Some predominantly oral Mercurians (such as the Ibo of Nigeria) would embrace the transition; others (such as the Gypsies) would continue to service the ever shrinking world of folk culture and small pariah entrepreneurship. Some Apollonian groups would prove willing and able to convert to Mercurianism; others would balk, fail, or rebel. No one would remain immune, however, and no one was better at being a scriptural Mercurian—and therefore “modern”—than scriptural Mercurians, old and new.45 The over-represention of the Armenians and Jews in entrepreneurial and professional jobs in Europe and the Middle East (discrimination notwithstanding) was matched or exceeded by the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Parsis in India, the Indians in Africa, and the Lebanese in Latin America and the Caribbean, among others. Having established themselves as commercial intermediaries with the arrival of the Portuguese, the Parsis became British India’s premier financiers, industrialists, and urban professionals—including the most famous and most successful of them all, Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata. The principal nineteenth-century Indian politician (“the Grand Old Man of India” Dadabhai Naoroji) was also a Parsi, as was the ideologue of violent nationalism Bhikhaiji Rustom Cama; all three Indian members of the British Parliament; the first Indian baronet; the first prime minister of the Bombay Presidency; the “Uncrowned King of Bombay”; the “Potato King of Bombay”; the pioneer of coffee production in the East; the first Indian to fly from Europe to India; the most prominent Indian Freemasons; most Western musicians (including, eventually, Zubin Mehta); and every single member of the first all-India cricket team. In 1931, 79 percent of all Parsis (and 73 percent of the females) were literate, as compared to 51 percent of Indian Christians and 19 percent of Hindus and Muslims.46 Similar lists could be compiled for all scriptural Mercurians (although in some areas they thought it wise to stay out of public politics).
A small minority wherever they find themselves, the Arabic-speaking immigrants from the Levant (Syrians, Palestinians, and Lebanese, known in Latin America as “turcos”) established a virtual monopoly of the Amazon trade during the rubber boom around the turn of the twentieth century and eventually came to dominate the economic life of Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras, among other places. Between 1919 and 1936, Arab entrepreneurs controlled 67 percent of the Honduran import and export sector, and by the late 1960s, they employed 36 percent and 45 percent of the manufacturing labor force in the country’s industrial centers of Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. Over the past two decades, at least seven of the New World’s heads of state have been of Lebanese origin: Julio Cesar Turbay Ayala of Colombia, Abdala Bucaram and Jamil Mahuad of Ecuador, Carlos Roberto Flores Facusse of Honduras, Carlos Menem of Argentina, Said Musa of Belize, and Edward Seaga of Jamaica. In the United States, descendants of Lebanese Christian immigrants are strongly over-represented in the political, economic, and cultural elite; one of them, Ralph Nader, was a contender for the presidency in the 2000 election. In postindependence Sierra Leone, in West Africa, the Lebanese (less than 1 percent of the population) acquired full control of the most productive sectors of the economy, including the gold and diamond trade, finance, retail, transportation, and real estate. Under President Siaka Stephens, in particular, five Lebanese oligarchs (to borrow a term from post-Soviet Russia) were the country’s de facto government.47
Various Indian diasporas have outlived the British Empire (which did so much to propel them), and moved farther afield, specializing in traditional Mercurian (“Jewish”) occupations such as trading, finance, garments, jewelry, real estate, entertainment, and medicine. Despite continued discrimination, Goans, Jains, Ismailis, and Gujaratis, among others, have continued to dominate the economic and professional life of large parts of East Africa (accounting for between 70 and 80 percent of all manufacturing firms in postindependence Kenya, for example). The Jains, the most “puritanical” and probably the wealthiest of all Indian diaspora communities, are second only to the Jews in the international diamond trade; in the late 1980s, having established themselves in such diamond centers as New York, Antwerp, and Tel Aviv, they accounted for about one-third of all purchases of rough diamonds in the world. In the United States, Indians (mostly Gujaratis) own about 40 percent of all small motels, including about one-fourth of the franchises of the Days Inn chain, and a substantial number of low-cost hotels in large urban centers. In 1989, the combined global real estate investment of Overseas Indians was estimated to be worth about $100 billion. At the same time (in the 1980s), the number of Indian students studying in the United States quadrupled to more than 26,000. By 1990, there were about 5,000 Indian engineers and several hundred Indian millionaires in California’s Silicon Valley. Altogether, there were about 20,000 Indian engineers and 28,000 physicians in the United States, including 10 percent of all anesthesiologists. But probably the biggest jewel in the Indian diaspora’s crown is the old imperial “mother country.” London serves as the headquarters of a large number of Indian commercial clans, and in Great Britain as a whole, Indian and Pakistani males have a 60 percent higher rate of self-employment than “white” Britons and make up a disproportionate share of managerial and professional personnel. In the 1970s, the rate of economic upward mobility among Indians and Pakistanis was three times that of the rest of the British population.48
By far the largest and most widely dispersed of all Mercurian communities in today’s world are the Overseas Chinese. Most of them live in Southeast Asia, where they have encountered relatively little market competition as they have moved from peddling, moneylending, and small artisanship to banking, garment making, and agricultural processing, to virtually total economic dominance (often concealed behind a variety of local frontmen). At the end of the twentieth century, ethnic Chinese (less than 2 percent of the population) controlled about 60 percent of the private economy of the Philippines, including, according to Amy Chua, “the country’s four major airlines and almost all of the country’s banks, hotels, shopping malls, and major conglomerates.” They dominated “the shipping, textiles, construction, real estate, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and personal computer industries as well as the country’s wholesale distribution networks . . . and six out of the ten English-language newspapers in Manila, including the one with the largest circulation.” The situation looked similar in Indonesia (over 70 percent of the private economy, 80 percent of the companies listed on the Jakarta Stock Exchange, and all of the country’s billionaires and largest corporations), Malaysia (about 70 percent of market capitalization), and Thailand (all but three of the country’s seventy most powerful business groups, the exceptions being the Military Bank, the Crown Property Bureau, and a Thai-Indian corporation). In post-Communist Burma and almost-post-Communist Vietnam, the ethnic Chinese were quickly returning to economic prominence; in Rangoon and Mandalay, they owned most shops, hotels, and real estate, and in Ho Chi Minh City, they controlled roughly 50 percent of the city’s market activity and dominated light industry, import-export, shopping malls, and private banking. Postcolonial Southeast Asia had become part of an international Overseas Chinese economy, headquartered in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and California.49
There is no consensus on why some recently uprooted Apollonians seem able and willing to transform themselves into Mercurians. Why do Chinese and Japanese farmers tend to become entrepreneurs when they arrive on new shores? Why did most Indians in Africa, whatever their background, become baniyas? And why did Lebanese villagers consistently ignore the appeals of the Brazilian government (which needed independent farmers to develop the South, farm laborers to replace the slaves, and factory workers to help with industrialization) in order to take up a nomadic and dangerous life as peddlers in the jungle?