ABSTRACT

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the history of 'merchant colonies' and their importance in the European international trade in the early modern period (late fifteenth-eighteenth centuries). It focuses on the most important merchant colonies of both western and eastern Europeans in the whole of Europe, western and eastern. The book reveals that merchant colonies shared similar organizations, structures and development in the English, Dutch, French, German, Russian, Greek and Armenian cases in European cities in the early modern period. Merchant colonies have also been described as 'trade diasporas'. The term coined by Abner Cohen refers to 'a nation of socially interdependent, but spatially dispersed communities'. Concerning diaspora people, this book focuses on the trade diasporas of Greeks and Armenians, keeping a comparative perspective with the Jews.