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| The Battle of Antietam, the Civil deadliest one-day fight. Public Domain |
The Confederates handed the Union a key victory on the “Cotton Front” before a shot was even fired in the American civil war. However, without the agility of the Greek cotton merchants, the alternative supplies may not have been enough, or established in time.
The “what ifs” of history have always been of interest to me, as a historian. In many cases profound events turn on chances both large and small, or in other cases, the game of history is well fixed, and in advance.
Sometimes, too, as a historian, one stumbles upon a “what if” investigative path, almost by accident.
I had always been interested in the Greek Orthodox Community of New Orleans, as it was the first Greek Church community in the United States. I understood it to be in many ways an outpost of a larger Greek merchant and expatriate network that extended throughout Europe and the Mediterranean.
When we lived in Europe, we visited the remnants of many of these communities, in Vienna, Venice, Trieste, Budapest, and elsewhere. I was well aware of this dynamic, articulate merchant/shipping diaspora, and its role in Greek independence and the growth of the Greek merchant fleet.
However, it was only after I began my master’s degree in history at Clemson University, in conjunction with teaching there, that I started to put the various threads together. As a Hydriot and the son and grandson of sailors, I quickly decided to focus on the Greek Merchant Marine for my thesis. The Greek merchant fleet specialized in the bulk carrying trade, and cotton was a key commodity in the 1800s.
At our local Greek Orthodox Church in Greenville, South Carolina I met a woman from New Orleans who introduced me to the New Orleans parish’s archives committee, which contained a treasure trove of information about the early Greek community there, where cotton merchants, usually agents of Greek houses located in Europe, settled in the boom times of the Antebellum South.
At the same time, I took a class on Middle Eastern History, where the professor suggested that I look at the Greek merchant community of Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. READ MORE
