After the Safavids: State Failure in Iran and the Eurasian State System

This paper reconsiders the course of early modern world history from the perspective of the geopolitical events surrounding and in the Iranian plateau during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. An Ottoman map from 1727 puts the region of Eastern Europe, West, Central and South Asia in an unusual perspective: rather than, as today, relegating Iran to one of the minor geopolitical and economic players in the larger historiography of Eastern Europe and Muslim Asia, the map-makers in Istanbul situated Iran at the center of the geopolitical architecture of what Frank Perlin called “Euro-Asia.” The Treaty of Zuhab (1639), concluded between the Ottoman sultan and the Safavid shah, had ushered in nearly a century of peace, stable frontiers, and increased commercial exchange. How consequential that agreement was for the Euro-Asia as a whole, however, only came into view after the Safavid state’s collapse: the Afghan occupation of Isfahan (1722), Tahmasp-Quli Khan’s regency (1722-36) and the ensuing “Wars of the Safavid Succession” (1736-1796) not only destabilized Iran itself. The military exploits of a series of short-lived new dynastic regimes -- Nadir Shah (r. 1736- 47) and Karim Khan Zand (r. 1751-79) – shattered the territorial balance of a West Asian state system in formation. By destroying mercantile networks, increasing the autonomy of frontier polities at the expense of political centers, and draining men and resources from Iran’s more powerful neighbours, the failure of the Safavid state opened the region as a whole to increased intervention from the North (Czarist Russia) and from Western mercantilist powers in the Indian Ocean.