Trade diasporas are communities of merchants living within an alien population. These communities evolved along long-distance trade routes because people of different languages and customs need mediators to negotiate transactions across cultural barriers.

Resident Alien Populations

History provides many examples of diaspora trade networks. One of the earliest recorded diaspora centres was Cappadocia, an Assyrian settlement dating to between 2500 and 2000 BCE. Samarkand exemplifies the diaspora communities that evolved along the overland caravan routes connecting Europe and the Near East with China across the Asian steppes. In Europe, Venice and Genoa established networks of diaspora communities along the Adriatic Coast and as far afield as the Black Sea in the Late Middle Ages.

Samarkand

Venice

Other trade diasporas include the towns of Europe's Hanseatic League, and the Swahili trade centres, such as Kilwa, which dotted coastal East Africa during the later Middle Ages. The Swahili centres were part of an ecumenical trade zone that regulated trade across the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea from the mid-1300s to the early 1500s. Malacca, a major transit centre within the zone, supported a sizeable diaspora community, as did Calicut on India's Malabar Coast.

	Kilwa
	Malacca