Trading diasporas and trading networks in the Early Modern period: A Sephardic partnership of Livorno in the Mediterranean, Europe and Portuguese India (ca 1700--1750)

This thesis is a historical study of a commercial partnership between two families of Sephardic Jews, the Ergas and the Silvera, which was based in Livorno (Tuscany) and Aleppo (Syria) and operated during the first half of the eighteenth century, when Livorno was the most important port of the Mediterranean after Marseille and the largest Sephardic settlement together with Amsterdam. Among a variety of primary sources, I drew primarily from 13,659 business letters written from Livorno by Ergas & Silvera between 1704 and 1746. Partnerships like Ergas & Silvera benefited from the privileges that had been granted to Jewish and New Christian merchants in Livorno since the 1590s. They became preferred intermediaries in the exchanges between Europe and the Ottoman Empire thanks to both their widespread presence on both shores of the Mediterranean and the diplomatic protection the French offered them in Ottoman ports after 1680. They largely controlled the exchange of Mediterranean coral and Indian diamonds through a heterogeneous network of Italian agents in Lisbon and Hindu correspondents in Goa until the 1730s, when the London-Madras route and the services of the English East India Company proved comparatively more advantageous.;This study aims to illuminate the activities of a prosperous Sephardic merchant house in the Mediterranean while most scholarship for this period focuses on the commercial ventures of the Sephardim in the Atlantic and the economic expansion of northern European states. It contributes to the diverse literature on the history of European long-distance trade that emphasizes the cooperation between private merchants and state-emanated commercial institutions. It shows how in some instances stateless diasporas sought the protection of formal institutions and yet did not loose their diasporic identity. This study also makes an analytical distinction between 'trading disapora' and 'trading networks.' The latter refers to durable economic relations between groups of different ethnic and religious backgrounds sustained in the absence of overarching authorities and solely on the basis of reciprocal means of reputation control. It conceives trust in such horizontal cross-cultural business relations as the result of both rational calculation and social control.