In 1722, the Safavid Empire collapsed. An empire that ruled for over two centuries, in its heyday spanned parts of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and present-day Iran, and which was responsible for converting the majority of Iranian society to Shiʿism, came to a swift end in the face of Afghan invaders.Footnote ¹ Over the next several decades, pretenders to the throne and political upstarts, most importantly Nadir Shah (r. 1736–47) and Karim Khan Zand (r. 1750–79), attempted to establish new dynasties. None were successful. Much of the eighteenth century was a time of upheaval in Iran – an era characterized by historians as a time when ‘orderly administration ceased. Insecurity became the order of the day.’Footnote ² It was only with the rise of Qajars in the 1780s that a level of stability was restored. By the time the second Qajar monarch, Fath-ʿAli Shah (r. 1797–1834), died in 1834, the Qajars had been ruling for almost fifty years. Cities that had been depopulated during the eighteenth century grew again, the economy showed signs of expansion, and the Qajar dynasty itself would remain in power until 1925. For bringing to a close a politically and economically turbulent period, the rise of the Qajars was a watershed moment in Iranian history.Footnote ³

How did the Qajars, out of the cauldron of political fragmentation during the eighteenth century, rebuild political authority? How was political and economic stability re-established in Iran during the early Qajar period (1785–1834)?Footnote ⁴ How did the Qajars remake an empire? Answering these questions is an opportunity to move beyond traditional explanations of state building, which emphasize capacity building and the centralization of power. The polity which the Qajars formed does not fit neatly into the category of a modern ‘state.’ Early Qajar Iran did not have a centralized bureaucracy, nor did it have a large, standing army capable of enforcing the Qajars’ will and coercing society across a vast territory – roughly 100,000 square miles larger than contemporary Iran, and two and a half times the size of modern-day France, the largest country in Western Europe (see Map I.1).Footnote ⁵ In fact, it is debatable whether the word ‘state’ can even be applied to the Qajar polity in the first half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁶ The Qajars claimed to be legitimate rulers, but they could not enforce those claims through coercion, or violence, or propaganda. They simply did not have the means to do so.Footnote ⁷

Map I.1 Iran as defined by early Qajar chroniclers.

Rather than viewing these historical realities as evidence of the Qajars’ ‘weakness,’ Making and Remaking Empire takes them as a clue to the nature of Qajar power and authority. The book adopts a socially oriented approach to political history – one that takes seriously the political, economic, and social ties that ran between Qajar rulers and broader society, closely examines the discourse and political practices of empire in Qajar Iran, and expands the focus to include both the centers and peripheries of empire.Footnote ⁸

Three distinct but closely related themes emerge in this book. The first is the extent to which the Qajars were part of a long historical tradition of imperial rule in the Iranian world. Qajar rulers saw themselves as reigning over an empire modeled on earlier empires and drew from earlier institutions and practices – those practices were in fact how they formed an empire.Footnote ⁹ Qajar-era texts like chronicles (tārīkh) and political ethical treatises (andarznāma; siyāsatnāma) advanced a vision of kingship and imperial authority whose roots went back centuries. The prescriptions found in these treatises often could be traced back not only to the Qurʾan and Islamic ideals, but also to Plato, Aristotle, and pre-Islamic Iran, producing a genre that can be described best as Perso-Islamic.Footnote ¹⁰ There is overwhelming evidence that Agha Muhammad Khan (r. 1785–97) and especially Fath-ʿAli Shah saw themselves as ‘king of kings’ (shāhanshāh) ruling over the ‘guarded domains of Iran’ (mamālik-i maḥrūsih-yi Īrān). The political offices created under the early Qajars, like the ṣadr-iʿażam (prime minister) or munshī al-mamālik (imperial secretary), had existed in previous empires. And the practices that are the focus of each chapter in this book were not new but inherited by the Qajars from earlier tributary, Perso-Islamic, Turco-Mongol dynasties – especially the Safavids.Footnote ¹¹

On the other hand, the socially oriented approach used here also helps us see the particularities of early Qajar politics. Political practices like land administration, gift-giving, marriage, and political correspondence helped the Qajars assume a position of authority, by buttressing their claims of legitimacy, and by building ties with provincial elites, tribal khans, and urban notables. Given the eighteenth-century turmoil out of which the Qajars rose to power, the social and economic relations built through these practices were especially crucial. And yet, the expanding Russian and British empires in Iran at the turn of the nineteenth century, together with tribal khans who continued to resist the Qajars’ claim to rule, put pressure on Qajar governance practices. Correspondence, provincial diplomacy, and territorial conquest and tribal relations – as Chapters 5, 6, and 7, respectively, will show – were again practices with long histories, but the circumstances of the early nineteenth century challenged and exposed the limits to their effectiveness. Thus, a second theme running through this book is of early Qajar governance practices responding to, being shaped by, and adapting to the historical circumstances of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – of being historically contingent, rather than simply the latest iteration of an age-old political culture.

And finally, a third theme that emerges is of a dynamic and evolving empire being made and remade – a story not of imperial structures, but of a process of imperial formation.Footnote ¹² This book ultimately presents a picture of Qajar Iran not often depicted in the scholarly literature: of an interconnected empire, with a web of bonds, relationships, ties, and networks linking people and regions, centers and peripheries, across a far-flung territory. Political, social, and economic conditions at the local and provincial levels shaped and informed Qajar political decisions. Correspondence, in the form of firmans and petitions (ʿarīẓih), crisscrossed Qajar Iran. Resources were shared and sent from one locale to another through a system of Qajar imperial management. And there was a multidirectional relationship between state and society, and between centers and peripheries. To put it simply, then, this book is about the remaking of an empire. The Qajars resuscitated a set of governance practices, based on a tributary imperial system that was heavily indebted to a Safavid past, but which was, at the same time, suited to the needs of their time.

The Rise of the Qajars: A Brief History

Before elaborating on the methods and interventions of this book, a brief history of the rise of the Qajars may help orient the reader. The period following the collapse of the Safavid empire in 1722 was, by general consensus, a turbulent time in Iranian history.Footnote ¹³ In fact, the only real debate among historians seems to be over how devastating the eighteenth century actually was. Ann Lambton characterized the century as one of ‘political contraction,’ ‘economic decline,’ ‘tribal resurgence,’ and a ‘decline in the bureaucracy’ in Iran.Footnote ¹⁴ Michael Axworthy described it as a ‘century of revolt, war, political disorder, anarchy and lawlessness, disruption of trade, economic collapse, famine, emigration, and general misery.’Footnote ¹⁵ Willem Floor wrote that ‘the advent of the Afghans was a devastating interlude that led to the rape of Iran.’Footnote ¹⁶ Perhaps the most vivid description was the one by Roger Stevens: ‘The eighteenth century is a horrible period in Iranian history – horrible to read about, horrible to disentangle, horrible to have tried to live in – I say tried because, at least if one was prominent, one probably stood a better chance than in any other period of being tortured, blinded, castrated, massacred or just simply put to death.’Footnote ¹⁷

Amid the upheavals of the eighteenth century, the periods of rule under Nadir Shah and Karim Khan Zand stand out as islands of stability.Footnote ¹⁸ Even here, though, there are a number of caveats. Nadir built his career as a military commander and he spent much of his reign focused on conquering territory. He is most remembered for his ambitious military campaigns in Iraq, Central Asia, and northern India, including his conquest of the Mughal capital Delhi, in 1739, and his invasion of Ottoman territories during the 1740s.Footnote ¹⁹ To the extent that he paid attention to political matters at all, it seems most of it was devoted to the size, discipline, and weaponry of his army.Footnote ²⁰ Even his attempt to integrate Shiʿism into Sunni Islam as a fifth madhhab was part of his broader ambition of expanding control into Ottoman territory.Footnote ²¹ Karim Khan, on the other hand, took more interest in matters of politics and governance, was a patron of art and architectural projects, and developed a reputation as a relatively gentle and restrained ruler.Footnote ²² But his political authority was effectively limited to southern Iran and especially to Shiraz, which he made his capital, and there is no evidence that he formed a bureaucratic administration (dīvān) analogous to that found under the late Safavids.Footnote ²³ Furthermore, upon Karim Khan’s death in 1779, internal fighting plagued the Zand clan and contending members claimed to be Karim Khan’s successor, leading to more political confusion.

Economic and social upheavals, meanwhile, followed on the heels of political instability. Although more scholarship is needed to fill in the picture, from what we know, war, famine, natural disasters, earthquakes, and outbreaks of disease devastated the population and the countryside during the century. Muhammad Hashim Asaf Rustam al-Hukamaʾ, who began writing his history in 1779 or 1780 and lived through some of the upheavals of the eighteenth century, claims that the price of bread rose to ten tūmāns during the nine-month siege of Isfahan in 1722, a price so high that some people resorted to murder and cannibalism to feed themselves.Footnote ²⁴ Hasan Fasaʾi, writing in the early nineteenth century, estimated that close to two million people perished during the Afghan interregnum of 1722–29 alone.Footnote ²⁵ The city of Shiraz may have lost 100,000 people to hunger during its siege in 1722.Footnote ²⁶ Other anecdotal evidence suggests that even smaller cities and towns were not immune to the ruin caused by years of war during the 1720s and 1730s. Carmelite missionaries in Nakhjavan, Azerbaijan, reported that, of the inhabitants of the town who were not killed or did not die of starvation, most fled to Izmir in the Ottoman Empire, while others fled to Tabriz.Footnote ²⁷ Tabriz itself would be victim to a disaster later in the century, in January 1780, when the city – which sits in a seismic region and was long familiar with earthquakes – was decimated by the strongest earthquake to have hit it in recorded history.Footnote ²⁸ Meanwhile, the output of revenue-generating crops like silk dramatically dropped in Iran during the eighteenth century.Footnote ²⁹

Nevertheless, the eighteenth century was not a period of unmitigated disaster. Cultural life flourished, and there were new developments in the realms of court culture, pictorial arts, and architecture. The Zand period in particular stands out as one of cultural efflorescence.Footnote ³⁰ Meanwhile, there were also important changes underway in the sphere of Shiʿi religious and political thought. An intellectual debate emerged between two schools of thinking among the ʿulama – one emphasized the traditions (akhbār) of the twelve Imams when deciding religious matters, while the other allowed for a measure of rationalist speculation based on the principles (uṣūl) of religious law. The debate was essentially over the appropriate sources of religious knowledge and authority, and the dominance of the Usuli school by the end of the eighteenth century would have far-reaching social and political consequences. The rise of the Usulis contributed to the widening purview of jurists (fuqahāʾ), and helped expand the role and functions of the ʿulama in not only the religious sphere, but in political and social life.Footnote ³¹

The eighteenth century, of course, was not just a period of change for Iran. Developments in Europe, including the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of an imperial rivalry best represented by the Napoleonic Wars, would have profound repercussions around the globe, including in Iran.Footnote ³² Although Iran was never formally colonized, it was not immune to European imperialism and became, like many other places in the world, a region over which Europeans competed for influence, resources, and domination. In 1798, Napoleon’s forces invaded Egypt as part of a broader strategy to challenge British political and economic interests in India. Britain’s concern over rising French expansionism was one reason for its interest in pursuing an alliance with the Qajars.Footnote ³³ Meanwhile, the Russian Empire expanded southward during the eighteenth century, and by the early nineteenth century had encroached on the Caucasus. The stage was set for the main players in the so-called Great Game, a nineteenth-century contest between European powers over who would dominate Iran and Central Asia.Footnote ³⁴

How does the rise of the Qajars fit into this eighteenth-century context? The story begins back in the Safavid period, when the Qajars served various Safavid shahs as military commanders and provincial governors. In fact, the Qajars were among the constituent tribes in the Qizilbash confederacy that had supported the Safavid dynasty from its very beginning in the sixteenth century. After the Safavid collapse and for most of the eighteenth century, the Qajars were caught up in the political rivalries of the time, alternating between serving and competing against the Afsharids and the Zands. During the 1720s, Fath-ʿAli Khan Qajar emerged as a rival to Nadir Afshar’s political ambitions, before being killed in 1726. One of Fath-ʿAli’s sons, Muhammad Hasan, took his father’s mantle and controlled parts of northern Iran, in the provinces of Mazandaran, Gilan, and Azerbaijan, along the littoral of the Caspian Sea. By 1759, he too was killed – this time by Karim Khan Zand’s forces – and a few years later his son, Agha Muhammad Khan, was taken as a hostage to Shiraz, along with a few relatives, to ensure the good behavior of the Qajars. When Karim Khan died in 1779, Agha Muhammad Khan escaped captivity, returned to Mazandaran, and launched his own political career. He conquered most of the former Safavid territories, defeated his last remaining Zand rivals, and crowned himself shah in 1796, before three of his own servants assassinated him in 1797. His nephew Baba Khan succeeded him to the throne, and took as his regnal name Fath-ʿAli Shah, in honor of his great-grandfather. Fath-ʿAli Shah would reign as Qajar monarch until 1834 (see Figure I.1).Footnote ³⁵

Figure I.1 Map of Persia under Qajar rule, drawn in 1814.

Published in John Thomson, A New General Atlas (Edinburgh, 1817), 30.

But with the expansion of European empires at the turn of the nineteenth century, a flurry of diplomatic and military activity took place at the Qajar court, as the British, French, and Russians competed for influence with the Qajars.Footnote ³⁶ The opening gambit came from the British in India, who sent two missions to Iran at the end of the eighteenth century – driven in part by the arrival of Napoleon in Egypt, but also to incite Fath-ʿAli Shah to attack Zaman Shah and thus protect British interests in India from the Afghan threat. Jonathan Duncan, the governor of Bombay, dispatched Mihdi-ʿAli Khan to the Qajar court in 1798, and Lord Wellesley, the governor-general of India, sent John Malcolm in 1799 – the first European diplomatic missions to Iran since the seventeenth century.Footnote ³⁷ They were quickly followed by several other emissaries, culminating in various treaties that the Qajars signed with the French and the British – most notably the Anglo-Persian Treaty of 1801, the Treaty of Finkenstein of 1807, the Treaty of Alliance of 1809, and the Definitive Treaty of Alliance of 1814.Footnote ³⁸ Adding another layer of complexity to the geopolitical context was the Russian Empire’s expansion and its own imperial objectives in the north. Russia had made claims to Darband, Baku, Gilan, Astarabad, and Mazandaran as early as 1723, in an agreement with the Safavid claimant Tahmasp.Footnote ³⁹ Although the agreement was never ratified, it marked an early example of European demarcation of boundaries in Iran, and foreshadowed the two wars with the Russians during the early nineteenth century, from 1804 to 1813 and from 1826 to 1828. Both wars ended in military defeat for Iran and, more damaging, resulted in the loss of territory, the imposition of huge financial indemnities, and Russian intrusion in Iran’s political affairs. To this day, the Gulistan (1813) and Turkmanchay (1828) treaties that ended the wars are remembered among Iranians as symbols of defeat and capitulation to European imperialism, and are a source of controversy and debate in Iranians’ collective national memory.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Qajars rose to power, therefore, in the context of political fragmentation and upheaval in eighteenth-century Iran, and globally, of European imperial expansion. Explaining how they were able to form a new empire in these circumstances is among the most important questions in modern Iranian history. Under Qajar rule, and especially during the reign of Fath-ʿAli Shah, the political situation in Iran returned to a reasonably stable situation, the economy improved substantially, and European travelers to the shah’s court remarked upon its splendor and opulence.Footnote ⁴¹ Ascribing the Qajars’ rise to their tribal relations or to their coercion over society is not convincing, not least because like other rulers of preindustrial societies, the early Qajars simply did not have the bureaucratic capacity to rely on force to rule. A shift in approach is needed to explain the formation of Qajar Iran.

A Socially Oriented Political History

This book, unlike much scholarship on Qajar Iran, introduces a sociological and anthropological bent into Qajar political history. In doing so, it elaborates on recent trends in the histories of state and imperial formation more broadly. Since at least the 1980s, historians have developed a body of literature that is simultaneously grounded in the historical sociology of state formation of earlier generations, and also profoundly shaped by the ‘cultural turn.’Footnote ⁴² While it would be difficult to describe this varied literature as making up one discrete category, a general feature of much of this work has been to begin from the premise that in preindustrial societies, political and economic systems were ‘as a rule, embedded in social relations.’Footnote ⁴³ No fixed and distinct line separating state from society existed – there was instead ‘an elusive boundary’ between the two, and state and society constituted one another.Footnote ⁴⁴

At the same time, waves of scholarship have emerged out of anthropological history and histories of imperial formation, which have pushed the conversation beyond institutions and structures of power.Footnote ⁴⁵ Much of this scholarship has argued that there be less emphasis on defining what empires or states are, and instead more focus on what they do.Footnote ⁴⁶ Far from being a return, however, to the functionalist approaches of the past, which described the functions of institutions and how they worked, the more recent scholarship has devoted attention to the practices of states and empires, and sought to inject people and social actors into the history. What these developments have yielded is a body of work that incorporates analyses of relationships, customs, beliefs, and culture in telling the story of how states and empires form. At its core, the aim has been to place structural constraints of culture, on the one hand, and the practices of social actors, on the other, into a dialectical relationship with one another – to place culture and discourses in creative tension with political and economic realities on the ground.Footnote ⁴⁷ Some of this scholarship has persuasively pushed back against reified conceptions of the state.Footnote ⁴⁸ At a minimum, the scholarship has reminded us that empires and states are constantly changing – being made, unmade, and remade.Footnote ⁴⁹

Needless to say, a perspective that considers the rise of the Qajars has been absent from these scholarly debates.Footnote ⁵⁰ This is a shame, because early nineteenth-century Iran is an ideal historical laboratory for exploring the sorts of on-the-ground processes where the rubber of political culture meets the road of reality – and the changes that often ensued.Footnote ⁵¹ Understanding the formation of Qajar Iran is impossible without an appreciation for the political culture of Persian kingship, and more specifically of the culture of imperial rule represented by the Safavid Empire. That political culture, and its associated practices, institutions, and vision of imperial rule, endured for long periods of time, and even survived the turmoil and upheaval of Iran’s eighteenth century, when bureaucratic institutions and structures weakened. But the case of early Qajar Iran also illustrates how new historical circumstances – like, for example, the eighteenth-century regional autonomy and tribal resurgence that resulted from the Safavid collapse and the encroaching European empires that served as the backdrop to the Qajars’ rise – constrained and shaped Qajar political authority and the formation of their empire. Political practices and institutions were adapted to and changed as a result of the context in which those practices were used. The case of Qajar Iran reminds us of just how crucial historical context is for making sense of processes of historical change and adds nuance and complexity to our understanding of how cultural systems change.

But the method adopted here offers a fresh perspective for Iranian history as well. It departs from studies that focus on particular political events, on political figures, or even traditional social histories, all of which have been the subject of some study. A number of historians, for instance, have written about political events, about the role key statesmen and ‘political men’ (rijāl-i dawrih-yi Qājār) played in Qajar politics, about the political and administrative offices that comprised the Qajar bureaucracy, and about the institution of kingship during the Qajar era and its long history in the Iranian world.Footnote ⁵² We know a fair amount about nineteenth-century political and religious concepts, ideas, and thought, and their evolution over time, including concepts like law and constitutionalism.Footnote ⁵³ There, likewise, are numerous studies on nineteenth-century diplomacy, imperial politics, and political and economic relations with Europe and the Ottoman Empire.Footnote ⁵⁴ As useful as these political histories are, the focus overwhelmingly has been on high politics, prominent intellectual figures, and major events. Historians have of course recovered stories from the sources about the other end of the social spectrum as well: on nineteenth-century religious upheavals, social and economic unrest, households, women, slaves, and subaltern groups.Footnote ⁵⁵ But the few studies which have explored the relationship between society and the state have stressed the breakdown in those relations, and especially the protests, rebellions, and general discontent that eventually led to the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11.Footnote ⁵⁶

This book, by contrast, begins from the position that – as mentioned above – there was no fixed boundary between Qajar state and society. The task, then, is to identify, tease out, and explain the social relations that ran through Qajar political power.Footnote ⁵⁷ That means highlighting the importance of conventions, mores, and codes of behavior that are often only alluded to in the textual and visual sources – that is to say, the ‘informal politics’ of Qajar government.Footnote ⁵⁸ But it goes further, by questioning the very category of the ‘Qajar state,’ and instead preferring the more capacious term ‘Qajar governance,’ to mean the customs, practices, and relationships that, combined with the formal apparatus of the state, kept a political order in place.Footnote ⁵⁹ A central contention of this book is that the customs, practices, and relationships at the heart of Qajar governance were critical to stitching an empire back together following the collapse and upheaval of the eighteenth century.

A Note on Structure and Sources

The methodological approach outlined above is only possible because, despite the numerous challenges associated with conducting historical and archival research in Iran, a rich array of manuscript, archival, and published primary sources exists from the early Qajar period.Footnote ⁶⁰ To put it bluntly, there is an abundance of sources, presenting an abundance of evidence, for socially oriented political histories of Qajar Iran. Over the course of seven chapters, divided into three parts, Making and Remaking Empire demonstrates what such an approach might look like. Following this introduction, Chapter 1 will focus on representations of legitimacy and kingship, in both textual sources and material culture, during the reigns of Agha Muhammad Khan and Fath-ʿAli Shah. The chapter shows what the political culture of Qajar imperial authority looked like – a culture that envisioned and emphasized the Qajar rulers as having reestablished balance, order, and the ‘circle of justice’ over an empire, and highlighted Qajar links with a long history of kingship in the Iranian world, but especially with the Timurid and Safavid political past. The book then moves its attention to the political and administrative practices that served as the backbone of the Qajar Empire.

Part II, comprising Chapters 2–4, emphasizes governance practices from the perspective of imperial centers – mostly Tehran and the provincial capital of Tabriz, the seat of the Qajar crown prince and heir apparent ʿAbbas Mirza. Chapter 2 focuses on the main source of revenue and wealth for Qajar rulers: the land. It begins by explaining how the conquest of the Safavid Empire’s former territories was central to Agha Muhammad Khan’s career, before explaining the continuities in land administration between the Qajars and earlier polities, with particular attention to the Qajar system of assigning land (tuyūl) and collecting taxes (māliyāt). Chapter 3, meanwhile, focuses on the second major source of revenue for the Qajars: gifts and tributes. It begins by highlighting the long history of political gift-giving in the Iranian world. It then demonstrates the central role of the pīshkish, a tributary gift-giving ceremony, in the political culture and economy of Qajar Iran, and its function in presenting Qajar rule as a continuation of previous Iranian royal dynasties. The chapter then discusses how gifts and honors given by Qajar rulers to society were part of an effort of presenting themselves as just and legitimate. Finally, Chapter 4 draws attention to the shah’s marriages. While dynastic marriages had long mattered in the political history of Iran, it is difficult to find a parallel to how Fath-ʿAli Shah used the practice in the early Qajar period. The shah married over 160 women and fathered over 260 children, many of whom in turn entered into numerous marriages with notable figures. By the mid-nineteenth century, an important change with far-reaching consequences had occurred in Iran: the emergence of an entire class of Qajar ‘aristocracy,’ composed of thousands of princes and princesses, who were directly descended from or related to the shah. The chapter highlights the social and regional background of the wives and the political considerations behind the marriages, and argues that marriage and marital practices were central in producing and reproducing Qajar political power.

Part III shifts perspective. Here the book moves its attention to the peripheries of the Qajar Empire, and how the Qajars governed in the provinces. Each of the three chapters in this part zeroes in on one province: Azerbaijan (Chapter 5), Fars (Chapter 6), and Khurasan (Chapter 7). The choice of these provinces was strategic: Azerbaijan, Fars, and Khurasan were the three most economically productive regions in early Qajar Iran; they were home to some of the major urban and cultural centers outside of Tehran; and, because they were all situated on the frontiers of the Qajar Empire, they were all places of intense contestation, negotiation, and, in the case of Azerbaijan, war. By focusing on various governance practices in these provinces, the book aims to show how the peripheries of the Qajar Empire were central to the empire’s formation, and more specifically, to illustrate the dual processes of expansion and constraint of Qajar political authority.Footnote ⁶¹

In Chapter 5, we see how the Qajars relied heavily on correspondence – in the form of firmans and petitions – with local tribal leaders to govern the region during the Russo-Persian Wars. The correspondence shows both an evolving relationship between the Qajars and local leaders, and that Qajar rulers were well informed of events on the war’s front. In fact, local circumstances and conditions in the Caucasus clearly influenced Qajar rulers’ political decisions. Chapter 6 is on diplomacy at the provincial level, and on the local politics that shaped it. It focuses on a minor diplomatic crisis between the Qajars and the British, which followed a rebellion among Arabs in Bushehr in February 1827. The crisis is a good example of the productive tension between normative and pragmatic governance: it created space for Qajar rulers to turn normative claims of political authority into concrete declarations of sovereignty over Iranian territory. Finally, Chapter 7 focuses on Qajar relations with the tribal khans in Khurasan, and especially with the Afshars. In the early nineteenth century, the Afshars, under the leadership of Nadir Mirza, a scion of Nadir Shah, repeatedly rebelled against Qajar rule and refused to send taxes and tributes. The chapter demonstrates how the practices discussed in prior chapters had limited success in consolidating Qajar expansion and authority in Khurasan. Here we can see the limits of Qajar political authority and imperial rule.

Serving as the foundation to the book’s chapters are an array of Persian-language sources – among the core of which are narrative sources, particularly chronicles (tārīkh) and local histories. While some of these sources are well known to historians, others have seldom been used by them. One of the strengths of these sources is their narrative quality – they often provide a good deal of information on the political history of the period, and even on the Qajar household and their relations.Footnote ⁶² Like other chronicles in the Persian historiographical tradition, however, early Qajar chronicles also have their limitations. They tend to devote most of their attention, for instance, to narrating events deemed important to the author or patron, like military campaigns, diplomatic missions and negotiations, royal accessions, and court intrigues. They also tend to depict events in a particular way – generally in the manner that the patron would want them to be presented. Nevertheless, when read carefully, they can also shed light on the political practices and social ties that shaped Qajar rule. Some of these chronicles were written by ministers and secretaries (munshī) serving the Qajar government, but others were written by Qajar princes themselves, providing clues to the cultural worlds and imaginative universes of the people who wrote them and for whom they were intended.Footnote ⁶³

Another critical corpus of sources to this book, in addition to the narrative sources, are firmans, and, to a lesser extent, petitions.Footnote ⁶⁴ In fact, firmans and petitions are central to the story, because they often are the clearest expression of the relationship between rulers and the ruled. Petitions can shed light on the concerns of subject populations, while firmans are an excellent window onto the intentions and political objectives of rulers. This becomes most evident in Chapters 5 and 6, which draw heavily on these sources. And yet, despite their usefulness for understanding a wide range of issues, including governance practices, public law, political ethics, and even socioeconomic conditions and concerns, this is among the first studies of Qajar history to draw on firmans and petitions in a sustained manner.Footnote ⁶⁵

One possible explanation for why many historians have neglected Qajar-era firmans and petitions may be the difficulties associated with collecting and reading them. At a basic level, the firmans are scattered across different libraries and archives in Iran and around the world, in edited volumes, and even buried in manuscripts. Only a fraction of early Qajar firmans have been used or studied, often in Persian-language scholarly journals like Bar’risī’hā-yi Tārīkhī, Yaghmā, Vaḥīd, or Ganjīnih-yi Asnād. More recently, researchers at the University of Bamberg have drawn attention to Persian historical documents by creating a remarkable online database of sources, including firmans, from pre-twentieth-century Iran and Central Asia.Footnote ⁶⁶ Moreover, the language typically employed in early Qajar firmans can be daunting. Firmans often begin by addressing the recipient with a series of titles and honorifics that can extend to several lines, and which to a modern reader can seem excessive, superfluous, even distracting. The message contained in the firman – the core of the text – likewise tends to be written in the ornate and formal style of Persian diplomatics that was typical in the premodern period. Yet another challenge is related to their historical veracity; it is difficult to determine whether firmans were actually executed. It is often impossible to know from reading a firman what actually happened after it was written. Was the firman delivered to the addressed person? Did the addressee follow the orders? How effectively or successfully were the orders executed? How was the firman received, and what effect did it have? Reading a firman in isolation, in other words, gives no indication of whether and how it was carried out.Footnote ⁶⁷

Despite these challenges, however, firmans are useful for socially oriented political histories in several ways. First, their baroque language can furnish important historical clues in its own way. Firmans were not unchanging over time; their language and style reflect the political ideology of the particular ruler who issued them. Safavid decrees from the early sixteenth century, for instance, often referred to the shah as having received his mandate from the Prophet Muhammad and the twelve Imams, and as being dedicated to the propagation of Islam (tarvīj-i dīn-i mubīn).Footnote ⁶⁸ Much of that ideological and ‘extreme’ (ghuluww) language which underpinned early Safavid rule had been stripped away or changed considerably by the time of Qajar rule in the early nineteenth century. Firmans, therefore, can tell us about the ideology, ambitions, and objectives of the ruler who issued them. Second, firmans usually name the addressee and therefore functioned as a form of political correspondence. Read in such a way, they can offer clues about the relationship between the two sides. Moreover, firmans were often issued in response to petitions and, even in cases where the original petition to which the firman was a response is unavailable or missing, were part of a larger corpus of political correspondence. Using firmans provides historians a more complete, if still imperfect, picture of the relationship between the two sides in the correspondence – the petitioner and the ruler – and sometimes, allows us to even chart the evolution of the relationship.

Two final bodies of sources used in this book are early Qajar literary and diplomatic sources. The literary sources include biographical dictionaries (taẕkirih), poetry, and travelogues, while diplomatic sources include the correspondence written or copied by the British, French, and Russians, all of whom had a political and economic presence in Iran in the early nineteenth century. Any student of nineteenth-century Iranian history – or indeed Middle Eastern history more generally – will know that there is an ocean of relevant European political and diplomatic sources. In the case of early nineteenth-century Iran, these sources include the records of European trading companies like the English East India Company as well as various imperial governments, like the British, French, and Russians. While these sources are used in this book, they are largely used in an auxiliary fashion – to supplement Persian-language sources rather than be the focus. As will hopefully become clear, this book very much prioritizes the Persian-language sources, of which there is no shortage.

Finally, it will become clear that the socially oriented approach taken here is in fact grounded in the sources and not an attempt to impose a theoretical model upon reality. Social relations, familial ties, and indeed notions like trust, loyalty, and reciprocity can be detected in the sources for anyone willing to look for them. The sources repeatedly refer to, for example, the ‘sincere loyalty and devotion’ (ikhlāṣ vaʿubūdiyyat-i ārāstih), ‘petitions of loyalty’ (ʿarīẓih-yiʿubūdiyyat), and ‘fitting tributes’ (pīshkish-i lāʾiq) by subjects. Persian-language political ethical treatises or ‘mirrors for princes’ (andarznāma) from the Qajar period point to a mutually beneficial relationship between rulers and the ruled, and not distinct dichotomies between state and society. Chroniclers like Mirza Fazlullah ‘Khavari’ Shirazi, a court historian under Fath-ʿAli Shah who wrote Tārīkh-i Z̲ū al-Qarnayn, wrote glowingly about the shah entrusting to his most trusted advisers the questions and concerns petitioners sent him, of treating the lowliest servants – let alone the most notable governor – with utmost respect.Footnote ⁶⁹ And the practices highlighted in this book – land assignment, gift-giving, marriage, correspondence, provincial diplomacy – appear over and over again across various kinds of sources: official Qajar histories, documents, and records, but also poetry, painting, rock reliefs, and diplomatic sources. To give but one example of how often these practices appear in the sources when one is looking for them: in an ode (qasīdih) addressed to the Qajar minister Hajji Mirza Aqasi, the prominent early Qajar poet Mirza Habibullah ‘Qaʾani’ Shirazi praises Aqasi at length for his various qualities – his greatness (ʿulūw), his generosity (jūd), his bounty (navāl). Then, toward the end of the poem, in just one single line, Qaʾani refers to three of the practices that appear in this book – land (tuyūl), gifts (inʿām), and robes of honor (khilʿat). The poem suggests that Qaʾani received all three from Aqasi and the shah.Footnote ⁷⁰

Qajar Iran: An Empire Remade

Over the course of its seven chapters, this book will show that the Qajars remade a tributary empire, modeled on earlier empires but adapted to its own particular historical circumstances. The book’s argument reframes three debates in the scholarship on Qajar Iran: the debate on the rise of the Qajars; on the transition to ‘modern’ Iran; and on how Qajar Iran compares with other empires. As will become clearer, the rise of the Qajars should be placed, first and foremost, in the context of a long-standing tradition of Perso-Islamic and Turco-Mongolian empires. In fact, a central thread in this book is of the longue durée continuities between Qajar institutions and practices, and those of earlier polities. There were, of course, notable differences between Qajar political culture and that of earlier dynasties: the Qajars were not, for example, nomadic rulers. Dream narratives were not central to their claims to legitimacy.Footnote ⁷¹ Any notions of sacred kingship – that the king himself was of semidivine status – had greatly diminished by the early nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷² And unlike the Safavids, the Qajars’ claims to legitimacy did not depend on even the pretense of being descended from the Shiʿi Imams.Footnote ⁷³ But these differences are outweighed by other similarities.

Nowhere are the continuities between the Qajars and the past clearer than in Persian historiography itself, and in the concepts and terms those sources deployed. Genres that had existed for centuries, like biographical dictionaries (taẕkirih), travelogues (safarnāma), and political ethical treatises (andarznāma), continued to be written into the Qajar period. And early Qajar chronicles continued a tradition of Persian historical writing that stretched back to at least the tenth century. That textual tradition grew and evolved over time but really flourished in the post-Mongol period, with further developments under the Timurids and Safavids.Footnote ⁷⁴ The result was that, by the early Qajar period, chronicles couched the language of imperial rule in a Perso-Islamic idiom of kingship colored with Turco-Mongolian terms.Footnote ⁷⁵ Concepts like justice, which long undergirded political legitimacy, continued to be central in Qajar political culture. Political offices that were at the heart of Qajar administration, like the ṣadr-i aʿẓam (premier or grand vizier), mustawfī al-mamālik (imperial treasurer), munshī al-mamālik (imperial secretary), or the ṣāḥib-i dīvān (head of the dīvān), can be found in earlier polities of the Iranian and broader Islamic world. The words associated with Qajar political practices – like tuyūl (a form of land assignment), pīshkish (a gift or tribute), or farmān (a royal decree) – had long histories, referring to practices used for centuries before the Qajars came to power. And terms used to refer to Qajar rulers, like shāh and shāhanshāh, had ancient Persian roots, while others had Islamic roots, like nāʾib-i mahdī (deputy of the Mahdi) and nāʾib-i ṣaḥib-iʿaṣr va zaman (deputy of the Lord of the Age), or Turco-Mongolian ones, like khāqān (khan of khans). Another term, ṣāḥib-qirān (Lord of Conjunction), may have had Middle Persian origins, but first came to be used in New Persian historiography in the thirteenth century, before becoming closely associated with Timur in the fourteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁶ One of the main chronicles of the early Qajar period, written by Mahmud Mirza, Fath-ʿAli Shah’s fifteenth son, was called Tārīkh-i Ṣāḥib-Qirānī.Footnote ⁷⁷ And Khavari’s chronicle, arguably the most comprehensive and important of Fath-ʿAli Shah’s reign, and one used extensively in this book, is called Tārīkh-i Z̲ū al-Qarnayn, a title that derives from the Qurʾanic term (dhū al-qarnayn, ‘the two-horned’) that later commentators interpreted as being an allusion to Alexander the Great.Footnote ⁷⁸

It should be said that modern historians have long been aware of these deep connections between the Qajar idiom of kingship and rule to those of previous eras and dynasties. As early as 1933, in a monumental work of history that was never fully completed, the Iranian literary scholar and historian ʿAbbas Iqbal drew attention to these continuities by placing the Qajars at the end of a long period of history in Iran that began with the Mongol invasion and ended with the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11.Footnote ⁷⁹ Iqbal’s framing was emblematic, and to some extent a harbinger, of many fine studies that traced the political concepts and institutions that defined the Qajar era back to the Mongol, Seljuq, or even early Islamic periods – works like those by Ann Lambton, and more recently, Gene Garthwaite, who argued in favor of viewing the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries as one coherent period in Iranian history.Footnote ⁸⁰

But few historians have emphasized how the Qajars went about resuscitating an imperial past.Footnote ⁸¹ Instead, the emphasis has been on other aspects of the Qajars’ rise. Much of the earliest scholarship narrated their rise as a ‘tribal’ story. Derived from the narratives found in Persian-language sources, and the Qajar chronicles themselves, these works situate Agha Muhammad Khan’s career in the tribal politics, rivalries, allegiances, and battles of late eighteenth-century Iran.Footnote ⁸² Scholars tended to highlight continuities in the specifically ‘tribal’ modes of rule between the Qajars and earlier dynasties. Then, in the late 1950s and even more so during the 1960s, a new wave of historians began to place the rise of the Qajars in the context of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century developments in Shiʿism. Influenced by a turn at the time toward intellectual and social history, historians of Iran became interested in the question of what the Shiʿi ʿulama’s attitudes toward political power were.Footnote ⁸³ For these historians, then, the key to understanding the rise of the Qajars was to understand how and why the Qajars not only drew on but relied on the ideological and political support of an ascendant Shiʿi clerical class at the turn of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁸⁴ A parallel trend emerged during the 1960s, this time under the influence of developments in the social sciences and Weberian theories of state formation. Historians began to pay greater attention to Qajar administrative history and to the Qajar state’s bureaucratic capacity.Footnote ⁸⁵ As a result of this school, the early Qajar period came to be seen as a precursor to later nineteenth-century attempts, under the rule of Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96), to create a more centralized, bureaucratic, and by extension ‘modern’ state.Footnote ⁸⁶ This book, in contrast to these three prevailing frameworks, insists that the rise of the Qajars should be situated in the long tradition of empire-making in the Iranian world, stretching from the Achaemenids and Sasanians to the Timurids and Safavids.

Chapter 1 elaborates these points in greater detail and shows how historical, literary, and politico-religious texts of the early Qajar period, along with material objects like paintings and portraiture, articulated a discourse of Qajar power and authority grounded in the concepts mentioned briefly here. The chapter shows that the concept of a ‘circle of justice’ ran through Qajar claims of having resurrected an empire and of being legitimate rulers. Imperial pretensions can also be seen in the paintings and portraiture of Qajar shahs, especially of Fath-ʿAli Shah, in the rock reliefs constructed by the Qajars during the early nineteenth century that emulated those of pre-Islamic Iranian dynasties like the Sasanians and Achaemenids, and even in the political and bureaucratic offices of the early Qajar administration, all of which were modeled on the administrative apparatus of other empires. The Qajars clearly saw themselves as rulers of an empire.

Making Empire in Qajar Iran

This brings us to the second intervention of this book. While it is true that the terms shāhanshāh and khāqān had long histories, as did practices like land assignment or gift-giving in the Iranian world, these terms and practices were used in a new, early nineteenth-century context – a context first and foremost born out of Iran’s eighteenth-century turmoil, but also of expanding European empires. After Agha Muhammad Khan conquered the lands formerly under Safavid rule, he and especially his successor, Fath-ʿAli Shah, began building relationships and ties with the tribal khans, urban notables, and provincial elites they would need to sustain their rule. And in both the Caucasus (where the Russian Empire was expanding south) and in the Persian Gulf (where the British Empire was ascendant) the Qajars encountered empires with new technologies and capabilities.

Situating Qajar governance in this early nineteenth-century context clarifies a process of change. This may seem counterintuitive, since ‘thick descriptions’ of culture tend to tell us more about what went on, rather than how things changed.Footnote ⁸⁷ But as it will become abundantly clear in this book, paying close attention to how the Qajars administered land, received gifts and tributes, entered into marriage alliances, used political correspondence, engaged in diplomacy following local uprisings, and pursued relations with tribal khans – each of the practices that is the subject of chapters in this book – shows that these practices were shaped by specificities of time and place. The Qajars may have seen themselves as latter-day Timurid or Safavid rulers, but their political authority was grounded in the realities of early nineteenth-century Iran.Footnote ⁸⁸

Qajar kingship drew on a range of symbols and imagery from pre-Islamic to Safavid Iran, buttressing their claims of having resuscitated an older imperial system. But, as even Chapter 1 will show, it also was in clear conversation with newer modes of sovereignty, including European kingship, and helped the Qajars present themselves to their own subjects and foreign powers as sovereigns.Footnote ⁸⁹ In many instances, Qajar governance practices facilitated the building of relationships with tribal khans, urban notable, and provincial elites. As we will see in Part II, the assignment of land, the giving of gifts, and the shah’s marriages all facilitated this process of building ties with notables. Even the correspondence that forms the bedrock of Chapter 5 shows a growing and evolving relationship between the Qajars and the Kangarlu tribal khans in Azerbaijan. Chapters 5 and 6 also demonstrate that the Qajars were able to meet some of the challenges posed by European empires – by mobilizing resources against the Russians, and by asserting their sovereignty over the Persian Gulf coast – but they simultaneously fell short. The Qajars did ultimately lose two wars against the Russians, and ceded control of the Gulf to the British.

In other situations, governance practices were tools for circulating information, news, local concerns, and for managing resources across a multidirectional empire. Chapter 5, but also Chapter 6 on the Bushehr revolt, is a good example of how political correspondence, in the form of firmans and petitions, served as a conduit through which information circulated. Provincial circumstances and local concerns reached Qajar rulers in Tabriz and Tehran, and those concerns and circumstances in turn shaped Qajar political decision-making and management of resources. Again and again, this book will demonstrate that Qajar rule was profoundly grounded in social and economic realities. In many other examples throughout this book, correspondence crisscrossed Qajar territories tying various regions and provinces to political centers as well as peripheries to one another. To imagine Qajar Iran as having one center (Tehran) connected to various provinces and peripheries – akin to a wheel with spokes radiating from a center – would be to miss a vastly more complex web of relationships and ties.Footnote ⁹⁰ There were in fact multiple centers and multiple peripheries in Qajar Iran.

Meanwhile, the case of Khurasan illustrates the aftershocks of the collapse and fragmentation of the Safavid Empire in eighteenth-century Iran. The Afsharids, a local dynasty descended from Nadir Shah, continued to claim political authority in the province well after the death of Nadir. Chapter 7 brings this theme to the foreground. Qajar efforts to use land assignment, marriage alliances, and correspondence to build relationships with the Afsharids – practices discussed in the previous chapters – repeatedly fell short, and Afsharid leaders resisted and refused to submit to Qajar rule. The same system of governance that had helped build Qajar political authority was met with resistance in Khurasan.

This depiction of the early Qajars as ruling over a dynamic empire, and as attempting to meet the demands of the time, is vastly different than the prevailing image in the scholarly literature. Much of the literature has framed the early Qajar period as a prelude to the main story – most especially as ‘setting the stage’ for later nineteenth-century transformations: the attempts at political, economic, and legal modernization during reign of Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96).Footnote ⁹¹ These are basically teleological narratives that understand the early Qajar period through the lens of explaining modernity in Iran. Some of this literature has been devoted exclusively to the early nineteenth-century wars with Russia and the extent to which those wars did or did not trigger modernization efforts.Footnote ⁹² Characterizations of the Qajar state and of Qajar rulers, in this body of literature, range from ‘weak,’ ‘arbitrary,’ ‘despotic,’ to ‘a failed attempt at … absolutism’ and uninterested or unable to govern.Footnote ⁹³ The Qajar shah’s ‘real power,’ we are told, ‘ran no further than his capital.’Footnote ⁹⁴ A second school of thought has focused on the European-influenced Iranian elite who pushed for European political ideas, institutions, and technologies, or social and cultural values, in Iran, some of whom were active in the early nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹⁵ Later historians took a different approach, and pointed out that nineteenth-century Iran was part of a global story of European imperialism – of Europeans seeking access to raw materials, cheap labor, and new markets abroad.Footnote ⁹⁶ European imperialism, according to this school, led to Iran’s integration into a global capitalist economy, disruptions to local economies, sharpening of class divides, concessions, and massive debt.Footnote ⁹⁷ Meanwhile, resistance to these various forms of Western hegemony – by some ʿulama, thinkers, and politicians – has often been used to explain how and why the Islamic revolution of 1979 took place in Iran.Footnote ⁹⁸

The underlying logic to all of this work is the same: at the turn of the nineteenth century, Iranians encountered the West, were shaken out of their slumber, and responded by either copying Europeans or resisting them.Footnote ⁹⁹ Some of these historians even went so far as to pinpoint the moment when Iranians ‘woke up’ to the West: the two rounds of wars against the Russians.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ This book, by honing in on how the Qajars governed, reveals a much more complex history.

Old practices persisted, but they also changed in response to the conditions of the times – both domestic and global. Earlier forms of power and authority survived the collapse of the Safavid Empire, to be picked up again by the Qajars. The Qajars used those forms of power and authority in new historical circumstances. The view from the center looked different than from the peripheries. Qajar political authority was, in short, constructed. It was a process. It was uneven. There were no clean breaks between the modern and the ‘premodern’ periods. Instead, Qajar Iran was a dynamic and evolving empire with overlapping processes of continuity and change.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Qajar Imperial Formation: Toward a Global Perspective

This way of conceptualizing the early Qajar period – as a time of an emerging and evolving empire – leads to this book’s final intervention: of placing the history of the Qajar period in greater and closer conversation with the arguments and debates animating other scholarly fields. With a few, albeit notable, exceptions – for instance, in the scholarship on nineteenth-century political and administrative reforms, or in the literature on the Constitutional Revolution – Qajar Iran is not situated in meaningful comparative historical frameworks. Take the scholarship on empires and imperial formation. Although the Safavids, at least, are included amongst the ‘gunpowder empires,’ and compared to the Ottoman and Mughal empires, the Qajars are, for the most part, excluded from this literature.Footnote ¹⁰² Historians can barely even agree on whether the Qajar polity was, in fact, an empire. They instead refer to it inconsistently as the ‘Qajar state,’ or the ‘Qajar government,’ or simply ‘Qajar Iran.’Footnote ¹⁰³ Further complicating matters is the fact that Iran was never formally colonized by European powers, as Mughal India and parts of the Ottoman Empire were, and is therefore occasionally left out of comparative scholarship on colonialism. Qajar Iran certainly seems somehow different. However, one of the goals of this book is to argue that the Qajars can and indeed deserve to be compared to, and integrated into, the histories of other empires.

This comparison can be made across both space and time. Qajar Iran was not a colonial or capitalist empire, but there is a strong case for it being a tributary one. A recent definition, offered by Peter Bang and Christopher Bayly, defines tributary empires along three criteria: as those that were ‘based on the conquest of wide agrarian domains and the taxation of peasant surplus production,’ who ‘dominated their wider worlds and were able to absorb most of their competitors and reduce them either to taxpaying provinces or tributary client kingdoms,’ and whose ‘rulers saw themselves as universal emperors, claiming supremacy over all other monarchs.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ All three can be applied to the Qajars, at least in the period up to 1828, when they finally and irrevocably lost the Caucasus to the Russians. Evidence of the Qajars’ perception of themselves can be seen in the numerous kingly and imperial titles that Fath-ʿAli Shah adopted for himself. It can be seen in the ways that Qajar sources refer to the government as ‘the glorious and eternal government’ (dawlat-i bahiyyih-yi abad-iqrān). And it is also evident in the use of the plural noun in the appellation of their territories as the ‘Guarded Domains of Iran’ (mamālik-i maḥrūsih-yi Īrān) – as mentioned above and elaborated in Chapter 1. These claims, these terms and concepts, were not exceptional to the Qajar kings or to Qajar Iran – indeed, many of these same terms and concepts were used in other earlier empires, from the Sasanian Empire, to the Timurid and Safavid ones.

There are even more grounds for comparison, however, if we focus on what the Qajars did – on how the Qajars governed. Land tenure under the Qajars looked remarkably similar to land tenure in other premodern empires.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Gift-giving and tributary ceremonies were a widely shared practice across Eurasia.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Marriage alliances were used by dynasties in vastly diverse cultural contexts – and indeed continue to be used in various ways in modern states.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Petitioning and correspondence have long served as a backbone of governance.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ All of these practices were obviously rooted in the local and the specific, but again, they were not exceptional to the Qajar Empire. They were used in many other places and in many other times, and can serve as useful launching pads from which to make comparisons and connections across time and space.

Ultimately, thinking about the Qajar Empire in a global comparative framework helps us take it seriously, as a subject of study worthy of attention. By focusing on governance and administrative practices, and taking seriously the call by historians of other empires to attend to what empires did – rather than just to what they are – we can more clearly identify the formation part of early Qajar history. Even if one rejects Qajar Iran as actually being an empire, then certainly early Qajar history can still be seen – and indeed this book will aim to illustrate it – as a process of imperial expansion, contraction, and change.Footnote ¹⁰⁹