Drawing on a rich trove of documents, including correspondence not seen for 300 years, this study explores the emergence and growth of a remarkable global trade network operated by Armenian silk ...merchants from a small outpost in the Persian Empire. Based in New Julfa, Isfahan, in what is now Iran, these merchants operated a network of commercial settlements that stretched from London and Amsterdam to Manila and Acapulco. The New Julfan Armenians were the only Eurasian community that was able to operate simultaneously and successfully in all the major empires of the early modern world—both land-based Asian empires and the emerging sea-borne empires—astonishingly without the benefits of an imperial network and state that accompanied and facilitated European mercantile expansion during the same period. This book brings to light for the first time the trans-imperial cosmopolitan world of the New Julfans. Among other topics, it explores the effects of long distance trade on the organization of community life, the ethos of trust and cooperation that existed among merchants, and the importance of information networks and communication in the operation of early modern mercantile communities.
Using a plethora of hitherto unused and under-utilized sources from the Ottoman, British and Iranian archives, Ottoman-Iranian Borderlands traces seven decades of intermittent work by Russian, ...British, Ottoman and Iranian technical and diplomatic teams to turn an ill-defined and highly porous area into an internationally recognized boundary. By examining the process of boundary negotiation by the international commissioners and their interactions with the borderland peoples they encountered, the book tells the story of how the Muslim world's oldest borderland was transformed into a bordered land. It details how the borderland peoples, whose habitat straddled the frontier, responded to those processes as well as to the ideas and institutions that accompanied their implementation. It shows that the making of the boundary played a significant role in shaping Ottoman-Iranian relations and in the identity and citizenship choices of the borderland peoples.
Ali Mirsepassi's book presents a powerful challenge to the dominant media and scholarly construction of radical Islamist politics, and their anti-Western ideology, as a purely Islamic phenomenon ...derived from insular, traditional and monolithic religious 'foundations'. It argues that the discourse of political Islam has strong connections to important and disturbing currents in Western philosophy and modern Western intellectual trends. The work demonstrates this by establishing links between important contemporary Iranian intellectuals and the central influence of Martin Heidegger's philosophy. We are also introduced to new democratic narratives of modernity linked to diverse intellectual trends in the West and in non-Western societies, notably in India, where the ideas of John Dewey have influenced important democratic social movements. As the first book to make such connections, it promises to be an important contribution to the field and will do much to overturn some pervasive assumptions about the dichotomy between East and West.
Nuclear Iran Patrikarakos, David
2012, 2012-08-22
eBook
The Iranian nuclear crisis has dominated world politics since the beginning of the century, with the country now facing increasing diplomatic isolation, talk of military strikes against its nuclear ...facilities and a disastrous Middle East war. What is Iran’s nuclear programme all about? What is its genesis? There is little real understanding of Iran’s nuclear programme, in particular its history, which is now over fifty years old. This ground-breaking book is unprecedented in its scope. It argues that the history of Iran’s nuclear programme and the modern history of the country itself are irretrievably linked, and only by understanding one can we understand the other. From the programme’s beginnings under the Shah of Iran, the book details the central role of the US in the birth of nuclear Iran, and, through the relationship between the programme’s founder and the Shah of Iran himself, the role that nuclear weapons have played in the programme since the beginning. The author’s unique access to ‘the father’ of Iran’s nuclear programme, as well as to key scientific personnel under the early Islamic Republic and to senior Iranian and Western officials at the centre of today’s negotiations, sheds new light on the uranium enrichment programme that lies at the heart of global concerns. What emerges is a programme that has, for a variety of reasons, a deep resonance to Iran. This is why it has persisted with it for over half a century in the face of such widespread opposition. Drawing on years of research across the world, David Patrikarakos has produced the most comprehensive examination of Iran’s nuclear programme – in all its forms to date.
Emerging in the early 1970s, the Organization of Iranian People’s Fadai Guerrillas (OIPFG) became one of the most important secular leftist political organizations in Iran. Despite their lasting ...influence and the way in which their efforts helped shape the history of Iran for decades to come, little is known about the group. A Guerrilla Odyssey presents the first comprehensive examination of the rise and fall of the Fadai urban guerrilla movement in Iran. Drawing on exhaustive analyses of the published and unpublished works of the Fadai Guerrillas, as well as of archival material and interviews with activists, the author demonstrates historically and sociologically the conditions that surrounded the debut and demise of the urban guerrilla warfare that defined Iranian political life in the 1970s. Vahabzadeh offers a critique of various aspects of the Fadai’s theories of national liberation in an attempt to reconsider the painful relationship among modernization, secularism, and democracy in contemporary Iran. In addition, the author makes a compelling case explaining why older revolutionary social movements of the 1960s and 1970s have transformed into the new democratic social movements that emerged from the 1980s onward in the form of today’s women’s, student, and youth movements in Iran. A Guerilla Odyssey is a meticulously researched and engrossing narrative that promises to be a major contribution to the field of Iranian history.
Iran has remained one of the most effective tools in Russia's foreign policy towards the West for more than two hundred years. Drawing on previously unpublished and recently declassified sources ...which change the established wisdom on many aspects of the history of Russia and Iran, Denis V. Volkov examines this relationship, and situates it within the broader context of Oriental studies. With a particular focus on the activities of scholars-diplomats, as well as scholars involved in academia, missionary activities and the military within their own professional domains, Volkov analyses the interaction of intellectuals with state structures and their participation in the process of shaping and conducting foreign policy towards Iran. This work explores the specific institutional practices of Russia's Oriental studies, including organisation of scholarly intelligence networks, taking advantage of state power for the promotion of institutional and individual interests, and profound engagement with Russia's domestic and foreign policy discourses of its time.
Drawing from a rich array of visual and literary material from nineteenth-century Iran, this groundbreaking book rereads and rewrites the history of Iranian modernity through the lens of gender and ...sexuality. Peeling away notions of a rigid pre-modern Islamic gender system, Afsaneh Najmabadi provides a compelling demonstration of the centrality of gender and sexuality to the shaping of modern culture and politics in Iran and of how changes in ideas about gender and sexuality affected conceptions of beauty, love, homeland, marriage, education, and citizenship. She concludes with a provocative discussion of Iranian feminism and its role in that country's current culture wars. In addition to providing an important new perspective on Iranian history, Najmabadi skillfully demonstrates how using gender as an analytic category can provide insight into structures of hierarchy and power and thus into the organization of politics and social life.