Overland trade of the seventeenth century: Armenian carriers between Europe and East Asia

Abstract

Seaborne trade was probably the leading sector of commercial growth in the world economy – perhaps going back as far as the ninth century, certainly from the fifteenth-century maritime revolution well into the nineteenth. The seventeenth century, however, and at least the first half of the eighteenth, marked a period of intense development in overland trade as well. This chapter will deal with overland connections between Persia and Europe, between Persia and India and East Asia, and especially with the Armenian trade diaspora that was active in the overland trade as well as the maritime trade of the Indian Ocean. In addition, and in these same centuries, new trade diasporas began to carry Euopean goods overland into regions previously served only by indirect relay trade. Siberia was one such region, as European, Chinese, and Ottoman demand for furs sent Russians eastward through the forests of northern Asia. This movement began in the middle of the sixteenth century. By the 1640s, the fur traders had found ways to use the large rivers of Siberia so as to reach the Pacific Ocean with only occasional need to portage goods from one river to another. Continuing by sea, they reached Alaska by the early eighteenth century and had explored down the North American coast to California by the early nineteenth. The same demand for furs sent European fur traders and their local agents into the North American forests with a similar timing. French trading posts on the lower Saint Lawrence from the early seventeenth century became the anchor for a trade network westward along the line of the Great Lakes to reach the Mississippi and beyond by the end of the century.