In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Iran’s vast southern and eastern borderlands were subjected to increasing surveillance by the central government in Tehran and by foreign powers, especially Britain and Russia. Qajar, British, and Russian officials viewed these regions as a dangerous terra incognita, ignorance of which threatened their respective empires. Using Iranian and British sources, this paper explores the manner in which these states sought to alleviate their anxieties by collecting, storing, and exploiting information about southern and eastern Iran. Such knowledge, they hoped, would render legible borderland landscapes, peoples, and loyalties and facilitate political and economic control.
Iran’s borderlands were a site in which competing imperial knowledge projects intersected with local information networks. The players in this “Great Game” were many and varied: Russian and Anglo-Indian diplomatic and intelligence officers; Qajar governors, karguzars, telegraph clerks, and customs officials; and local notables, such as landowners, tribal leaders, ulama, and merchants. This last group was particularly important, because in the absence of a strong, centralized bureaucracy, local knowledge was essential to governance. Qajar and foreign officials’ attempts to access this knowledge, combined with improved communications, resulted in the development of a series of new, overlapping information networks, which connected the Qajar borderlands not only with Tehran but also with London, St. Petersburg, and Simla.
This paper seeks to enhance our appreciation of the relationship of center and periphery in late Qajar Iran. It emphasizes the continued significance of local notables as well as the centralizing impulses from Tehran that would find fuller expression during the Pahlavi period. Anxieties about the frontier were fundamental to understanding the militarism, autocracy, and bureaucratization of Pahlavi nationalism. Finally, this paper seeks to bridge the inexplicable gap between the historiographies of modern Iran and modern European imperialism, connecting accounts of Qajar state-building, reform, and revolution with studies of European colonial knowledge and imperial expansion.
