Religious institutions shared merchant courier networks to police member identity

Evidence

Merchants were not the only ones to depend on the intelligence network connecting communities in India and the East with the nodal center in Julfa. The church also depended on this system to send information to its diocesan sees in India. General encyclicals, pontifical bulls from Etchmiadzin [the seat of the Church], letters of blessing, alms donations, payment of church taxes, correspondence between priests overseeing a parish in India and the primate in in New Julfa, and, in rare cases, letters of excommunication all circulated between the diocesan center of the All Saviors Monastery in Julfa and its daughter churches in India and farther east by means of the same courrier system. The ability of this system to circulate information from one end of the Julfan network to another was thus just as crucial for merchants as it was for the clergy, one of whose functions was to maintain the integrity of the commercial network by ensuring that its members stayed firm in their ethno-religious identity and, therefore, continued making generous donations to the church. — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 200

Categorization

• XREF: Articulates the church-via-network mechanism — religion reinforcing commercial trust through identity policing — parallel to Norenzayan’s larger Big God argument that prosocial religion creates in-group solidarity.
• SHARE: The church’s role in policing Armenian merchant identity to keep donations flowing is a niche nugget a scholar of trade-and-religion would appreciate.