Download PDF | Rudolph P. Matthee - The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran_ Silk for Silver, 1600-1730-Cambridge University Press (2000).
314 Pages
The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran Silk for Silver, 1600-1730 Rudolph P. Matthee's book offers a sophisticated, revisionist interpretation of the economy of Safavid Iran. Using a wide range of archival and written sources in languages ranging from Persian to Dutch and Russian, the author considers the economic, social and political networks established between Iran, its neighbors, and the world at large, through the prism of the late Safavid silk trade.
In so doing, the author demonstrates how silk, the only commodity which spanned Iran's entire economic activity, was integral to various aspects of late Safavid society, including its approach to commerce, export routes, and crucially, to the political and economic problems which confounded the Safavid state in the early 1700s. In a challenge to traditional scholarship, the author argues that, despite the introduction of the maritime, western-dominated channel, Iran's traditional land-based silk exports continued to expand and diversify right up to the end of the seventeenth century. The book makes a major theoretical contribution to the current debates on the social and economic history of the pre-modern world.
RUDOLPH P. MATTHEE is Associate Professor of History at the University of Delaware.
Preface
In the last quarter-century the study of long-distance trade in south and southwest Asia in early modern times has developed, into a serious field of inquiry. The Mughal state and, to a lesser extent, the Ottoman Empire in particular have seen a rich production of monographs on various aspects of domestic trade and traders, the activities of the newly founded European maritime companies in Asian waters, the commodities they exchanged and conveyed, the place of merchants in society, and their interaction with the state. With the notable but partial exception of Niels Steensgaard's and Stephen Dale's studies neither of which deals with Iranian trade per se Iran in the Safavid period has not shared in this surge in scholarly interest.
This lacuna may have had its origins in the geopolitical position of Safavid Iran, a country squeezed, as it were, between two empires of admittedly greater wealth and resources, and more remote from the West than either; yet it remains curious and unjustifiable curious in the light of the celebrated encouragement of long-distance trade by Shah 'Abbas I, the Safavid ruler whose reign is virtually synonymous with commercial efflores- cence, which thus remains in isplation, suspended as a unique burst of energy and foresight without antecedents or follow-up, and unjustifiable because of the existence and availability of rich source material in the form of the archival records of the Dutch and English East India Companies and, to a lesser extent, of documentation in the Russian archives.
The present book seeks to contribute to a redressing of this situation. It examines aspects of long-distance trade in Safavid Iraq, focusing on one commodity, silk. It does not claim to be a comprehensive study of silk in early modern Iran; it considers raw, unprocessed silk, pays some attention to its cultivation, but virtually none to the mechanics of silk manufacturing or the technicalities of silk textiles Those interested in the latter two topics will therefore have to look elsewhere. This study does aspire to being more than an examination of silk and how it was exchanged and transported, however, by way of silk, it seeks to uncover the nexus of commerce and political power in late Safavid Iran. Silk is not an obvious key for this purpose: silk famously counts as a luxury commodity, and as such is often seen as being of limited value for the study of social and economic processes in non-modern societies. In the Safavid period, however, silk formed Iran's most valuable and lucrative export product.
Central to the royal court as a source of revenue and a resource in state-controlled textile manufacturing, and crucial to the long-distance trade radiating out of Iran, silk affected much more than the elite. Its economic and political significance therefore greatly exceeded that of a preciosity, and it thus serves to illustrate one of this study's main arguments that commerce can only be studied fruitfully in its political context. Owing to its centrality to the state and the nature of the available source material-silk in Safavid Iran forces the researcher's attention on the royal court, the locus of power and the arena where decisions were made that involved the entire realm, at least in theory.
This focus places the book somewhat outside the mainstream of current scholarship on Asian trade and its practitioners, which tends to concentrate on the periphery, often confining itself to port cities, and to look for regional variation, resistance to central control, and the potential for regeneration in the face of a disintegrating center.
These themes will be addressed as part of this study's concern with the economic and political crisis that befell Safavid Iran in the late seventeenth century. Yet the central state and the part it played in procuring, negotiating, and distributing silk remain the primary focus. Through this focus Safavid Iran emerges as a distinct political entity ruled by an elite with a clear sense of self, and as a territory that paired fluid cultural and social boundaries with rather well defined geographical and even economic borders marked by unambiguous crossing points. Iranian silk in the Safavid era, finally, crossed regional and national boundaries and changed hands and was carried halfway around the globe in the context of one of the great processes of all time, Europe's maritime expansion and the global intercultural contact it spawned. Safavid silk was one of the commodities that helped integrate economic regions across imperial and cultural boundaries.
It did so in more than one way, for even after the opening up of the maritime connection, linking Iran with Europe via the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic, Iranian silk continued to be exported to the Mediterranean basin along the terrestrial trade routes traversing the Ottoman territories of Anatolia and Mesopotamia. In documenting the continued vitality and, to some extent, increased activity of the latter routes, the study revisits and, by adducing a great deal of new evidence, modifies Steensgaard's well-known thesis about the decline of the overland trade following the entry of the European maritime companies. By the same token, it demonstrates the limited impact of the European companies on the economy and society of seventeenth-century Iran, revealing this to be a combined function of difficult, even inaccessible terrain and the limited attractiveness of Iran as a provider of commodities.
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