the Jews, whose economic and cultural border-crossing was greatly aided by their habit of writing things down (in their own way). Some predominantly oral Mercurians (such as the Ibo of Nigeria) would embrace the transition; others (such as the Gypsies) would continue to service the ever shrinking world of folk culture and small pariah entrepreneurship. Some Apollonian groups would prove willing and able to convert to Mercurianism; others would balk, fail, or rebel. No one would remain immune, however, and no one was better at being a scriptural Mercurian—and therefore “modern”—than scriptural Mercurians, old and new. 45 The over-represention of the Armenians and Jews in entrepreneurial and professional jobs in Europe and the Middle East (discrimination notwithstanding) was matched or exceeded by the Chinese in Southeast Asia, the Parsis in India, the Indians in Africa, and the Lebanese in Latin America and the Caribbean, among others. Having established themselves as commercial intermediaries with the arrival of the Portuguese, the Parsis became British India’s premier financiers, industrialists, and urban professionals —including the most famous and most successful of them all, Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata. The principal nineteenth-century Indian politician (“the Grand Old Man of India” Dadabhai Naoroji) was also a Parsi, as was the ideologue of violent nationalism Bhikhaiji Rustom Cama; all three Indian members of the British Parliament; the first Indian baronet; the first prime minister of the Bombay Presidency; the “Uncrowned King of Bombay”; the “Potato King of Bombay”; the pioneer of coffee production in the East; the first Indian to fly from Europe to India; the most prominent Indian Freemasons; most Western musicians (including, eventually, Zubin Mehta); and every single member of the first all-India cricket team. In 1931, 79 percent of all Parsis (and 73 percent of the females) were literate, as compared to 51 percent of Indian Christians and 19 percent of Hindus and Muslims. 46 Similar lists could be compiled for all scriptural Mercurians (although in some areas they thought it wise to stay out of public politics). A small minority wherever they find themselves, the Arabic-speaking immigrants from the Levant (Syrians, Palestinians, and Lebanese, known in Latin America as “turcos”) established a virtual monopoly of the Amazon trade during the rubber boom around the turn of the twentieth century and eventually came to dominate the economic life of Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras, among other places. Between 1919 and 1936, Arab entrepreneurs controlled 67 percent of the Honduran import and export sector, and by the late 1960s, they employed 36 percent and 45 percent of the manufacturing labor force in the country’s industrial centers of Tegucigalpa and San Pedro Sula. Over