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Signed, Sealed, and Undelivered: The Voyage of the Santa Catharina and the Global Microhistory of the Indian Ocean
June 3, 2019 @ 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm +04
About the Event:
In the early hours of the morning of April 30, 1748, at the height of the War of the Austrian Succession, a British naval squadron intercepted a merchant vessel called the Santa Catharina in the Indian Ocean on its return voyage from the port of Basra in the Persian Gulf to the Bengali port of Calcutta. Like many “country ships” involved in the port-to-port trade of the Indian Ocean, the Santa Catharina had a crew with a diverse and cosmopolitan background hailing from different parts of Europe and South Asia. Moreover, two of its passengers were Armenian merchants from New Julfa (Isfahan), freighting the ship and owning most of its cargo. The ship’s cargo included bales of raw silk, Bengali textiles, lead, iron, rice, Persian rosewater, palm dates, and silver species. Most importantly perhaps, at the time of its capture, the Santa Catharina was carrying a payload of about three thousand pieces of business and family correspondence written from Italy, the Ottoman empire (Istanbul, Tokat, and Diyarbekir), and especially from Isfahan and addressed to recipients throughout India and as far afield as Canton and Beijing in China. Along with the rest of the ship’s belongings, these letters were confiscated by the British and sent to London where they were presented as exhibits during a high-stakes Admiralty trial (1749-1752) on the fate of the ship. My talk treats the Santa Catharina as a vessel, instrument, and metaphor of Indian Ocean and Armenian history. The talk focuses on the sensational trial of the ship that took place in London and attempts to assess the historical value of the ship’s traveling “archive” for global, Armenian, and Indian Ocean history.
About the Speaker: