Persia in Crisis

In the last couple of decades the study of Safavid Iran has progressed seriously and rapidly, partly encouraged by the series of Safavid roundtables held from Paris to Edinburgh, and partly by the rising interest in the period expressed by Iranian historians – in fact this autumn there will be a major conference on Safavid history in Tehran. Rudi Matthee has contributed to this development in serious engaged scholarship through his studies of the political economy of the late Safavid period and his absorbing study of the culture of pleasure at the Safavid court. In the book under review, Matthee tackles one of the key points of historiographical contention relating to the why and how of the fall of the Safavid dynasty and the ‘decline’ of eighteenth century Iran. Safavid studies suffer often in comparison with the other ‘gunpowder empires’. Iran had neither the wealth of India or the Ottoman Empire, nor did it have the administrative structures and resources. Similarly, historians of Safavid Iran have a wealth of narrative and discursive sources at their disposal but in comparison to Ottomanists and specialists of Mughal India lack the extensive archival and documentary sources necessary for the understanding of political and imperial history. Matthee turns back to an area famously studied by Lockhart earlier in the twentieth century. An earlier generation of scholars blamed cultural reasons for the fall of the Safavids – the feeble nature of a harem-besotted and intoxicated series of Shahs, the intolerance of the Shi[i clerics given ever greater power to discriminate against Jewish and Christian minorities (especially merchants) and Sunni notables (especially tribal levies in the military) and an inability to control over-mighty subjects (alongside the inability to create a strong and centralised state often in contrast to the supposedly centralised Mughal empire) are seen as key reasons for the Afghan sack of Isfahan in 1722 and the occupation of Iran. However, Matthee argues that the fall of the Safavids was not just due to moral degeneracy – rather the real structural reasons lay in political mismanagement, weakening of the military (and the failure of the new Safavid form of the devsirme to establish an independent force loyal to the Shah), the breakdown of communications and control between the court and the provinces, disastrous economic and monetary policies, and the inability to establish authority. His analysis shifts us back to the real problems in the political economy of Iran from the death of Shah [Abbas onwards. The language of decline is not entirely discarded but the teleology of it challenged.