Shah Abbas gave silk trade to relocated Armenians to avoid a rival

Safavid Persia's silk trade was one of the state's most valuable economic assets, but handing control of it to a powerful indigenous faction — a landed noble family, an established merchant guild with its own political weight — risked building up exactly the kind of independent domestic power base a Persian ruler had reason to fear, especially amid ongoing conflict with the Ottoman Empire.

In 1604, amid war with the Ottomans, Shah Abbas I forcibly relocated the Armenian population of the border town of Julfa — driven out on short notice, their original town burned — resettling the wealthier merchant families in a new suburb of his capital, Isfahan, that became known as New Julfa.

The Armenian merchants of New Julfa, a Christian minority within a Muslim state at war with a rival Muslim empire, sat structurally outside the domestic factional politics a Persian noble family or guild would have been part of, and came to dominate Persia's silk trade in the following decades.

Gave the silk trade to a relocated Christian minority with no place in Muslim factional politics, so they could run it without ever becoming a domestic threat.

Armenian merchants had trade networks and expertise, so the silk trade ran well.

As a Christian minority, they had no standing in Persia's Muslim factional politics.

Without a domestic base, they could not convert economic control into political power.

Their dependence on the shah's favor kept them loyal and controllable.

When a critical function must be performed without creating a rival, choose an outsider with capability but no domestic base to build power from.

Whatever the precise mix of deliberate policy and circumstance, New Julfa's Armenian merchant community built one of the most extensive trading networks of the early modern period, connecting Iran to Europe, the Levant, Central Asia, India and the East Indies through the 17th and 18th centuries.