Traveling and Trading nected these parts of the world were both familial and commercial, but
revolved around a sense of the “nation” of conversos: “Planetary disper-
sion, transcontinental and transoceanic solidarities: this immense network
that joined the conversos of Lisbon, Antwerp and Mexico, and the Jews of
Livorno, Amsterdam and Constantinople introduced a new and remark-
able character,” which united “tens of thousands of persons who do not
officially profess to the same religion, yet share a sentiment of belong-
ing to the same collectivity, designated by one word: ‘Nação’ [nation].”^21
Moreover, the new configuration of long-distance commerce demanded
knowledge and experience that the Old Christian merchant elites lacked.
At the same time, the New Christians, emancipated from the restrictions
that had marginalized them as Jews, could finally access all the charges
and functions of the New World economy. The mastering of new tech-
niques of credit and production allowed them to engage commercially
through the routes that the discoveries of the New World and the colonial
enterprises opened up to them, particularly in the sugarcane market.^22
Both identity—who they were—and historical juncture—when they
consolidated as a group—formed the context and contingency of the con-
versos’ commercial rise. Freed of Jewish status, benefiting from new op-
portunities in world trade, and networking among an expanded “family”
linked by a shared sense of identity, the conversos mirror the Dönme in
the nineteenth century. Moreover, Jews in the Ottoman Empire did not
face the same restrictions as Jews in Iberia and Iberian holdings abroad,
and, as Muslims, the Dönme were more privileged than Jews. Like the fif-
teenth and sixteenth centuries, the nineteenth century witnessed a radical
expansion in trade accompanying high colonialism, and Ottoman mar-
kets, including Salonika, were penetrated by western European capital.
Goods and technologies moved between empires aided by a fully devel-
oped Dönme diaspora. As Yuri Slezkine notes of Jews in the neighboring
Russian Empire, there was “a network of people with similar backgrounds
and similar challenges who could, under certain circumstances, count on
mutual acknowledgement and cooperation.” Their “intragroup trust” as-
sured “the relative reliability of business partners, loan clients, and sub-
contractors”; most of their businesses were family businesses.^23
Salonika found itself “fully located within specialized global circuits of
finance, labor, technology, and capital,”^24 and the main space of interme-
diation in the transactional encounter between western Europe and the
Ottoman Empire.^25 Dönme bankers and textile and tobacco merchants,