercantile culture of the time.The result will be a hybrid product with an e-book, and a paper copy comparable to the recently published edited text of the travel account of Minas Bžškeanć in Eastern Europe (Kovács and Grigoryan 2019). The text with the accompanying annotated introduction will benefit further understanding of the organisation of global commerce in the Indian Ocean and especially, the life of the early modern liminal diasporic merchants.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants