Indeed suffering in common unifies more than joy does. Where national memories are concerned, griefs are of more value than triumphs, for they impose duties and require a common effort.[1]
These words from Ernest Renan’s iconic essay of 1882, “Q..
Sebouh David Aslanian is Associate Professor of History and the Richard Hovannisian Endowed Chair in Modern Armenian History at the University of California-Los Angeles. He is the author of From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (California, 2011) and Dispersion History and the Polycentric Nation: The Role of Simeon Yerevantsi’s Girk or Kochi Partavjar in the Eighteenth Century National Revival (Bibliotheque d’armenologie, 2004), along with many articles and book chapters. He is now working on two books on the “global microhistory” of the early modern Indian Ocean as well as a study of early modern global Armenian print culture in the diaspora.