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

Abstract

This article offers a non-fictional detective story that enables, and is embedded within, a larger analytical narrative. For reasons that will become clear, I as a historian and archival researcher play an unusually large role in the detective story, a tale of how I tracked down documents that enabled me to reconstruct an act of British colonial-era piracy against merchants of the Armenian trade diaspora in the eighteenth century. At the center of the narrative is an Armenian-freighted merchant ship called the Santa Catharina, whose cargo the British Admiralty confiscated in India in 1748 and for the possession of which a complex trial was conducted in London between 1749 and 1752. The case pits a trade diaspora against a state, and the analytical narrative discusses the contestation between the waxing power of an imperial nation-state and the waning power of a transnational diaspora. My article situates the Santa Catharina trial in a context in which a form of familial–ethnic merchant capital competed with a national-stock-holding merchant capital (that is, the English East India Company), worked with as well as clashed against it, all in an environment increasingly dominated by the colonial conflicts of Britain, France, and the nawab states of India. That larger context was shaped by the everincreasing reach of the British state, the English East India Company it chartered, and the navy and law courts that enforced the company’s privileges and encroachments.