Trading Diasporas' Role in Trade and Diplomacy is the second meeting of the workshop series organised by the Department of Medieval Studies, Central European University (Budapest) and by the Transcultural Studies Program and the Institute of Papyrology at the Universität Heidelberg, in the framework of the DAAD/MÖB project "Trans-European Diasporas: Migration, Minorities, and Diasporic Experience in East Central Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean 500-1800".
In this workshop, the focus will be on trading diasporas’ role as transcultural agents, with a regional focus on the maritime trade routes across the Eastern Mediterranean and their extensions towards Central Europe, the Black and Red Sea regions, andIndia as well as Central and East Asia. Many specialized studies are devoted to diasporic groups in specific emporia and some research has been done on trade along the main routes, as for instance between Alexandria and Venice. However, less attention had been given to the comparison of trading diasporas of different places. The workshop shall thus investigate how groups of the same diaspora (Jews, Armenians, Greeks, Florentines, Venetians) but resident in different trade hubs of competing routes were connected with one another and—if applicable—their homeland/-city: How did they communicate and in which languages and scripts? How did they complete their presence along the trade routes by maintaining cross-links, cutting perpendicular to the main axes of commerce? Did they generate closed ethnic networks, or were they open to associations with each other? What was stronger: the links among diasporic groups of the same diaspora or among different diasporic groups in one place? How useful is even the distinction between diasporic versus indigenous groups for instance in a port town – did the conditions of cross-cultural exchange not create a new, perhaps ‘cosmopolitan’ trans-culture forging a common identity between diasporic and indigenous groups vs. less ‘cosmopolitan’ groups of the same ancestry, ethnicity or religion? How did texts, images and objects wander across these side routes as well as along the main axes by mediation of trading diasporas? Which role played trading diasporas in spreading new commodities, techniques and other innovations? A particular emphasis shall be put on hitherto rather neglected sources, e.g. pottery, tomb stones, and the testimonies of material culture.
