ABSTRACT
Diaspora historiography has often emphasised cultural bonds, transnational organisations and networks linking people across geographical boundaries, thus opening the way to more global approaches. Trade was an economic activity which introduced a large number of local merchants, as well as diaspora merchants from the Ottoman Empire, into international and inter-ethnic transactions. The organisation of the Greek communities in London, Manchester and Liverpool followed the model of the Greek communities of the previous phase in the Italian Peninsula, and was the launching pad principally for Greek migrant entrepreneurs from Mediterranean ports and other Anatolian cities, as well as from the Greek state after the 1830s. Greeks usually created introvert communities in their place of settlement, as they had done in the previous phase of trade migration. In Victorian England the cultural features that combined antiquarianism, bibliophilia and a love of learning with classical moral and aesthetic values facilitated the Greeks' assimilation into a flourishing bourgeois society.
