Propagating Proto-nationalism via Print in the Armenian Trade Diaspora of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Building on insights from Eisenstein regarding the ‘print revolution’ and Smith and Gellner on the nationalist gestation process, this paper seeks to demonstrate that by the 17th century Armenian diasporic life in cosmopolitan entrepots over the Eurasian hemisphere forged a novel ethnic inclusiveness among the merchant class. This mutuality is reflected in the discourse of ethnic affiliation expressed in printers’ colophons, establishing affinities with readers through myths of common origin from Hayk, eponymous progenitor of the Armenians. This is then reinforced by published works, like that of the historian Movsēs Xorenac‘i, whose narrative presents the received account of Armenia’s early history.

The diffusion of proto-nationalist ideology from Europe and America in the 18th century together with the negative impact of mercantilism infused traditional genres with a new territorial dimension. Moreover, whereas the past had been conceived as continuous with the present as in the poet Nersēs Shnorhali’s Vipasanut‘iwn (Romance), a modernist reading, as Anderson has shown, detached it from the reader’s ‘now’. Similarly, whereas the many political laments (1145-1604) treat the destruction of cities from an eyewitness perspective, 18^th century laments idealize Hayk’s rule during a primeval Golden Age as a Paradise Lost. A series of nostalgia-driven compilations then transferred the mythological to the historical plane. This culminated in a tract of the 1770s demythologizing the mystique of earlier kingdoms by critiquing the aristocratic and ecclesiastical elites and empowering the middle class to realize a modern state on democratic republican principles.

In this way I posit an ideological shift in print rhetoric from ethnic solidarity in the 17th century to reconstituting a state in the 18th, predicating the transformation on the incipient movement toward global integration that constituted the matrix of the nation state.