The Wreck of the Brig ‘Arabat’ and the Georgiev Brothers:

A Business Story during the Crimean War (1853–1856)

Abstract

This paper presents a representative fragment of the maritime trade during the Crimean War years
(1853–1856) involving Evlogi Georgiev and Khristo Georgiev. The purpose of the present article is
to reveal the role of insurance policies in the economic enterprises of the Georgiev brothers and to
emphasise the rationale, suggested by P. Theologos (or Theologu), behind the use of such a
commercial instrument. Based on commercial letters, preserved in the National Archives of Romania,
between P. Theologos, a Balkan merchant established in Manchester, and the Georgiev brothers, we
discover some of the entrepôts and industrial centres from which the trading houses controlled by
them were supplied, the problems encountered in trade between the West and the Black Sea; among
other things, the introduction (quite recent for the Lower Danube region) and use, as a safety factor,
of instruments specific to the capitalist commercial system: the insurance of goods on board ships.
All this leads to the idea that the network of agents and partnership relations built up by the two
Georgiev brothers, supported since 1839 by the Puliev brothers, their maternal uncles, turned the
small trading house in Karlovo into one of the promoters of capitalism at the Lower Danube, by using
and introducing various Western economic instruments in the western Black Sea region, along the
two banks of the Lower Danube.