Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran

"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 lands to the outside world. As the Qajar dynasty sought to integrate the people on its margins into the state, the British Empire made commercial inroads into the once inaccessible mountains on the frontier between Iran and Iraq. Imperial projects including the building of a road through the mountains, oil exploration, and the gathering of geographic and ethnographic information - which were always mediated through accommodation and engagement with the tribes - narrowed the distance between the state and these autonomous pastoral nomads. These changes brought the tribes into a wider imperial territory and world economy, which led to their participation in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. These modern projects assimilated autonomous pastoral nomadic tribes on the peripheries of Qajar Iran into a wider imperial territory and 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 the 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. Arash Khazeni teaches history at the Claremont Colleges in California and is currently Robert W. Mellon Research Fellow at the Huntington Library.