In recent years, the economic, administrative and social historiography of the Greek diaspora has flourished, especially with regard to the Greek communities of central Europe. It has evolved as part of a vibrant methodological discourse built upon migration, network-systems and colonial/postcolonial studies. The title of the volume of which this paper forms part refers to ‘merchant colonies’ and their importance in European international trade in the early modern period (late fifteenth–eighteenth centuries). Consequently, we will be discussing the trade undertaken by foreign merchants to and through central Europe, especially those who established themselves in that area in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We should begin by explaining the geographical and geopolitical context in this area during the period in question. The term ‘colony’ occupies a central place in this volume, and needs to be explained and compared with others such as ‘nation’ (Nation/Гἕνοζ), ‘establishment’ (Niederlassung/paroikia), ‘community’ (comunità/Gemeinde/ϰοινότητα), ‘confraternity’ (Confraternità/Bruderschaft/Αδελϕότητα) and ‘companies’ (compagnie/Gesellschaften). The merchant colonies in central Europe, which were part of the south-eastern European Orthodox diaspora, should be examined in terms of the conflicts, as well as the convergences, between the two – and after the late eighteenth century, three – empires with territory in central Europe, and of developments in their respective economic policies.

I am using the term ‘central Europe’ to denote the space delimited by the city-port of Trieste and the Transylvanian lands of the Carpathians, with small ‘deviations’ as far as the Black Sea.