The Houses

Before the fire, we need to understand the network, because the network is what survived it — and because it is the direct ancestor of everything in Part VII.

By the late eighteenth century the Chian merchant families had developed a distinctive commercial system, consistent enough across houses and generations to count as a model. Economic historians refer to the "Chiot phase" of Greek business as a specific structure occupying a specific period, and its elements are worth spelling out, because they recur, almost unchanged, in the shipping offices of the twenty-first century.

The family was the firm. Partners were brothers, sons, nephews, cousins, and sons-in-law. Outside capital was used sparingly and outside partners hardly at all. This kept control absolute and made trust cheap: the enforcement mechanism was kinship, and the penalty for bad faith was not litigation but social annihilation within a small, intensely interconnected world in which everybody knew everybody and everybody's mother.

They married each other, systematically, generation after generation. A Chian merchant marriage was simultaneously an alliance, a capital transfer, and a credit guarantee. The dowry was working capital. The bride's brothers became the groom's correspondents in another port. Argenti's genealogies show Ralli marrying Rodocanachi marrying Argenti marrying Scaramanga marrying Mavrogordato marrying Petrocochino marrying Sechiari marrying Schilizzi marrying Vlasto, in loops and re-loops, until by the third generation everyone in the network was related to everyone else in several different ways at once.

They dispersed geographically while keeping a single centre of gravity. The characteristic structure was a set of branch houses in different ports, each headed by a family member, all trading on the family account with one another. Brothers in Constantinople, Odessa, Trieste, Livorno, Marseille and London, writing to each other weekly. This gave the firm three things that no outsider could easily replicate: real-time commercial intelligence across the whole Mediterranean and Black Sea; the ability to arbitrage price differences between markets, buying in the cheap one and selling in the dear one on the same account; and internal credit, so that the firm could finance its own trade without going to a bank at all.

They specialised without becoming rigid. The core business was grain — Russian and Danubian wheat, brought from the Black Sea to the deficit markets of the western Mediterranean and, increasingly, of industrialising northern Europe. Around that core clustered cotton, silk, olive oil, hides, dried fruit, and, flowing the other way, British and French manufactures.

And they built the institutions that made the trust work. Wherever a Chian community established itself, it founded a church and a school, and the church and the school reproduced the community that enforced the reputation that made the credit possible. The Greek Orthodox churches of London, Manchester, Marseille, Trieste, and Odessa were substantially Chian foundations. This was not merely piety; it was infrastructure.

The names, and where they went: Ralli, the largest, in Marseille and then London from 1818. Rodocanachi in Odessa, Livorno, Marseille and London. Argenti in Marseille, Trieste and London. Mavrogordato, connected to the Phanariot princely house of the same name, in Constantinople, Odessa, Trieste and London. Scaramanga, dominant at Taganrog on the Sea of Azov. Petrocochino in Marseille, Manchester and London. Vlasto, Sechiari, Schilizzi, Negroponte, Calvocoressi, Agelasto, Franghiadi, Zarifi, Prasakakis, and the Zizinia in Alexandria.

By 1820 this was, taken together, one of the significant commercial networks of the Mediterranean world, and it was operated by perhaps a hundred interrelated families whose home island was Chios and whose family seats were behind the red walls of Kambos.

In 1822 the home island was destroyed. And the network did not fall with it.