ABSTRACT
Greater emphasis on the role of trading networks could thus be beneficial to the discipline of global history. This chapter focuses on an alternative notion, that of the trading diaspora', as put forward in the 1970s by Abner Cohen, an Africanist anthropologist, and generalized in the 1980s by Philip Curtin, an African historian. It presents a case study, based on the history of one particular network, that of the Sindworkies of Hyderabad-Sindh, in British India. A different work of anthropologists such as Lloyd Fallers or Karl Yambert, who are probably the first to have used the term trade networks', or trading networks', and who have looked extensively at non-European contexts. Within trading networks, the accumulation of information can lead over time to the development of forms of knowledge, of a pragmatic nature, which can be transmitted from one generation to another, and constitute a precious resource. Global history has often been criticized for a certain lack of empirical grounding.
