Professor Edmund Herzig: The ‘Isfahan factor’ in the success of the Julfa Armenian merchants

The Armenian merchants of New Julfa were recognised by contemporaries as being among the most successful international merchants of the 17^th and 18^th centuries, with a trade network that extended East-West from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and North-South from the White Sea to the Indian Ocean. This lecture discusses the causes of this extraordinary success, focusing in particular on the Isfahan factor: the social capital that the Julfa Armenians accrued through their location in Isfahan, the cosmopolitan capital of the Safavid Empire.

Edmund Herzig is the Masoumeh and Fereydoon Soudavar Professor of Persian Studies and a Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. A historian of Iran, the Caucasus and Central Asia, he has worked on Safavid history (Iran and the World in the Safavid Age, 2012, with Willem Floor); on early modern trade and merchants (numerous articles and book chapters); on the post-Soviet Caucasus (The New Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia, 1999); on the uses of history in contemporary Iran and the post-Soviet Caucasus and Central Asia (The Armenians: Past and Present in the Making of National Identity, 2005, with Marina Kurkchian); and on the foreign relations of the Islamic Republic of Iran (Iran and the Former Soviet South, 1995).