The history of 18th century Iran has been neglected but is vital for understanding contemporary Iran, and is a fascinating drama in its own right. This book presents contributions from the leading experts on this period worldwide, and is a major advance in this important area of Iranian Studies.

"A history of the relationship between Iran and America from the 1700s through the current day"--

An introduction to the history of Iran since 1800, covering key events up to the current Islamic Republic.

Integrating forgotten tales of literary communities across Iran, Afghanistan and South Asia - at a time when Islamic empires were fracturing and new state formations were emerging - this book offers a more global understanding of Persian literary culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. It challenges the manner in which Iranian nationalism has infilitrated Persian literary history writing and recovers the multi-regional breadth and vibrancy of a global lingua franca connecting peoples and places across Islamic Eurasia. Focusing on 3 case studies (18th-century Isfahan, a small court in South India and the literary climate of the Anglo-Afghan war), it reveals the literary and cultural ties that bound this world together as well as some of the trends that broke it apart.

Some justification seems to be necessary for the addition of yet another History of Iranian Literature to the number of those already in existence. Such a work must obviously contain as many novel features as possible, so that a short explanation of what my collaborators and I had in mind when planning the book is perhaps not superfluous. In the first place our object was to present a short summary of the material in all its aspects, and secondly to review the subject from the chronological, geo graphical and substantial standpoints - all within the compass of a single volume. Such a scheme precludes a formal and complete enumeration of names and phenom ena, and renders all the greater the obligation to accord most prominence to matters deemed to be of greatest importance, supplementing these with such figures and forms as will enable an impression to be gained of the period in question - all this is far as possible in the light of the most recent discoveries. A glance at the table of contents will suffice to give an idea of the multifarious approach that has been our aim. We begin at the very first traces of evidence bearing on our subject and continue the narrative up to the present day. Geographically the book embraces Iran and its neighbouring countries, while it should be remarked that Iranian literature in its fullest sense also includes Indo-Persian and Judeo-Persian works.

The medieval period of Persia's remarkably continuous, history began with its conquest by the Muslim Arabs in the seventh century AD and gave way to the modern period at the end of the eighteenth century when the influence of the West became pervasive. Without an understanding of the confused legacy of these centuries, no-one can hope to understand the complexities and dynamism of modern Iran. Concise, clear and colourful, David Morgan's book is the best and most up-to-date short account of its subject in the English language.

This volume explores the troubled eighteenth century in Iran, between the collapse of the Safavids and the establishment of the new Qajar dynasty in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Despite the striking military successes of Nader Shah, to defeat the Afghan invaders, drive back the Ottomans in the west, and launch campaigns into India and Central Asia, Iran steadily lost territory in the Caucasus and the east, where Persian arms failed to recover lands lost to the Afghans and the Ozbeks. The chapters of this book cover the continuity and change over this transitional period from a range of perspectives including political history, historiography, art and material culture. They illuminate the changes in Iran's internal conditions, including the legitimising legacy of the Safavid period in court chronicles, the rise of Nader Shah and his influence on the idea of Iran, as well as the art of successive dynasties competing for power and prestige. The volume also addresses Iran's changed international situation by examining relations with Russia, Britain and India, the result of which would contribute to its re-emergence with a curtailed presence in the new world order of European dominance.

This handbook is a guide to Iran's complex history. The book emphasizes the large-scale continuities of Iranian history while also describing the important patterns of transformation that have characterized Iran's past.

Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran traces the history of the Bakhtiyari tribal confederacy of the Zagros Mountains through momentous times that saw the opening of their territory to the outside world. As the Qajar dynasty sought to integrate the peoples on its margins into the state, the British Empire made commercial inroads into the once inaccessible mountains on the frontier between Iran and Iraq. The distance between the state and the tribes was narrowed through imperial projects that included the building of a road through the mountains, the gathering of geographical and ethnographic information, and the exploration for oil, which culminated during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. These modern projects assimilated autonomous pastoral nomadic tribes on the peripheries of Qajar Iran into a wider imperial territory and the world economy. Tribal subjects did not remain passive amidst these changes in environment and society, however, and projects of empire in the hinterlands of Iran were always mediated through encounters, accommodation, and engagement with the tribes. In contrast to the range of literature on the urban classes and political center in Qajar Iran, Arash Khazeni adopts a view from the Bakhtiyari tents on the periphery. Drawing upon Persian chronicles, tribal histories, and archival sources from London, Tehran, and Isfahan, this book opens new ground by approaching nineteenth-century Iran from its edge and placing the tribal periphery at the heart of a tale about empire and assimilation in the modern Middle East.

This book offers a new interpretation to the social history of religion in Iran from the 1870s to the 1970s. It aims to situate the 'revolutionary' upheavals of 1977-82 in an extensive narrative context of historical developments over the preceding century, and to relate the 'religious' elements in that history to other social and cultural issues. In the author's analysis, Iran's revolution was complex, and contingent on a range of factors rather than a simple or inevitable outcome of the nature of the Iranian state or the nature of religion in Iran. The focus of the argument is on the human responses of Iranians to their experiences and problems in all their diversity and on the rich variety and complexity of relationships between religion and other aspects of life, thought and culture in the daily life of Iranians.