on where to trade, and what to trade in, for a seventeenth century Armenian merchant's manual gave instructions for all the places Hovhannes visited.14 Armenians were classic intermediaries in the commercial world. It seems that persecution had done them a favour. They were moved by Shah Abbas from Armenia late in the sixteenth century, and made to settle in New Julfa, near Isfahan. This move gave them much better access to routes and products. They spoke Persian, and so could operate all over the Muslim world, yet were Christian, an advantage when dealing with Europeans. Thanks to their network made up of the dispersed Armenian community they had excellent intelligence on prices and conditions in their centre of New Julfa. There were several very large, often kin based, merchant houses in New Julfa, and these sent out agents, maybe a hundred in all from each house, far and wide around the Indian Ocean and far inland too. By the end of the seventeenth century Armenians in London were major freighters of the ships of the EIC. They traded as far as Sweden, and were important merchants in Amsterdam.15 There are strong parallels here with the Jewish trade from Egypt which was so important in a previous period (see pages 103–4). Other major merchants belonged to larger and more settled communities. Such magnates have recently been described as 'portfolio capitalists', that is people who spread their investments into many areas, including banking and shipping as well as trade in a host of commodities. These merchant princes, many of them Muslim at this time, overlapped with rulers and nobles who also traded. None of these were humble men at all. The Europeans wrote in awe of the great Jain merchant Virji Vorah in Surat, reputedly the richest man in the world, and who could have bought and sold the northern European trading companies with ease. Virji Vorah, who died in 1665, was into everything. He was a banker, a ship owner, a trader in indigo, pepper and many other products. He engaged in both retail and wholesale trade, and lent money to the Mughal nobility. He also lent money to the Europeans, and used his power quite unscrupulously. He had a Coromandel counterpart, Kasi Veeranna. He operated all over the central Coromandel coast, and sent out ships to both mainland and island southeast Asia from Pulicat, Chennai, San Thome, Tranquebar and other places. He was a major supplier of local cotton cloths to the European companies, and it is symptomatic of changes occurring at this time that from the 1670s he left a rather unsettled local environment and based himself in Chennai, from where he administered tax farms over an extensive area of coastal Coromandel.16
Most of these wealthy men did not travel themselves, but rather had agents spread around the great port cities of the littoral, and also far inland. Virji Vorah had agents or connections in Calicut, Agra, Burhanpur, all over the interior of Gujarat, and at all the great emporia around the Indian Ocean littoral. Networks of other Gujarati traders, especially the Hindu merchant group known as banias, extended even beyond this, to the Philippines, and even to Russia. These agents would often be members of the same community as themselves, often indeed related to some degree to the central figure.
Members of the chulia community on the Coromandel coast are roughly analogous to the banias of Gujarat. Bowrey wrote a very hostile, and revealing, account of them. We see yet again Indian Ocean merchants competing very well with Europeans in the late seventeenth century, for Bowrey was writing in the 1670s:
The Chulyars are a People that range into all Kingdoms and Countreys in Asia, and are a Subtle and Roguish people of the Mahometan Sect, but not very great Observers of many of his laws. Theire Native land is Upon the Southernmost parts of the Choromandell Coast. . . . They by theire rangeinge much (before they content themselves with a place for theire abode), doe learne to write and Speake Severall of the Eastern languages, whereby they very much delude the people, and not