A Merchant Prince in the Twilight of the Western Sephardic Diaspora: Aaron Lopez and his Business Organization

The present article takes as its starting point a case study—the business network of Aaron Lopez, a Portuguese merchant and whaling entrepreneur based in Newport, Rhode Island, in the second half of the eighteenth century—which it will use to ask how the dynamics and circumstances of the final phase of the western Sephardic diaspora’s life cycle influenced business structures. 

The remarkable quantity of primary sources relating to Aaron Lopez makes him the most fully documented Sephardic merchant in the eighteenth-century English-speaking world. Analysis of this voluminous documentation, scattered throughout diverse archives and libraries, allows us to trace an accurate picture of the different phases of Lopez’s business organization and to question how the strategies he adopted in choosing his correspondents were influenced by the specific dynamics of the twilight of the western Sephardic diaspora as experienced in colonial British America. This analysis will culminate in a problematization of the model that shaped Lopez’s trading network and his profile as a “merchant-prince” (an epithet coined by Stanley Chyet). Should it be understood as late western Sephardi or as colonial American? The article argues how the deconstruction of this dichotomy can provide us with a more operative framework for analyzing the late western Sephardic diaspora in all its complexity.