4

TRADING NETWORKS IN
GLOBAL HISTORY
Claude Markovits

Global history has often been criticized for a certain lack of empirical grounding.
Looking at the way in which different kinds of networks created actual connections
between various areas would be one possible way of strengthening its empirical
base. Among such networks, those which revolved around trade were always of
particular importance as they extended across vast distances and often left significant
archival traces. Greater emphasis on the role of trading networks could thus be
beneficial to the discipline of global history.
There is a fairly developed sociological literature on the subject of dispersed
trading groups. Among the earliest and most enduring contributions is that of Max
Weber, and the notion of ‘pariah traders’,1 to which could be linked Werner
Sombart’s studies of the relationship between capitalism and the Jews,2 and, with
a different approach, Georg Simmel’s theory of the ‘stranger’.3 More recent
contributions by Herbert Blalock4 and Edna Bonacich5 are focused more specifically
on the notion of ‘middleman minorities’. This literature is on the whole more
interested in the social than in the economic aspect of trading groups’ activities,
and it is also Eurocentric, with a strong focus on Jewish traders. A different emphasis
is noticeable in the work of anthropologists such as Lloyd Fallers6 or Karl Yambert,7
who are probably the first to have used the term ‘trade networks’, or ‘trading
networks’, and who have looked extensively at non-European contexts. Of the
economic historians who have used this term, Fernand Braudel is probably the
most prominent, although his notion of it is fairly loose—a point to which I shall
return—and a more precise definition would be useful. Prior to this, I shall focus
on an alternative notion, that of the ‘trading diaspora’, as put forward in the 1970s
by Abner Cohen, an Africanist anthropologist, and generalized in the 1980s by
Philip Curtin, an African historian. This term has become widely accepted and
has benefited from the growing popularity of the term ‘diaspora’ itself. A critique
of this notion is presented here.
64 Claude Markovits

In his seminal 1971 article entitled ‘Cultural strategies in the organization of

trading diasporas’,8 Abner Cohen, basing himself on fieldwork done in Nigeria
among immigrant Hausa traders from northern Nigeria settled in Yorubaland (in
southwestern Nigeria), advanced a general theory about the nature and function
of dispersed trading communities. His approach was genealogical rather than
morphological: he identified a set of problems faced by traders operating in a pre-
industrial context characterized by a high degree of uncertainty, such as that of
Nigeria in the 1960s. These related to the transmission of information about markets,
the transport of goods (especially perishable ones) across long distances, the
establishment of trust between operators situated at different points along the supply
chain, the provision of credit, and lastly the mechanisms available to resolve
disputes, which supposed the existence of structures of authority able to enforce
decisions. He concluded that the combination of all these functions within a structure
that he called a ‘trading diaspora’ allowed for successful resolution of these problems.
Focusing more particularly on the question of trust which underpinned credit, and
of authority which permitted rule enforcement, Cohen emphasized the specific
characteristics of dispersed Hausa traders in Yorubaland that made for their success
in overcoming these problems. Among those, he attached particular importance
to the fact that these traders, apart from belonging to the same ethno-linguistic
Hausa group, which set them apart from the Yoruba traders constituting the majority
in the markets, adhered to a specific form of Sunni Islam represented by the powerful
Tijjaniya brotherhood: the latter, with its tightly knit organization, provided a basic
framework for the development of trust between traders, as well as a consensus
about enforcement rules. ‘Cultural strategies’ geared towards ensuring a high level
of cooperation within the group, rather than privileged access to capital resources
or the possession of particular skills, were thus crucial to the success of such traders
in the market place.
Abner Cohen’s insights, drawn from fieldwork done in West Africa, were
systematized by Philip Curtin, himself an African historian, in his 1984 book, Cross-
cultural trade in world history.9 In a strikingly bold move, Curtin sweepingly extended
the range of the notion: he saw trading diasporas as a crucial institution across the
entire timeframe of world history, ranging from antiquity to the advent of the
Industrial Revolution in around 1800. He offered a diachronic analysis in the longue
durée that complemented Cohen’s synchronic portrayal of a particular trading
diaspora of the twentieth century. In keeping with Cohen’s insight, Curtin viewed
the role of trading diasporas as both cultural and economic: in the process of
establishing trade routes, they brokered relations of a broader nature between
different cultural areas. He identified a universal time sequence, in which first trade
settlements were established by ‘stranger merchants’ in alien territory. These
merchants, having often learnt the language of their hosts and adopted some of
their customs, were then in a position to serve as ‘cross-cultural brokers’ between
these hosts and the people of their own land of origin. At a subsequent stage, a
crucial distinction occurred between those merchants who settled permanently in
the new location, and who became thoroughly assimilated, and those who
 Trading networks in global history 65

continued to move back and forth. The number of settlements then grew apace
with the movements of the latter, and the result was an ‘interrelated net of
commercial communities’ forming a trading diaspora. It should be noted that, despite
some similarities, this narrative differed significantly from the ‘ports of trade’
narrative advanced by Karl Polanyi.10 While the latter was mostly preoccupied with
showing that the market was a recent innovation, and the result of a ‘Great
Transformation’ which he traced back to the eighteenth century, and that the
economy was previously characterized by its ‘embeddedness’ within society, Curtin
maintained a fairly neutral stance on the question of the nature of markets.
To illustrate his theory, Curtin presented an impressive series of case studies
covering enormous ground, both spatially and temporally, from the obsidian trade
in ancient Mesopotamia to the fur trade in eighteenth-century North America.
He concluded, however, on the irrelevance of the notion in the post-1800 world,
in which he believed ‘Western commercial culture’ had become the ‘common
culture of commerce throughout the world’, thus making redundant the function
of intermediaries that had been fulfilled for centuries by the trading diasporas.
The prominent economic historian K. N. Chaudhuri in turn offered a
devastating critique of the notion, which he found epistemologically ‘invalid’.11
He claimed that the characteristics assigned to trading diasporas, such as exchanging
commercial information through friends belonging to the same group, could be
assigned to any human grouping. Leaving aside Chaudhuri’s strictures, which appear
too sweeping, it seems to me that an assessment of these two authors’ contributions
would have to start with a recognition that the notion of ‘trading diaspora’
represented an important advance in our understanding of the way dispersed trading
communities operated across spaces that varied enormously in their size, as well as
in their temporal dimension. By generalizing the notion of diaspora that had
originally been applied to the dispersion of Jews in the ancient world and linking
it to a dual cultural and economic function, Cohen and Curtin provided a useful
tool for conceptualizing a set of phenomena that were known empirically, but that
often remained little understood. In its wide embrace, however, their theory was
not without its pitfalls. First, it assumed a level of cohesion in the dispersed groups
that was not always there to the same degree. It is significant that Cohen explicitly
defined a trading diaspora as a ‘nation of socially interdependent but spatially
dispersed communities’. This homology between diaspora and nation was obviously
meant to convey an image of cohesiveness, at a time when the paradigm of the
nation state had not yet been subjected to a process of deconstruction. Cohesiveness,
in the case of the Hausa traders, although based on a common ethnicity and kinship
was, as already mentioned, further enhanced by the adherence of a majority of
traders to the Tijjaniya brotherhood. Malams, a specific type of religious specialists
belonging to that brotherhood and who were endowed with a great deal of charisma,
figured among the leaders of the community, and were often in cahoots with the
traditional chiefs and largest traders. Such a triad, combining wealth, social prestige
and religious charisma, exercised enormous influence: it was difficult for individual
traders to contest their decisions in the case, for example, of disputes. Not all
66 Claude Markovits

dispersed trading communities, however, were characterized by the same degree

of social cohesiveness. Even if many were composed of people who spoke the same
language and adhered to the same religion, few coincided with an organized
institutional structure such as a religious brotherhood. The boldest assumption made
by Cohen, albeit one shared by many authors, concerned the question of trust.
He saw trust as a given, an automatic outcome of the kind of close interpersonal
relationships, often based on kinship, that existed between traders of a closely knit
ethnic group operating among strangers. However, as a lot of research done by
economists shows,12 trust in business is generally closely linked to reputation. In
the market, you do not trust a trader simply because he is a kinsman or belongs
to the same ethnic group as you: you tend to seek information about his/her
reliability on the basis of a record of past transactions. Such a record can be provided
through oral evidence, the kind of gossip circulating in the market about the
behavior of traders. It can also be disseminated through written correspondence
between traders. Whatever the case, reputation is a crucial factor in the calculations
made by traders about the risks they are ready to take, in particular in the matter
of the provision of credit. You are not going to extend a loan to a trader, even a
relative, who is known not to repay his debts on time. Although the information
available to traders is often far from perfect, being easily inaccurate or out-of-date,
it nevertheless contributes to building reputations that play a major role in
influencing transactions. Linking trust to reputation, and not seeing it as a given
within a community of traders sharing the same ethnicity, language or religion, is
a first and necessary move towards a critique of the notion of the trading diaspora
as put forward by Cohen.
A second critique, addressed mostly to Curtin, relates to the latter’s dismissal of
the notion’s relevance to the post-1800 world, which, apart from running contrary
to Cohen’s own insights, is not corroborated by more recent research. Curtin’s
argument was basically that the relentless advance of Western capitalism had
resulted in the gradual dissolution of the boundaries between different cultural areas,
making redundant the function of brokerage that had been fulfilled by trading
diasporas in earlier times. What remained, according to him, were a set of ‘cultural
minorities’, such as the Chinese in Southeast Asia or the Indians in East Africa.
Although he recognized that these minorities were heavily involved in trade, he
saw them as essentially different from the trading diasporas of earlier times because
they were not primarily engaged in long-distance trade and fulfilled no significant
role as cultural brokers. In reality, however, as many studies in the last three decades
have shown, the advance of Western capitalism was not as rapid or universal as
assumed by Curtin. In the interstices of the European and North American-
dominated world capitalist economy, there remained many opportunities for non-
Western European-dispersed trading communities to operate successfully. As
shown by Indian historian Rajat Ray,13 there was even a trend towards expansion
in the spatial range of such groups, which took advantage of the spread of European
domination to areas previously characterized by a low degree of commercialization.
Ray sees the emergence, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, of a ‘pan-Asian
 Trading networks in global history 67

bazaar’, mostly consisting of Chinese and Indian traders, operating parallel to the
rise of Western capitalism. One could add the cases of Syro-Lebanese, Greek and
Sephardic Jewish traders, whose operations extended to many parts of Asia, Africa
and even Latin America in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century,
and supplemented those of already well-established groups such as Armenians
or Ashkenazi Jews. Far from disappearing after 1800, trading diasporas tended on
the contrary to multiply. This proliferation, empirically observable as it is, must
therefore lead, since it runs contrary to the gist of Curtin’s analysis, to a
reconsideration of the notion itself. That is why we propose here to substitute the
term ‘trading networks’ for ‘trading diasporas’.
Although Curtin himself used both terms as largely synonymous, we propose
to differentiate between them. The notion of diaspora, because of its origins,
inevitably carries with it ‘cultural’ baggage that can become an obstacle to its
usefulness. ‘Network’ does not carry the same baggage, is a more neutral term and
can be applied to a greater number of situations. At the most general level, a network
is defined as a specific type of relation linking a defined set of persons, objects or
events. A trading network is thus a relation linking different traders. The real
question is that of the nature of the link between the traders. Existing definitions
of trading networks in the literature are often marked by a certain lack of precision.
Thus Fernand Braudel, in his magnum opus, Civilization and capitalism, distinguishes
between ‘networks’ and ‘circuits’,14 and sees networks basically as a form of
merchant solidarity, based on trust. This is actually a circular definition, begging
the question of why trust should specifically flourish within a given network. We
hold to the definition we gave in our book, The global world of Indian merchants, in
which we defined a trading network as ‘a structure through which goods, credit,
capital and men circulate regularly across a given space which can vary enormously
in terms of size and accessibility’.15 We find a regular pattern of circulation,
rather than any essential traits such as a given ethnicity or religion, to be the central
defining feature of trading networks. Our definition is morphological rather than
genealogical. We do not assume that all trading networks developed in the same
way: contrary to Curtin, we have no ideal-typical sequence in mind. The fact that
most known trading networks tend to coincide with a specific ethnic or religious
group is, from our point of view, irrelevant, since such a coincidence is always
historically contingent and the result of a specific sequence, which is never exactly
the same as another sequence. Our definition is sufficiently wide to encompass
any kind of grouping, provided the items listed above effectively circulate through
it. In order to conclude to the existence of a trading network, these items all have
to be present simultaneously. For instance, if only goods circulate, we have simply
a circuit; if only men circulate, a migration chain, and so on. There are also
immaterial items, such as information and knowledge, whose circulation is crucial
to the functioning of trading networks. Up-to-date information about markets is
a particularly sought-after commodity in the world of trade, and the better a trading
network is at transmitting it, the more successful it tends to be. Within trading
networks, the accumulation of information can lead over time to the development
68 Claude Markovits

of forms of knowledge, of a pragmatic nature, which can be transmitted from one

generation to another, and constitute a precious resource. Such information can
be jealously guarded as ‘trade secrets’ or traded with others, depending on
circumstances. To illustrate our theory, we shall present a case study, based on the
history of one particular network, that of the Sindworkies of Hyderabad-Sindh,
in British India.
This is an example of a town-based network, a type which is fairly well
represented in the history of trade, but which has previously perhaps not attracted
enough attention. Other cases coming to mind would be the Chinese traders from
Wenzhou, a town in the province of Zhejiang, or the Baghdadi Jewish traders
from Iraq (although not all those who called themselves Baghdadis hailed from
that city). The fact that a particular town becomes the hub of a specific trading
network at a certain moment in time is always the product of a set of circumstances
which are not necessarily easy to trace in retrospect, given that traders themselves
tend to keep few archival traces of their activities, and are rarely their own
historians. A supplementary problem is that the history of trading networks is rarely
seen as part of mainstream history because it is not easy to fit it into a national
narrative. Even the advent of ‘global’ or ‘transnational’ history has rarely resulted
in much attention being paid to such networks, a point to which we shall return.
Regarding the case of Hyderabad, a middle-sized inland town of Lower Sindh in
the Indus valley that had been the capital of a fledging Sindhian state between
1783 and 1843, when it was annexed to British India, an added problem was that
the town became part of Pakistan in 1947 at the time of the partition of the
subcontinent. This led to an exodus of the Hindu traders, who had played a major
role in the commercial life of the town: while most of them relocated themselves
in India, there was a new dispersion from there, and these conditions were not
favorable to the emergence of a memory. Through the exploitation of a variety
of sources which had never previously attracted scholars’ attention, I was able,
however, to put forward a certain number of hypotheses regarding the emergence,
between 1860 and 1914, of Hyderabad as the center of a trading network ranging
across most of the globe from Kobe in Japan to Panama in Central America. Here
I give a brief summary of my findings. Post-annexation Sindh’s integration into
the economy of British India brought in its wake certain restrictions in the
opportunities available to the Hindu bankers and traders of Hyderabad. On the
other hand, the strengthening of the province’s links with Bombay, after it had
been made part of the Bombay Presidency in 1847, was used by some traders as
an opportunity to start peddling to Bombay local craft goods produced by Muslim
artisans of Hyderabad and other localities in Sindh. These found a ready market,
particularly among Bombay’s European population, because they appeared more
‘authentic’ than the bastardized productions of most workshops in the Presidency.
These products, including quilts and bedsteads, became known under the generic
term of ‘Sindwork’ and those who sold them as ‘Sindworkers’ or ‘Sindworkies’.
A next crucial stage in the development of the network was when some traders
boarded ships in Bombay that took them to Egypt, carrying the same craft products
 Trading networks in global history 69

that they then started selling in that country. Their arrival in around 1860 luckily
coincided with Egypt’s emergence as a privileged destination for well-to-do
European and North American tourists attracted by its climate and the lure of its
antiquities. These tourists sought to buy souvenirs, which meant the Sindworkies
found a niche for their products. At first, most of these traders seem to have been
peddlers who came to Egypt for only a few months during the winter tourist season
and returned to India during the slack season. By 1880, however, they started
establishing permanent shops in a few cities, such as Alexandria, Cairo or Port Said,
and increasingly targeted the clientele of the great passenger ships passing through
the Suez Canal. In the meantime, from the 1870s onwards, other Hyderabadi traders
had traveled east of India from Calcutta or Madras to Singapore. From that great
emporium, they fanned out towards the Dutch East Indies, and soon reached China
and Japan. By then, the small workshops of Sindh were no longer able to respond
to the ever-growing demand for craft products and the Sindworkies started
purchasing from other areas of craft production in India, such as Benares or Kashmir,
and increasingly from China and Japan. Thus, what had begun as a network of
traders peddling a few craft products between Hyderabad, Bombay and Egypt,
gradually became a fully fledged international trading network purchasing in Asia
a range of craft goods, often labeled as ‘curios’, including silk products, that it sold
in shops around the globe to a clientele of mostly affluent European and North
American travelers. By 1907, the official Gazetteer of Sind asserted that there were
some 5,000 Hyderabadi traders dispersed around the world.
This network consisted mostly of a cluster of more than a hundred firms, four
or five of which were really large, with branches in many countries. These were
family firms, formed either by a group of brothers, or a father and son(s), or an
uncle and nephews. They were often structured as partnerships, which gave them
some legal status and protection, without entailing requirements to disclose their
finances. All these firms had their seat in Hyderabad, where the principals resided,
originally in houses situated in the cramped old city, but at a later stage, on the
strength of accumulated profits, in compounds situated in the ‘new town’ that
developed in the late nineteenth century. They had branches abroad, in various
localities situated west of India along the sea routes that led to Europe and the
Americas via Africa and the Mediterranean, and east of India in the major ports
of Southeast and East Asia, all the way to Australia. The branches were headed by
managers, who could either be salaried employees or partners with an interest in
the firm. Under the managers were two different kinds of employees: shop
assistants and clerks dealing with customers and keeping the accounts on the one
hand, and on the other hand servants who performed menial tasks in the shops
and go-downs, and attended to the managers. There were also cooks, who were
generally Brahmins; as the network expanded, these cooks increasingly tended to
be replaced by general-purpose servants. This was an almost exclusively male world,
although some managers lived with their wives and families. Shop assistants and
servants were generally unmarried. They were hired on two-and-a-half or three-
year contracts, at the expiration of which they went back to Hyderabad, where
70 Claude Markovits

they were often re-hired, albeit not necessarily for the same destination. It is clear
that such a network differed from a classical diaspora: it consisted almost exclusively
of men who were sojourners rather than settlers and who circulated regularly
between Hyderabad, the network center and the various places of work where the
shops and go-downs were located. They traveled by ship, and ship passages, even
in third class, represented a significant share of firms’ overhead costs. Another trait
differentiating such a network from a diaspora was the existence of a socio-economic
hierarchy, illustrated by wide differentials in rates of pay between managers, shop
assistants and servants. The written contracts that most of these men had with the
proprietors of firms strictly regulated the terms of their employment. There were
also independent operators, hawkers and small shop-owners, often former
employees of firms who had used their savings to establish themselves in trade.
The vast majority of men, however, were employed by Hyderabad-based firms.
Control by the principals was exercised mostly through accounting: all accounts
were sent to Hyderabad, with the books kept and the accounts annually settled
there. Principals also used to do periodic tours of the branches to ensure that their
instructions were being obeyed. They kept in constant touch with branch managers
by telegraph, and also through a regular stream of correspondence.
The members of this extended network were almost all Hindus. While Sindh
was a Muslim-majority province, its towns and cities had a Hindu majority. In
Hyderabad, they belonged to the Bhaiband segment of the Lohana caste, which
was the main Hindu caste in Sindh. Lohanas were divided into an upper segment
known as Amils and a lower segment known as Bhaibands. The Amils were
traditionally scribes, with a knowledge of Persian; they had been in the service of
the various Muslim dynasties which had reigned over Sindh, and entered the service
of the British as subordinate civil servants. The Bhaibands, who tended to be less
educated, were generally traders, with the majority being small shopkeepers or
moneylenders. Among them, however, there was an elite of bankers and owners
of large trading firms, and it is from the ranks of this group that most of the founders
of Sindwork firms hailed. Their employees often belonged to less affluent Bhaiband
families. With the rise of the network and the wealth amassed by some families,
Amil youths were encouraged to take employment in Sindwork firms, leading to
a kind of reversal in the traditional pecking order of the Lohana caste.
Despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the network members were
Hindus and Bhaibands, I do not see the network as defined primarily by religion
or caste. The reason is that, in Sindh, Hinduism was a fairly fluid reality. In this
peripheral province of British India, long exposed to Iranian cultural influence,
and subjected to a kind of Afghan overlordship for a century before British
conquest, Hinduism was entangled in many ways with both Sufi Islam and Sikhism.
Many Hindus of Sindh were murids (disciples) of Sufi pirs (spiritual guides,
descendants of holy men): these religious figures enjoyed enormous prestige in the
province, where they had large followings, and accepted Hindu disciples without
qualms. Besides, many Hindus in Sindh were Nanakpanthis, or Sahajdhari Sikhs,
i.e. non-Khalsa Sikhs, who practiced a religion that mixed the worship of Hindu
 Trading networks in global history 71

gods with that of Sikh gurus. Hinduism in Sindh was not a strongly institutionalized
religion, and there is a clear contrast in behavior between Sindworkies and other
Hindu-dispersed trading communities. Sindhi traders did not as a rule take priests
with them and did not build their own temples: often they prayed in Sikh gurdwaras
(temples), which were sometimes built with Sindhi money, but managed by
Punjabis. The contrast could not be greater with the case of the Nattukottai Chettiar
bankers, who, from their homeland in Tamil Nadu, controlled a powerful financial
network operating in Burma, Malaya and French Indochina. In his study of that
group,16 David Rudner shows how the Chettiars used their Saivaite temples to
regulate financial transactions within the group: compensation took place on
hundis (bills of exchange) worth millions of rupees. He talks in terms of a ‘caste
capitalism’: caste institutions, such as panchayats (councils), were used by Chettiars
to cover themselves mutually for the risks they would be exposed to in the event
of default by their peasant debtors. No such institutional mechanism existed among
Sindworkies. In Hyderabad, caste panchayats appear to have regulated social life,
but to have played no great role in business matters. Nor was trust between Sindwork
traders particularly well developed, judging from the frequency of court cases pitting
Sindhis as defendants against other Sindhis, as revealed by a perusal of cases
brought before British consular courts in Egypt in the early twentieth century.
Disputes were rife among Sindwork traders and employees in Cairo and Port Said.
Internal arbitration mechanisms were apparently not robust enough to preclude
recourse to the judiciary, another indication of the weakness of corporate
institutions in the milieu of Sindworkies. A caveat has to be thrown in here as
consular courts were very specific jurisdictions, fairly easy to manipulate for wily
operators, and this may have been a powerful incentive for some traders to bring
their disputes before them. Most cases concerned disputes between proprietors and
employees over contracts, and they reveal a work environment marked by serious
tensions. That is very different from the kind of irenic image one generally has of
trade diasporas as big, happy families. There were also disputes between proprietors
and hawkers about goods, and between different proprietors about business deals.
The importance of reputation to the standing of traders is revealed by one case,
in which a small trader sued the proprietors of a firm for having blackened his
reputation in letters to various correspondents. Belonging to the same religion and
the same caste did not automatically generate trust between Sindworkies.
Reputations were established on the basis of an abundant correspondence and, once
established, one way or another, were difficult to change.
In terms of the spatial range covered, it was a very extended network. I have
identified 134 localities outside Hyderabad, where Hyderabad-based firms had
branches between 1890 and 1940. Only 4 were in India, with the remaining 130
in 46 different states and territories, of which 21 were in the British Empire.
Discovering the logic at work behind such dispersion is not obvious. A map of
the main shipping lines would provide one clue: most of the localities were ports
of call for ships of the Peninsular & Oriental and other British shipping lines. Ship
passengers were an important clientele for Sindwork traders, especially first-class
72 Claude Markovits

passengers, who had a lot of money to spend, and shop-owners had touts in places
such as Port Said, Aden or Colombo to bring passengers to their shops. There
were also, however, Sindhi shops in many inland localities, where the clientele
consisted almost exclusively of residents, as in the interior of the island of Java, or
in the interior of West and Southern Africa. The customers in these places were
mostly European settlers with a fairly large purse, eager to purchase ‘exotic’ goods
to adorn their houses. A typology of the localities further distinguishes between
purchasing centers, entrepôts and retailing centers. The main purchasing centers,
besides a few localities in India, were Kobe and Yokohama in Japan, and Shanghai
and Canton in China. Through dealers, the Sindworkies bought a variety of silk
goods and curios into those places. These were sent by ship to various entrepôts,
such as Singapore, Surabaya, Cairo, Gibraltar or Tenerife, from where they were
dispatched, either by ship or over land, to many other localities where Sindworkies
had retailing establishments. While the commercial side of operations involved a
string of widely dispersed localities, the financial side was heavily centralized, with
practically all operations taking place in Hyderabad and Bombay. Firms had their
headquarters, where all the accounting was done, and purchasing and sales policies
coordinated, in Hyderabad, while bank finance was arranged, and the transport of
men and goods organized, in Bombay (although Karachi gained in importance in
the interwar period).
The case study presented here does not purport to be exemplary. Trading
networks come in many shapes, and their trajectories are rarely similar. To remain
with South Asian networks, there are striking differences, as we have shown,
between the case of the Chettiars and that of the Sindworkies. These differences
do not, however, challenge the basic definition proposed here, with its emphasis
on circulation. Major recent contributions by Sebouh Aslanian on Armenian
traders from New Julfa17 and by Francesca Trivellato on Sephardic Jewish traders
from Livorno18 allow us to refine the picture, but do not change it fundamentally.
In my view, the major question remaining unanswered is how to articulate the
history of trading networks with the wider trend of ‘global’ or ‘transnational’ history.
One important caveat is that we should avoid a teleological point of view, whereby
trading networks are seen as the forerunners of globalization. The fact that trading
networks often served as conduits for transnational connections does not necessarily
make them agents of globalization. To come back to the Sindworkies, craft goods
produced in Asia circulated across the world through the agency of their network.
However, this circulation was made possible only by a change in consumers’ tastes
that the Sindworkies themselves did not generate. It is because Japonism had become
a craze in certain milieus in Western Europe and North America that curios
produced in Japan found ready-made custom among Western travelers to the Orient
and offered Sindwork traders a niche that they could exploit to develop their
business. Whether the spread of Japonism represented a globalization of taste is a
point open to discussion, however, as it could be seen as a reaction against the
growing uniformity of taste produced by mass industrialization and, therefore, as
part of a backlash against globalization.
 Trading networks in global history 73

It seems to me that, independently of its contribution to trade history, the real

value of studying worldwide trading networks is that these networks provide a
specific lens through which we can perceive the global flow of events differently
from the master narratives that still dominate global history. Seen from the point
of view of traders from Hyderabad, the British Empire looks very different from
its image in mainstream history. For two decades, between 1860 and 1880, it
provided opportunities to travel around the world, without suffering harassment,
for men who were British subjects and could trust in the protection offered by the
British flag, without any need to carry documents of identity with them. Things
started to change, however, in the 1880s, as some British territories, following the
example of the United States, started taking measures to limit the entry of ‘Asiatics’.
A transition to a new regime started and was finally completed at the end of the
First World War, by which time all travelers needed passports and, even with a
British-Indian passport, one could be refused entry to many countries. Hence the
necessity for the proprietors of Sindwork firms to lobby the government of India
to intervene with various colonial and foreign governments so as to remove obstacles
to the circulation of their employees, a lobbying that was not always successful,
but that was on the whole sufficient to maintain the flow of men constituting the
lifeblood of the network. In the event of a major crisis, however, British protection
was of little use to Sindwork traders caught in war zones. During the Spanish Civil
War, for example, hundreds of Sindhi traders were caught in the Canary Islands
and Spanish Morocco. Despite the good relations between the British government
and the Nationalist authorities, no relief could be obtained for the Sindhis, who
consequently lost most of their businesses. During the Second World War, in
Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia, Sindhi traders often tended to support the pro-
Japanese movement of the dissident Indian nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose
for reasons that probably had more to do with the preservation of their business
interests than with Indian patriotism, although the two motivations were of course
not mutually exclusive. World political events, looked at from the angle of a
worldwide trading network, appear in a different light from the one in which they
are viewed by political historians.
A possible conclusion is that the notion of trading networks proposed here as
a substitute for the more popular concept of the trading diaspora is less oriented
towards the cultural aspects of trading activities in a broad sense, but more attuned
to providing links between the history of trade and other forms of global history.
This is, of course, a proposition that needs to be tested thoroughly before it can
be validated.

Further reading
Aslanian, S. (2011) From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: the global trade networks of Armenian
merchants from New Julfa, Berkeley, CA; New York; London: University of California Press.
Blalock Jr, H. M. (1970) Towards a theory of minority group relations, New York: Capricorn
Books.
74 Claude Markovits

Bonacich, E. (1973) ‘A theory of middleman minorities’, American Sociological Review, 38,

583–94.
Braudel, F. (1982) Civilization and capitalism 15th–18th century. Vol. II: the wheels of commerce,
London: Collins.
Chaudhuri, K. N. (1985) Trade and civilisation in the Indian Ocean: an economic history from the
rise of Islam to 1750, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Cohen, A. (1971) ‘Cultural strategies in the organization of trading diasporas’, in
C. Meillassoux (ed.), The development of indigenous trades and markets in West Africa, London:
Oxford University Press, pp. 266–78.
Curtin, P. (1984) Cross-cultural trade in world history, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Fallers, L. A. (ed.) (1967) Immigrants and associations, The Hague; Paris: Mouton.
Gambetta, D. (ed.) (1988) Trust: making and breaking cooperative relations, Oxford; Cambridge,
MA: Basil Blackwell.
Markovits, C. (2000) The global world of Indian merchants 1750–1947: traders of Sind from Bukhara
to Panama, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
Polanyi, K. (1963) ‘Ports of trade in early societies’, Journal of Economic History, 23, 30–45.
Ray, R. K. (1995) ‘Asian capital in the age of European domination: the rise of the bazaar,
1800–1914’, Modern Asian Studies, 29, 449–554.
Rudner, D. W. (1994) Caste and capitalism in colonial India: the Nattukottai Chettiars, Berkeley,
CA; London: University of California Press.
Simmel, G. (1964) ‘The stranger’, in K. H. Wolff (ed.), The sociology of Georg Simmel, New
York: Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan, pp. 402–8.
Sombart, W. (1997) The Jews and modern capitalism, London; New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction.
Trivellato, F. (2009) The familiarity of strangers: the Sephardic diaspora, Livorno and cross-cultural
trade in the early modern period, New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press.
Weber, M. (2011) The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, New York: Oxford University
Press.
Yambert, K. A. (1981) ‘Alien traders and ruling elites: the overseas Chinese in Southeast
Asia and the Indians in East Africa’, Ethnic Groups, 3, 173–98.

Notes
1 M. Weber, The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, New York: Oxford University
Press, 2011, p. 39: ‘National or religious minorities which are in a position of
subordination to a group of rulers are likely, through their voluntary or involuntary
exclusion from positions of political influence, to be driven with peculiar force into
economic activity.’
2 W. Sombart, The Jews and modern capitalism, London; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction,
1997.
3 G. Simmel, ‘The stranger’, in K. H. Wolff (ed.), The sociology of Georg Simmel, New York:
Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan, 1964, pp. 402–8.
4 H. M. Blalock Jr, Towards a theory of minority group relations, New York: Capricorn Books,
1970.
5 E. Bonacich, ‘A theory of middleman minorities’, American Sociological Review, 38, 1973,
583–94.
6 L. A. Fallers (ed.), Immigrants and associations, The Hague; Paris: Mouton, 1967.
7 K. A. Yambert, ‘Alien traders and ruling elites: the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia
and the Indians in East Africa’, Ethnic Groups, 3, 1981, 173–98.
 Trading networks in global history 75

8 A. Cohen, ‘Cultural strategies in the organization of trading diasporas’, in C. Meillassoux

(ed.), The development of indigenous trades and markets in West Africa, London: Oxford
University Press, 1971, pp. 266–78.
9 P. Curtin, Cross-cultural trade in world history, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1984.
10 K. Polanyi, ‘Ports of trade in early societies’, Journal of Economic History, 23, 1963, 30–45.
11 K. N. Chaudhuri, Trade and civilisation in the Indian Ocean: an economic history from the rise
of Islam to 1750, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985, p. 224.
12 D. Gambetta (ed.), Trust: making and breaking cooperative relations, Oxford; Cambridge,
MA: Basil Blackwell, 1988.
13 R. K. Ray, ‘Asian capital in the age of European domination: the rise of the bazaar,
1800–1914’, Modern Asian Studies, 29, 1995, 449–554.
14 F. Braudel, Civilization and capitalism 15th–18th century.Vol. II: the wheels of commerce,
London: Collins, 1982, p. 149.
15 C. Markovits, The global world of Indian merchants 1750–1947: traders of Sind from Bukhara
to Panama, Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 25.
16 D. W. Rudner, Caste and capitalism in colonial India: the Nattukottai Chettiars, Berkeley,
CA; London: University of California Press, 1994.
17 S. Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: the global trade networks of Armenian
merchants from New Julfa, Berkeley, CA; New York; London: University of California
Press, 2011.
18 F. Trivellato, The familiarity of strangers: the Sephardic diaspora, Livorno and cross-cultural trade
in the early modern period, New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2009.