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Book Review

Comparative/World

Ina Baghdiantz McCabe. The Shah's Silk for Europe's Silver: The Eurasian Trade of the Julfa Armenians in Safavid Iran and India (1530–1750). (Armenian Texts and Studies, number 15.) Georgia: Scholars Press. 1999. Pp. xxii, 414. $44.95.

Scholars working in languages that few others command invariably reach for comparisons, but Ina Bagldiantz McCabe's analogies to other parts of the world are too often flawed. References to the Armenians' European trading partners are marred by real blunders. For example, transactions between the Fuggers and the Holy Roman Emperor did not involve "the lending of money with an interest rate" (p. 3); the Dutch, rebels against Spain's Philip II in the late sixteenth century, knew "that [the king] was bankrupt, since they had long served as his financiers" (p. 25); and French traders in the sixteenth century had easy access to Spanish silver "because of their allegiance to Spain" (p. 26). More serious for a scholar who understands that "Iran's economy cannot be studied in isolation" (p. 157), and despite titles listed in her bibliography, Baghdiantz McCabe seems unaware of the extent to which the terms of debate have changed over the last three decades for the economy of the Ottoman and Mughal empires. She is right to insist that the trade in Persian silk as far as entrepots like Aleppo was controlled by Armenians, not by Europeans, but this point was made in Bruce Masters's Origins of Western Economic Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilism and the Islamic Economy in Aleppo, 1660–1750 (1988). She is right, too, to insist that holders of New Julfa's great fortunes cannot be described as "peddlers." But any suggestion that indigenous merchants and revenue-collectors in India were mere peddlers is now buried under a good deal of solid work, including Sanjay Subrahmanyam's delineation of the phenomenon of the "portfolio capitalist." . . .

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