Professor Talinn Grigor will participate in the 2026 Cultural History of Asian Art Conference at the University of Hong Kong on June 24. Professor Grigor will discuss “Postcards, Hotels, and Hospitable Minorities: Armenian and Parsi Urbanity Networking a British Empire” for a panel exploring urbanity.

In his watershed, The Mediterranean (1949), Fernand Braudel names the Armenians and the Parsi of the early and high modern periods as two old and classic examples of “civilizations of the diaspora type.” Grigor’s talk maps a network of minoritarian architectural patronage by expanding Sussan Babaie’s concepts of Safavid-era “Perso-Shiʿa conviviality,” “politics of generosity,” and “the mercantile effect” into the British imperial strategies of the nineteenth century. The most striking urban expression of this generosity politics manifested in Armenian- and Parsi-owned residential mansions that paralleled a chain of Armenian- and Parsi-owned and -managed luxury hotels. In 1884, the four Sarkies Brothers from New Julfa “dominated the hospitality trade in the East” with the establishment of the Eastern and Oriental Hotel (E&O) ensembles. The staggering success of the Raffles Hotel (1887) in Singapore was owed to Tigran Sarkies, who moved there and formed the “oldest and most iconic hotel” in the country. Tigran then joined his brother, Aviet, in 1895 to acquire from John Darwood and relaunch the Strand Hotel (1901) in Rangoon, Myanmar. The scale of Sarkis Brother’s hotel in Penang, Singapore, and Rangoon was paralleled by Jamsetji Nusservanji Tata’s neoclassical Esplanade House in Bombay (1887), outdone by the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel (1903). The partnership between Parsi Sir Hormusjee Nowrojee Mody and Armenian Sir Catchick Paul Chater in Hong Kong resulted in megaprojects such as the Kowloon Development and Praya Reclamation, starting in the 1860s, that transformed the city’s urban fabric.