Download PDF | Matthee, Rudolph P - Persia in crisis _ Safavid decline and the fall of Isfahan (in association with the Iran Heritage Foundation) I.B. Tauris, 2012.
419 Pages
Rudi Matthee holds a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the University of California in Los Angeles. He taught at the University of Delaware from 1993 to 2011, the last four years as Unidel Distinguished Professor of History. He is currently the Roshan Professor of Persian Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park.
“This is an extensive and authoritative study of the history of Iran from the second quarter of the seventeenth century until the fateful year of 1722, which ended the rule of one the country’s most successful dynasties—the Safavids. It fills a gap in our understanding of the Safavid period by emphasizing the political, administrative and economic structure of the time. A rich palette of personalities and events are critically assessed, and the study is intelligently but also thoughtfully composed and well documented. The author displays an admirable knowledge of the sources in Persian, a rich vein of contemporary archival material and the studies written in all major European languages, clearly a feat that will not be easy to follow. The result is a rich mine of information which will undoubtedly allow the reader to come to new insights into the character and structure of the Iranian polity during the second half of the seventeenth century.” J. P. Luft, Centre for Iranian Cultural Studies, University of Durham, UK
Preface
This book addresses the problematic question of decline for Iran in a period which most Iranians and a good many scholars consider to be not just a crucially formative phase in the country’s history but one of its more glorious epochs. As the nationalist narrative goes, the Safavids were the first dynasty since the Mongols to knit Iran together as an integrated territorial unit. They did so by giving their realm a distinct identity marked by overlapping territorial and religious boundaries, which endures until today. In time Safavid Iran became an urban-centered society of great cultural achievement, a nation imbued with an outward-looking elan connecting it to a globalizing world by way of long-distance commerce and diplomacy.
The lead actor in this script is Shah `Abbas the “Great,” who plays the role of Renaissance prince, equal in fortitude and sophistication to the greatest contemporary European monarchs. After “reconquering” Iran, this most formidable of Safavid rulers put his realm on a sound military and administrative footing, sidelining its unruly tribal elements by replacing them with a new military-bureaucratic elite, endowing his new capital, the centrally located city of Isfahan, with a dazzlingly new commercial and administrative center. The outcome of his efforts was a centrally controlled country under visionary leadership, a nexus of long-distance trade and diplomacy, from which the Armenian merchants of New Julfa, the suburb of Isfahan that `Abbas had created for them, plied their trade under royal patronage from England to the Philippines, and which dispatched envoys to farflung courts in Europe and Asia.1 Such is the image, one that has only grown in radiance with time, evoking a blend of royal grandeur and justice and, ultimately, the promise of transformative change.
The transformation, of course, never materialized. Indeed, Iran— as much of Asia—and Western Europe embarked on rather different trajectories precisely in this period, the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, spanning the high Renaissance and the onset of the Enlightenment and the early Industrial Revolution. European thinkers in this period gradually moved away from an epistemological framework based exclusively on the Bible and its truth toward a more experimental and open-ended approach to the fundamental questions of human life and society. English and French political philosophers, operating in an atmosphere of widening intellectual and geographical horizons, formulated fresh ideas that summoned accountable government and popular sovereignty and that proclaimed the commensurability of self-interest and the common good; scientists began to put science at the service of trades and crafts, allowing entrepreneurs to tap into vast reservoirs of newly available “useful” knowledge, prefiguring the synergetic interplay between government and private initiative that soon was to harness nature’s resources beyond anyone’s imagination.
All this—in addition to great advances in military technology—enabled the nations of northwestern Europe to expand tremendously, militarily, economically, but above all in terms of applied knowledge. While European visitors were dazzled by the splendor of the mid-seventeenth-century Safavid court, gazed admiringly at the wondrous architecture of Isfahan, and marveled at the safety of the country’s road system, Europe’s objective economic power, organizational capacity, and cognitive grasp of the world already far surpassed that of Iran (and most other nonWestern nations).2 Any lingering indeterminacy with regard to Iran’s direction ended abruptly with the fall of Isfahan in 1722 and the country’s subsequent disintegration at the hand of tribal warlords, the extortionate Nadir Shah in first place. The resulting anarchy would persist for almost a century, with consequences that reverberated into the modern age, leaving Iran far behind metropolitan Russia, India, and the core area of the Ottoman Empire in developmental terms.
After 1722 Europeans no longer visited what was now seen as a dark and dangerous land. When they returned to Iran in the early nineteenth century they looked in vain for the splendor of the realm of the legendary Sophi; what they encountered instead was a bedraggled, backward country of ruined towns inhabited by impoverished, ignorant people who seemed in dire need of Western tutelage. Iranians have been baffled at this devolution ever since. They have found it hard to come to terms with the yawning gap between their self-perception as the proud inheritors of a great civilization and the inhabitants of a country endowed with abundant material resources and a magnificent culture, and the reality of a land rapidly turning into a backwater ripe for the imperialist picking in these two centuries. In their search for answers, they have generally looked to outside forces. Externalizing the “blame,” they have tended to ascribe the slide to second-rate power status to the machinations of greedy and power-hungry foreigners—not the lowly Afghans so much as the foreigners they take seriously, the ones who evoke a mixture of envy, admiration, and resentment—first the Portuguese, prone to bullying Iran from the isle of Hurmuz, their stronghold in the Persian Gulf, then the Dutch, determined to despoil their country of its vast natural riches, and finally the crafty English, who are thought to have completed the job of stifling Iran’s autonomy while robbing it of its wealth.
I draw attention to this radical divergence between perception and reality, not to indict Iranians for indulging in a myopic collective memory but to enable the reader to understand some of this book’s premises. One is that, if the Safavid state had not disintegrated, Iran’s future might not have been drastically different from what it became. There are no interruptions here. To recognize the Safavids as an important phase in Iranian history is not the same as presenting their reign as a teleologically predetermined chapter in a heroic national narrative.
The pages that follow are offered as an interpretive study that grapples with the complex range of reasons—environmental, economic, and, above all, political—explaining why the interaction between the state and society and the outside world evolved the way it did, causing the Safavids to falter and fail. It is an attempt to explain the fate of the Safavids, not Iran’s “failure” to follow a European-like path to modernity. That would be a different project. In his recent study on the rise of Britain as an industrial power, Joel Mokyr observes that for much of recorded history “the arch-enemy of economic growth was […] predators, pirates, and parasites, often known euphemistically by economists as ‘rent-seekers,’ who found it easier to pillage and plunder the work of others than to engage in economically productive activities themselves.”3 There is precious little evidence to suggest that, absent the Afghans (or any other “outsiders”), rent-seeking would have ceased to be the dominant mode of making money in Iran.4
This leads to the second premise, which is that, whereas from the early nineteenth century onward outside pressure and meddling inarguably had a significant impact on Iran’s political and economic conditions, to connect Safavid decline directly to the (deliberate) design of external forces is as misleading as it is anachronistic.5 Iran, then as now, was embedded in a larger regional and international context that helped shape its fortunes, yet its destiny was not determined by “foreigners.” Foreigners and foreign lands naturally are not excluded from the discussion in this book; long-distance trade and transcontinental money flows are an integral part of the analysis; it will be seen how wars, natural disasters and government policies in Europe, the Ottoman Empire, India, and even Japan influenced the commercial and monetary conditions of the Safavid realm.
Yet this study identifies the causes of Iran’s malaise at the turn of the eighteenth century primarily in terms of internal dynamics, having to do with political and economic weaknesses which were domestic in origin even if they played themselves out as part of and in interaction with larger global currents. The Afghans finally—hardly “foreigners”—emerge from this book not as a cause but as a symptom, for being the most successful peripheral tribesmen who, alienated by the center, broke out of their frontier zone and ended up overwhelming a severely weakened heartland.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق