Petrus Woskan, 1680-1750: The Life and Times of an Early Modern Merchant

科瓦贾·佩特鲁斯·沃斯坎是一位信奉天主教的亚美尼亚商人，于公元1705年离开新朱法前往马德拉斯。公元1750年去世时，他是镇上最显赫的亚美尼亚人。佩特鲁斯·沃斯坎写的独特的自传式遗嘱和遗嘱是一个白手起家的生活故事的教科书例子。这个项目将带来这份未出版的档案文件的关键注释版本。一个商人，根据他自己的证词，没有从家人或朋友那里得到任何帮助，他是如何建立自己的事业的？关于印度洋的政治经济，他的成就告诉了我们什么？与公认的亚美尼亚商业网络是新朱法使徒亚美尼亚人的独家联盟(阿斯兰尼亚，2011年)相反，这份独特的、未出版的文件提供了关于亚美尼亚天主教徒在全球商业中作用的重要信息。它谈到了一个国际化的世界，在这个世界里，来自陌生社会的移民可以通过自己的企业安排资本，并建立覆盖至少半个地球的贸易网络。它帮助我们理解单个商人如何协商更大的世界历史进程和结构，因为他创建了跨越帝国边界的跨文化和跨区域网络，并在其中创造了自己的位置。此外，文件中关于商人网络中的委托-代理关系和中心-外围关系的信息要求对商人网络这些方面的现有知识进行审查(Aslanian 2011；Braudel 1986；Markovits 2001；Khchikian 1998)。我认为，有必要了解更大的背景，多国港口和全球经济联系为跨文化接触的代理人提供了职业机会，比如遗嘱书的作者。鉴于制度经济学(Greif 2006；Hart 2017,1995)、商业史(Dekker，Kiping和Wadhwani 2015；Roy 2018)、英印法律史、领域(Bourdieu 2002)和亚洲世界主义(Lefèvre et al 2015；Subrahmanyam 2018)等理论，我将使用当前遗嘱中的见解以及与其他亚美尼亚商人有关的其他法律文件来解释佩特鲁斯·沃斯坎及其合作伙伴的商业活动的组织。我还强调了精神来源对于重建当时的跨文化商业文化的重要性。结果将是一种混合产品，其中包括一本电子书，以及一份可与最近出版的Minas BžšKeanć在东欧的旅行记述(Kovács和Grigoryan 2019)编辑的文本相媲美的纸质副本。文本和附带注释的介绍将有助于进一步了解印度洋的全球商业组织，特别是早期现代边缘散居商人的生活。

Khwaja Petrus Woskan, a Catholic Armenian merchant left New Julfa for Madras in 1705 CE. At his death in 1750 CE, he was the most prominent Armenian in the town. The unique autobiographical last will and testament Petrus Woskan wrote is a text-book example of a rags to riches life-story. This project will bring out a critical annotated edition of this unpublished archival document.How did a merchant, who as per his own testimony had not received any help from family or friends, build his career? What do his achievements inform us about the political economy of the Indian Ocean? Contrary to the accepted wisdom that the network of Armenian commerce was an exclusive coalition of Apostolic Armenians of New Julfa (Aslanian 2011), this unique unpublished document offers crucial information on the role of Armenian Catholics in global commerce. It speaks of a cosmopolitan world in which migrants in a stranger society could, by dint of their own enterprise, arrange capital and build networks of trade spanning at least half the globe. It helps us to understand how an individual merchant negotiated the larger processes and structures of world history as he created cross-cultural and trans-regional networks across imperial borders and created a place for himself in it.Additionally, the information on principal–agent relationship in a merchant network and centre-periphery relations in the document calls for a review of the existing knowledge of these aspects of merchant networks (Aslanian 2011; Braudel 1986; Markovits 2001; Khachikian 1998). I argue that it is necessary to understand the larger context with polyglot ports and the global economic connections providing career opportunities to agents of cross-cultural encounters such as the author of the testamentary account. I shall use insights from the current testament, other legal documents pertaining to other Armenian merchants in view of the theories of institutional economics (Greif 2006; Hart 2017, 1995), business history (Dekker, Kipping and Wadhwani 2015; Roy 2018), Anglo-Indian legal history, the field (Bourdieu 2002) and, Asian cosmopolitanism (Lefèvre et al 2015; Subrahmanyam 2018) to explain the organization of commercial activities of Petrus Woskan and his partners. I also underline the importance of etic sources for a reconstruction of the cross-cultural mercantile culture of the time.The result will be a hybrid product with an e-book, and a paper copy comparable to the recently published edited text of the travel account of Minas Bžškeanć in Eastern Europe (Kovács and Grigoryan 2019). The text with the accompanying annotated introduction will benefit further understanding of the organisation of global commerce in the Indian Ocean and especially, the life of the early modern liminal diasporic merchants.