Exile as Empire: Pandia Ralli and the House That Circled the Earth

And now the strangest part of the whole story, which is that the destruction of Chios did not destroy the Chians.

It scattered them. And because the scattered were, disproportionately, members of a merchant network that already had branch houses in a dozen foreign ports, the effect of the catastrophe was to convert a Mediterranean trading community into a global one — almost overnight, under maximum pressure, and with a workforce of traumatised relatives who had to be found something to do.

The refugees of 1822 went to Syros, where the new town of Ermoupolis, founded largely by Chian and Psariot refugees, became within a decade the leading port and shipbuilding centre of the new Greek state; and to Trieste, Livorno, Marseille, Odessa, Taganrog, Alexandria, Constantinople, and London. They arrived with their lives, their connections, and in many cases nothing else whatever. And their relatives who were already established took them in and put them to work, because that is what the system was for.

The result is what economic historians call the Chiot phase of Greek commerce, running from the 1820s to about the 1860s, in which a group of interrelated Chian families came to occupy a genuinely major position in the international grain trade and in Mediterranean commerce generally.

The house that went furthest was Ralli Brothers, and it deserves telling properly.

The Ralli family of Chios had established itself in Marseille in the eighteenth century and in London in 1818, four years before the massacre. Five brothers ran it: Zannis (John), Augustus, Pandia, Toumazis (Thomas), and Eustratios. The dominant figure, and one of the notable merchants of Victorian London, was Pandia Stephen Ralli (1793–1865), known throughout the City by a nickname that says most of what needs saying: Zeus.

Pandia Ralli was born on Chios and came to London as a young man. He was a formidable, austere, and immensely disciplined operator, and under him the firm did three things in sequence.

First, it exploited the catastrophe. When Chios was destroyed, Ralli Brothers absorbed refugee relatives into its offices, extended credit to Chian houses that had lost everything, and expanded aggressively at a moment when the competition was in ruins. This sounds cold and was not: the firm also spent very large sums ransoming Chian slaves, and the two activities were carried on by the same men in the same letters.

Second, it built a Mediterranean and Black Sea machine. Grain out of Odessa, Taganrog, and the Danube; cotton, silk, gall-nuts, and dried fruit out of the Levant; British manufactures going back the other way; branch houses in Odessa, Constantinople, Marseille, Trieste, and Manchester, each run by a Ralli or a relative, all reporting to London. By the 1830s and 1840s it was among the larger Greek houses in Europe.

Third — and this is what separated it from every other Chian firm — in the 1850s it went east.

Ralli Brothers opened in Calcutta in 1851, and then in Bombay, Karachi, and Madras, and then in a network of up-country buying stations scattered across the subcontinent, eventually numbering in the dozens. The model was unusual and highly profitable: rather than buying through the established chain of Indian and British intermediaries, Ralli bought directly from the producers through its own salaried agents at its own stations, graded and baled the goods itself, and shipped on its own account. Jute, cotton, wheat, oilseeds, hides, shellac, saltpetre. It employed thousands of people. It ran, in effect, a vertically integrated commodity business a century before the phrase existed.

By the later nineteenth century Ralli Brothers was one of the largest trading houses in the British Empire and among the largest in the world in its lines, with offices from Manchester to Marseille to Odessa to Persia to New York.

And it became, without ceasing to be Greek, a British institution. The Rallis were naturalised, knighted, and made baronets. They sat on the boards of banks and insurance companies. They married English wives as well as Greek ones and sent their sons to English schools. They built and endowed the Greek Orthodox churches of London and Manchester, and gave very large sums to hospitals, schools, and public works both in Britain and in Greece — including on Chios, which the family never stopped regarding as home. The firm survived as an independent house until the 1960s.

Around Ralli operated the rest of the network, doing the same things at slightly smaller scale. Rodocanachi, immense in Odessa and London, in grain, banking, and eventually shipping. Scaramanga, dominant at Taganrog. Mavrogordato, Argenti, Petrocochino, Schilizzi, Vlasto, Sechiari, Negroponte, Agelasto, Calvocoressi, Franghiadi, Zarifi, Zizinia in Alexandria.

Together with the Greek families from elsewhere who joined them, they made the Greek community of London — first around Finsbury Circus in the City, later in Bayswater, worshipping at St Sophia in Moscow Road — one of the wealthiest immigrant communities in nineteenth-century Britain. The Greek merchants of Manchester came to dominate the export of cotton goods to the Levant. Greek names appear among the founders and governors of Victorian financial institutions.

And they patronised the arts, extensively and with real discrimination. The Ionides family — from Constantinople rather than Chios, but married into the same network and central to the same community — were among the most important private patrons in Victorian Britain, buying and supporting Whistler, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Watts, and Legros; Alexander Ionides's house at 1 Holland Park was decorated by William Morris, Walter Crane, and Philip Webb, and is one of the lost monuments of the Aesthetic Movement. Marie Spartali Stillman, daughter of another family of the network, was both one of the celebrated Pre-Raphaelite models and, more importantly, a serious painter in her own right with a career spanning sixty years.

Two features of this world matter enormously for what comes next.

The first is that it moved into shipping. A grain trader who charters ships eventually buys ships; a firm that ships a million quarters of wheat a year wants to control its own freight. Rodocanachi, Ralli, Scaramanga and others acquired vessels — first sail, then steam — initially to carry their own cargoes and then as a business in its own right. The Greek shipowning presence in London, which by the twentieth century would be the largest in the world, began with Chian grain merchants buying bottoms for their own wheat.

The second is that it never let go of the island. The Chian families abroad went on sending money home, marrying Chians, burying their dead on Chios where they could, and funding the island's churches, schools, hospitals, and public works. Chios was repopulated and rebuilt through the nineteenth century very substantially with diaspora money. That habit — of making a fortune somewhere else and spending a serious part of it on the rock you came from — has never been broken, and it is still the most visible fact about the island. It is why a place of fifty thousand people has the public buildings it has.