In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the merchants of Julfa, a town on the trade routes linking the Mediterranean with Iran, developed an extensive international trade network reaching from the Atlantic coast of Europe to the Indian Ocean. Part 1 of the dissertation traces the history of Julfa and examines the factors contributing to the Armenians' success - among them the significant growth of Iranian raw silk exports to Europe; the stimulus to East-West trade given by the influx of American silver to Europe and the consequent imbalance in the value of bullion between Europe, the Middle East and South Asia; the forced resettlement of the Julfans in Isfahan and the formation of a close economic relationship with the Safavi court. Part 2 concentrates on social and economic organisation, examining the structure of the Armenian patriarchal household and its commercial operation as family firm, and the community and its provision of the institutions that upheld commercial law and the merchants' system of values and standards of behaviour. The discussion in Chapters 4 and 5 of partnership and agency and the credit system operated by the Julfans is based on research into surviving contracts and credit instruments. These documents also provide the material for Part 3. The Julfan mercantile documents are a unique record of the commercial world of an Asian trading community in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. They also present numerous technical difficulties, which are discussed through the presentation of examples of documents in the original, with translation, notes and a glossary. The history of the Julfa merchants affords a rare opportunity for close examination of the organisation and techniques of trade in Asia and provides a basis for comparison with other Asian merchants.

Over the last decade, Ubiquitous Real-time Passenger Information (URTPI) has become popular among public transport passengers. The effectiveness of URTPI and hence the value of the investments into the necessary systems can be increased with a clear understanding of how URTPI influences passenger behaviour. However, such an understanding is still limited and fragmented. In particular, very little is known about the impact of URTPI on route choice. This study fills this gap evaluating the impact of URTPI on bus passengers' route choice. A revealed preference survey methodology was adopted for data collection and two questionnaire surveys targeting bus users were carried out. Categorical Regression and discrete choice models, such as Binary Logit Model and Multinomial Logit Model, have been applied to analyse the survey data. The study reveals that trip length, passenger age and profession are the main factors influencing the use of URTPI.Having access toURTPI, the frequency of its use is strongly influenced by the attributes of information and social norms. Bus arrival time and bus stop location are the two most important contents of information. Changing time ofdeparture from the start and the boarding time are the two most popular actions taken by bus passengers after consulting URTPI. Passengers' decisions are influenced by information on bus arrival time, bus route, and walking distance. As a result of the impact of URTPI on passengers' choices, the demand distribution for bus runs could potentially be changed by 33% and for bus lines by 22%. The overall network demand distribution could be affected in 42% of cases as a result of consulting URTPI.This study implicates that while investing in tailoring the sources of URTPI, passengers' preferred attributes and contents of information should be considered. Transport planners and operators should take the potential impact of URTPI into account to make better predictions of the PT demand distribution.

This thesis questions a series of assumptions concerning the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century modernization of European spaces. Current scholarship tends to concur with essayistic texts and images by contemporary intellectuals that technological and organizational developments increased the freedom of movement of those living in western-European societies, while at the same time alienating them from each other and from their environment. I assess this claim with the help of Dutch travel egodocuments such as travel diaries and letters. After a prosopographical investigation of all available northern-Netherlandish travel egodocuments created between 1500 and 1915, a selection of these documents is examined in greater detail. In these documents, travellers regarded the possession of identity documents, a correct appearance, and a fitting social identity along with their personal contacts, physical capabilities, and the weather as the most important factors influencing whether they managed to gain access to places. A discussion of these factors demonstrates that no linear increase, nor a decrease, occurred in the spatial power felt by travellers. The exclusion many travellers continued to experience was often overdetermined. The largest groups affected by this were women and less educated families. Yet travellers could also play out different access factors against each other. By paying attention to how practices matched hopes and expectations, it is possible to discover how gravely social inequities were really felt by travellers. Perhaps surprisingly, all social groups desired to visit the same types of places. Their main difference concerned the atmosphere of the places where the different groups felt at home. To a large degree this matched travellers' unequal opportunities. Therefore, although opportunities remained strongly unequal throughout the period, this was not always experienced as a problem. Also, in cases where it was, many travellers knew strategies to work around the obstacles created for them.

Social theorists have long argued that literacy is one of the principal causes and hallmark features of complex society. However, the relationship between literacy and social complexity remains poorly understood because the relevant data have not been assembled in a way that would allow competing hypotheses to be adjudicated. The project set out in this thesis provides a novel account of the multiple origins of literate behaviour around the globe, the principal mechanisms of its cultural transmission, and its relationship with the cultural evolution of large-group human cooperation and complex forms of socio-political organisation. A multi-method large-scale cross-cultural approach provided the data necessary to achieve these objectives. Evidence from the societies within which literate behaviour first emerged, and from a representative sample of ethnographically-attested societies worldwide (n=74), indicates that literate behaviour emerged through the routinization of rituals and pre-literate sign systems, eventually spreading more widely through classical religions. Cross-cultural evidence also suggests that literacy assumed a wide variety of forms and socio-political functions, particularly in large, complex groups, extending evolved psychological mechanisms for cooperation, which include reciprocity, reputation formation and maintenance systems, social norms and norm enforcement systems, and group identification. Finally, the results of a cross-cultural historical survey of first-generation states (n=10) reveal that simple models assuming single cause-and-effect relationships between literacy and complex forms of socio-political organisation must be rejected. Instead, literacy and first-generation state-level polities appear to have interacted in a complex positive feedback loop. This thesis contributes to the wider goal of transforming social and cultural anthropology into a cumulative and rapid-discovery science.