Armenian silk merchants sustained three centuries of cross-imperial trade via church-linked monitoring

Evidence

At its peak, this network stretched from major European cities such as Amsterdam and London all the way to India and as far east as Tibet and the Philippines. The New Julfa Armenian merchants ran a sophisticated trade network operating simultaneously in all the major empires of the time for almost 300 years. Manufacturing and trading a precious commodity like silk, and transporting it through vast distances across various continents and empires, requires a very high degree of trust and cooperation, and the presence of credible mechanisms for punishing transgressors. They accomplished this feat without the benefits of an Armenian state or military-political establishment to support their activities. How did they do it? The Armenian merchant families spread around the world depended on an intricate network for communication and social monitoring that intertwined with the Armenian Apostolic Church. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 199

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s partner-choice framework from Baumard: a closed religious community provides the solidarity and monitoring that force-based state institutions could not.
• QUESTION: What specific church mechanisms (confession, excommunication, shared ritual) did the Armenian Apostolic Church deploy for social monitoring? Worth chasing in Aslanian’s work.