Lecture | CMGI Brown Bag Seminar
Convenience and community: How Armenians entered and settled in Venice and Amsterdam, 1650-1730
- Date
- Wednesday 9 April 2025
- Time
- Series
- CMGI Brown Bag Seminars 2024-2025
- Location
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- Conference room (2.60)
Since the late nineteenth century, sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft has held a strong sway over the conscious and unconscious understanding of “community” for historians and political scientists. Community is often seen as a largely positive concept, rooted in ideas such as “belonging” and “mutual support”. Community has often been used by historians of early modern minorities to understand how groups of minorities from certain religious or imperial backgrounds congregated and settled in host cities.
This talk is based on my Marie Skłodowska Curie postdoctoral project ‘Armenian trading communities between Amsterdam and Venice, 1650-1730’. In early modern Venice and Amsterdam, Armenian merchants began trading in ever-increasing numbers during the seventeenth century. I investigate the activities of Armenian traders and other Armenians associated with trade. In contrast to Tönnies’ view of community as an organic structure, authorities and certain individuals actively constructed defined legal and cultural identities formutual social and economic benefits. Whilst not wishing to throw the concept of communityentirely out of the window, I question the picture of minority communities which imposes a cohesive identity onto such groups. Instead, I explore minorities’ diverse linguistic, religious, economic, and affective ties.