Paper short abstract:

Moving from the diasporic networks to the processes of economic acculturation and knowledge transfer involving Greek merchants in the Kingdom of Naples during the eighteenth century, this paper aims to overcome some conventional representations of diasporic space.

Paper long abstract:

During the last decades diaspora studies have basically translated the concept of trans-nationality into two opposite cultural and social representations: one implying a clear-cut separation among different cohesive organizations, the "trading diasporas", each interacting across state borders with a number of "external" networks (political, cultural, trading…); and the other one built up on the notions of hybridism, in-betweeness and fragmentation as intrinsic features to diasporic experience.

Moving from the diasporic networks to local context, I suggest, it is possible to grasp a more multifaceted reality behind these two contrasting and univocal views. By focusing on the case of the Greek-Epirot merchants living in Naples and in Terra di Bari during the eighteenth century, I will show that the business and commercial activities they run throughout this region were based on a double arrangement of relationships. The trade of Levantine coats across the central Mediterranean was largely managed by exploiting the intra-group relations connecting the diasporic communities scattered along this commercial circuit. At a local level, instead, processes of mutual economic acculturation and knowledge transfer involved the same merchants in the creation of Greek-Neapolitan coat-factories and agricultural farms.

The space charted by these two different sets of business relationships is one where the cross-cultural interaction does not take place between two groups socially separated, nor it inevitably produces hybrid identities. The interplay with the "other" engenders new knowledge, economic synergies and social roles, which re-shape the space - rather than the identities - according to contingent and functional dynamics.