Mischief in the Old Regime: Provincial Dragomans and Social Change at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This worthy man combined in his single person the various characters of diplomatist, husbandman, merchant, manufacturer, and master of a privateer. To be more explicit-he was drogueman to the French consul at Chios; in town he kept a silkloom at work; in the country he had a plantation of agrumi (citrus); he exported his stuffs and fruits to the principal sea-ports of the Archipelago, and, in the first Russian war, he employed all his spare money in fitting out a small vessel to cruise against the enemy-for so he chose to consider the Russians, in spite of all their amicable professions towards the Greeks. As a loyal subject of the Porte, and an old servant of the French government, he felt no sort of wish to be delivered from the yoke of the Turks; and he looked upon those barbarians of the north, who cared no more for the Patriarch of Constantinople than for the Pope of Rome, as little better than rank heretics, not worthy of being treated even like his silkworms, which he got every year carefully exorcised before their spinning time. (Hope, 1819, vol. 1:2)