Sebouh Aslanian

The first is a history of early modern global Armenian print culture and is provisionally titled Early Modernity and Mobility: Port Cities and Printers Across the Armenian Diaspora, 1512-1800. Under contract with Yale University Press, the book rethinks in novel and insightful ways both the role of mobility in the early modern period in global history and the rise and development in that historyof Gutenberg print culture across the early modern diasporic Armenian communities in the port cities of the Mediterranean, Atlantic, and Indian Ocean world.  Early Modernity and Mobility follows my earlier challenge and call to world or global historians to eschew the impersonal grand narratives of global history that tend to homogenize the past, overlook heterogeneity and complexity, and create “flattened” accounts of history. Rather than pursue such sweeping macro narratives of the rich human experience, I advocated for what I and Tonio Andrade were the first to call a “global microhistory” where large arguments are made on the basis of microanalysis and from a smaller vantage point. In an earlier publication in the pages of the American Historical Review, I had argued that “Microhistory’s attention to details or ‘trifles’…promises to restore the role of human agency and subjectivity to the largely agency-devoid macro-narratives of social history that penetrated the discipline of world history at a time when it was on the rise in the 1990s.” The book also engages with an earlier invitation to scholars in the specialized field of Armenian studies to shun what I called “autonomous history”—characterized by methodological nationalism or insularity along with blithe indifference to larger debates in the social sciences and humanities—and to embrace global history and its “interactive” approach to studying the rich past of the Armenians. In Early Modernity and Mobility, I take up these two sets of challenges and apply them to the writing of early modern Armenian history. First, I rely on microhistorical analysis to reach larger, more global conclusions about the textured nature of Armenian diasporic early modernity (a topic and periodization that has yet to exist in the field) and the role in it of print culture, all the while holding on to the global microhistorian’s mission of avoiding “flat” narratives and restoring agency to global history’s main protagonists who often remain faceless in large-scale studies. To trace the outlines of Armenian early modernity, I examine biographies of mobile and itinerant  printers, publishers, merchant benefactors, and even book censors. I follow these individuals and their books and presses as they moved across bodies of water, large and small, as well as continents, in short from one location in the global Armenian diaspora to another. My analysis and coverage span a broad swath of the early modern world from London and Amsterdam in the West, to Saint Petersburg in the North, Venice, Marseille, Livorno, Constantinople and New Julfa in the middle, and Surat, Madras, and Calcutta in the East. Second, in line with my earlier critique of Armenian Studies as a species of area studies with its insular, autonomous methodology, Early Modernity and Mobility thus embraces larger discussions and debates in early modern global history and self-consciously and critically grapples with the dominant annales-style historiography of the book known as l’histoire du livre. Despite its dominant influence in Euroamerican scholarship this approach has remained either entirely unknown to earlier studies of Armenian print culture, or only tangentially connected to it.

My second book project is provisionally titled Signed, Sealed, and Undelivered: The Voyage of the Santa Catharina and a Global Microhistory of the Indian Ocean, c. 1738-1756.”  A narrative microhistory of trade and politics in the early modern Indian Ocean, the book relies on 2,000 pieces of mercantile and family correspondence, commercial contracts, and other papers stored on an Armenian-freighted ship, the Santa Catharina and seized by the British navy in 1748. The book unpacks these letters, now stored at the High Court of Admiralty, and probes them to understand economic, cultural, and political histories of Indian Ocean arena and emerging commercial and contractual isomorphism in the age of Empire.

Classes Taught:

History 105B - Middle East, 1100-1700: From the Crusades and Mamluks to the Age of the Gunpowder Empires, History 107A - Armenia and Armenians in World History: From Ethnogenesis to the Eleventh Century CE, History 107B - Armenia and Armenians in World History: From the Medieval to the Early Modern Period, History 107C - Armenian and Armenians in World History: Empire, Diaspora, and Nation-State, History 191F-1/201J-1 - Port Cities and Printers: An Introduction to Early Modern World and Armenian History, 1500-1800, History 191F/201J - From Venice and Istanbul to Isfahan and Madras: Explorations in Early Modern Armenian History, 1500-1800, History 596 - Paper Instruments and Networks in Early Modern Trade: The Role of the Commenda and the Bill of Exchange in Early Modern Indian Ocean and Julfan Trade, 1600-1800.