Port Cities and Printers: Reflections on Early Modern Global Armenian Print Culture

Abstract

This essay addresses the burgeoning field of global studies of print culture by examining the rich history of early modern Armenian print culture and book history, both it is own right and comparatively with their counterparts in the European and Islamic worlds.. Drawing on a variety of primary sources (colophons, notarial documents, and correspondence between printers), it makes two significant contributions to the broader scholarship on print culture and book history. First, it restores to the historiography of global print a valuable case study of a Near Eastern print tradition thus far missing from it. Second and more vital, unlike the recent spate of case studies involving South Asian, Persian, and Arabic print histories, it examines an Asian print tradition that stretches back to the first phase of printing, coinciding and overlapping with the early modern period and also with the “hand press” era of printing before the onset of the Industrial Revolution. It argues that from its inception in Venice in 1512 until roughly the early 1800s, the history of Armenian print culture was not only linked to its European counterpart but, much like it, was closely entangled with that of port cities, initially in Europe and subsequently in Asia, where Armenian long-distance merchants, or “port Armenians,” were settled.

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“…14 On this, see Aslanian 2013, 53-68. A series of studies by Sebouh D. Aslanian (2013;2014a;2014b; has demonstrated the interconnected web that linked together port cities, port Armenians, and printers. Not only was printing largely undertaken in port cities, but readership demographics were dominated by Armenians who lived in port cities, a class of which (mostly merchant port Armenians) were largely responsible for financially bankrolling printing enterprises.…”

Comparative Nationalisms and Bibliographic Black Holes: The Case of the Turkmen of the North Caucasus

“…The first Armenian-language newspaper, Azdarar , for example, was published not in Istanbul, Yerevan, or Venice but by the tiny Armenian diaspora community of Madras (modern Chennai, India) between 1794 and 1796. Azdarar has sparked a wide range of scholarly analysis in Armenian, Russian, English, and other languages (Aslanian 2014; Irazek and Ghukasyan 1986; Khachatrian 1984). Another significant newspaper published at the farthest edge of an ethnoreligious community is Sibiriya , the early-20th-century newspaper of the approximately 1,500 Muslims then living in Tomsk, in central Siberia.…”

The languages of Indian Ocean studies: Models, methods and sources

“…If so, how-with what dictionaries, teachers, or other mechanisms of language acquisition? This is not to say that trade and knowledge transfers bore no relationship with one another: merchants provided the basic nautical mechanisms of ancient and medieval contact and by the mid-nineteenth century became some of the main investors in newspapers and other printing enterprises that formed the infrastructure of the vernacular public sphere that spread across the ocean's ports (Aslanian, 2014;Bang, 2011;Green, 2022;Hofmeyr, 2013;Lewis, 2009). The point is rather that the movement of ideas cannot be collapsed into or equated with the easier transfer of commodities, not least because ideas, ethics and the complex belief systems or intellectual disciplines they constitute are always linguistically embedded.…”