Trade Diaspora versus Colonial State: Armenian Merchants, the English East India Company, and the High Court of Admiralty in London, 1748-1752

that the Armenian expansion was taking place not only in the same space to which British juridical discourse was increasingly being applied but also within the same geographic space of its economic and attendant political/military conquests?Bereft of a state of its own and dispersed across vast geographic distances, upon what methods did the Armenian trade diaspora rely to compete with its more organized imperial rivals?In addition to retelling the story of the ship's trial, my essay aspires to study how the "stateless power" (Tölölyan, "Rethinking") of a diaspora can emerge and function, not always successfully but over long distances, and how private postal services far ahead of their time, intelligence networks, and the resulting information asymmetries enabled that diaspora to compete.Focusing on the narrative of the Santa Catharina's trial in London, I will argue that the Armenian trade diaspora of the Indian Ocean had developed its own distinct "techniques" of survival and prosperity that enabled it, as a stateless social formation, to compete and excel against its better-organized European and Asian rival networks of trade.This essay seeks to highlight two such techniques that appear to be unique to the Armenian trade diaspora of the early modern period, though further research may indicate that similar techniques were shared by other trade diasporas of the period.I shall refer to the first technique, following Renee Barendse 4 and in reference to the central node of the Armenian trade diaspora, as New Julfa's 5 "global intelligence networks."This consisted of an elaborate system of communication and sharing of information across vast distances through a privately funded network of commercial mail that New Julfa merchants seem to have instituted rather early in their trading history.The second technique was the Armenians' practice of relying on the state institutions of their host societies to defend their "transnational interests" abroad in cases involving clashes with other states and their juridical practices.Arguably, this technique may be seen as a forerunner to the lobbying functions of contemporary diasporas, although its success clearly depended on the continuing fiscal benefits successful diasporic trade and other functions provided the "host" states (for the role of Julfa merchants as financiers to the Safavid state, see Baghdiantz McCabe, Shah's Silk ch. 5).As we shall see, the Santa Catharina trial in London brings both of these facets of "stateless power" to the forefront. Merchants and Culture: The Trajectory of an InvestigationMy interest in Armenian merchants in Iran and India began during my research for a doctoral dissertation at Columbia University on the "origins" of Armenian nationalism and the "national revival movement" in the eighteenth-century Armenian diaspora xxxxxxxxxxxxxx