ABSTRACT
In the seventeenth century, news of millenarian events interacted with the energies of trade, commerce, and exploration in the Mediterranean world and beyond. Growing overseas trade led merchants to interact with political authority, creating entangled networks built on communication, commerce, and trade, connecting an emerging global world. Considering three millenarian movements –in the Safavid empire, in England and the English world, and in the Ottoman empire– this chapter explores how all three movements drew on mercantile, monied, and well-connected individuals; how each movement elicited a local response which was analogous to the response of authorities in each of the three polities, leading to greater scrutiny of religious divergence and religious pluralism and the challenges it would bring for trade, commerce, and society. Travellers, diplomats, early economic writers, and “uncommonly cosmopolitan individuals” alike drew on models and comparisons, rather than the direct observation of economic facts, to understand human motivation. Writers like Paul Rycaut alighted upon commerce as an antidote to the metaphysical, presaging changes about commerce as an outlet for the “passions”. All three movements were seen as related, and lessons learned from the experience and reporting of domestic and foreign millenarian movements were sketched to assure the avoidance of similar disruptions in the future. In this way, news of millenarian movements aided in building close relationships between mercantile elites, diplomats, and state actors, often across geographic distance, and by implication helped to define millenarianism as a process. Millenarianism-as-process was the cumulative effect of century-long private and public pleading, lobbying, and coalition building by companies and their agents to draw the state into service.
