Kirman and the Qajar Empire: Local Dimensions of Modernity in Iran, 1794-1914 (Iranian Studies) [1 ed.] 1138914568, 9781138914568

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Kirman and the Qajar Empire

Despite its apparently peripheral location in the Qajar Empire, Kirman was frequently found at the center of developments reshaping Iran in the 19th century. Over the Qajar period the region saw significant changes, as competition among Kirmani families rapidly developed commercial cotton and opium production and a world-renowned carpet weaving industry, as well as giving strength to radical modernist and nationalist agitation in the years leading up to the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. Kirman and the Qajar Empire explores how these Kirmani local elites mediated political, economic, and social change in their community during a significant transitional period in Iran’s history, from the rise of the Qajar Empire to World War I. It departs from the prevailing center–periphery models of economic integration and Qajar provincial history, engaging with key questions over how Iranians participated in reshaping their communities in the context of imperialism and growing transnational connections. With rarely utilized local historical and geographical writings, as well as a range of narrative and archival sources, this book provides new insight into the impact of household factionalism and estate building over four generations in the Kirman region. As well as offering the first academic monograph on modern Kirman, it is also an important case study in local dimensions of modernity. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Iranian studies and Iranian history, as well as general Middle East studies. James M. Gustafson is Assistant Professor of History at Indiana State University, specializing in the social and economic history of the modern Middle East and Central Asia.

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20 The Sīh-rōzag in Zoroastrianism A textual and historico-religious analysis Enrico G. Raffaelli 21 Literary Subterfuge and Contemporary Persian Fiction Who writes Iran? Mohammad Mehdi Khorrami 22 Nomads in Post-Revolutionary Iran The Qashqa’i in an era of change Lois Beck 23 Persian Language, Literature and Culture New leaves, fresh looks Edited by Kamran Talattof 24 The Daēva Cult in the Gāthās An ideological archaeology of Zoroastrianism Amir Ahmadi 25 The Revolutionary Guards in Iranian Politics Elites and shifting relations Bayram Sinkaya 26 Kirman and the Qajar Empire Local dimensions of modernity in Iran, 1794–1914 James M. Gustafson 27 The Thousand and One Borders of Iran Travel and identity Fariba Adelkhah

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Kirman and the Qajar Empire Local dimensions of modernity in Iran, 1794–1914 James M. Gustafson

First published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2016 James M. Gustafson The right of James M. Gustafson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gustafson, James M. Kirman and the Qajar Empire : local dimensions of modernity in Iran, 1794–1914 / James M. Gustafson. pages cm. — (Iranian Studies) 1. Kirman (Iran)—History. 2. Kirman (Iran)—Politics and government. 3. Economic development—Iran—Kirman (Iran) 4. Iran—History—Qajar dynasty, 1794–1925. I. Title. DS325.K4G87 2016 955ʹ.82—dc23 2015003318 ISBN: 978-1-138-91456-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-69070-4 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgments Note on transliteration Introduction: the politics of households in Qajar Kirman Modernity and agency in Qajar Iran 6 The politics of households in Qajar Kirman 8 Analyzing Kirman’s household networks and their estates: a note on the sources 12 An outline of the present study 16 Notes 18

x xi xii 1

PART I

Kirman and the politics of empire

23

1

Kirman and the Qajar Empire A view from across the desert: geography and history in Kirman 26 Reconfiguring urban politics 31 The Ibrahimi family: reconstruction and renewal 33 Shaykhi–mutasharʿi sectarianism 35 Patterns of landownership and rural administration 37 The Mahallati revolt: networks of social power and the state 41 Conclusion 44 Notes 45

25

2

Local historiography and the politics of the Great Game The quest for knowledge in the Great Game 51 Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri-Kirmani and his works 54 The Qajars, the British, and their local intermediaries 58 Conclusion 63 Notes 64

49

viii Contents PART II

A regional political economy

67

3

Household networks and rural integration Patterns of landownership in Qajar Kirman 72 Rural development and the commercialization of agriculture 75 The Vakil al-Mulki estate 78 The Kalantari estate in Sirjan 79 Rafsanjan: land investment and Shaykhi–mutasharʿi factionalism 81 The sale of crown lands 83 Rural integration and the fate of the Aqayan and tribal elites 84 Conclusion 86 Notes 87

69

4

From cotton to carpets: consolidating a regional economy Structure and agency: global forces and local transformations 95 Weaving and craft production in Kirman 101 Cotton to carpets: Kirmani elites and the carpet boom 103 Conclusion 108 Notes 108

92

PART III

Patrimonialism and social change

113

5

Contesting urban patrimonialism Estate building and the normative foundations of social power 116 Kirman’s rural transformation 118 The question of “tribalism” 121 Carpet capitalism, class, and labor 124 Gender and modernism 130 Conclusion 133 Notes 133

115

6

The household politics of revolution The Ahmadi household and intellectual radicalism in Kirman 138 The 1905 Shaykhi–mutasharʿi conflicts 141 The Constitutional Revolution in Kirman 147 Containing the revolution: conflicts over the local anjumans 151 Conclusion 154 Notes 155

137

Contents

ix

Conclusion: mediating modernity in Kirman Notes 163

158

Appendix: genealogical charts Bibliography Index

164 170 179

List of illustrations

Figures  1.1  2.1  2.2  4.1 A.1 A.2 A.3 A.4 A.5

Kirman City in the late 19th century Sketch of southern Persia Percy and Ella Sykes and ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farman Farma Sketch showing caravan routes The Ibrahimi household The Vaziri household The Vakil al-Mulk household The Bihzadi household The Ahmadi household

27 51 60 95 165 166 167 168 169

Table  6.1

Kirman’s representatives to the first Majlis-i Shawra-yi Milli, 1906–08

150

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my gratitude to the many people who offered their time, their advice, and their support over the five years that went into writing this book. My colleagues and friends at the University of Washington and Indiana State University, in particular, have bravely endured years of conversations about 19th century opium farmers and tax collectors and offered critical feedback from the perspective of their own areas of expertise as historians. Joanna deGroot, Florian Schwarz, Shaun Lopez, Joel Walker, Christine Nölle-Karimi, Rudi Matthee, John Gurney, and Lyman Stebbins all generously offered significant, formative input on this manuscript during its cycles of deconstruction and rebirth. I am immensely grateful for the support of this community of friends and colleagues. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge the Iran Cultural Heritage Foundation, the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute, a University of Washington Presidential Dissertation Fellowship, and a University Research Committee grant from Indiana State University in supporting critical research and travel for the preparation of this book. A visiting professorship at the Institute for Iranian Studies at the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna in 2013 was also essential to completing the final stages of this manuscript. Invitations to share my research and collaborate with faculty and students at Yale University, Indiana University, the University of Washington, and Portland State University provided opportunities to reflect on and sharpen the larger underlying questions behind this work. Where there are strengths in this book, they are from the collective guidance of this community. My wife, Melissa Gustafson, has shown enormous patience, sticking with me from Chicago to Seattle to Terre Haute, Indiana. In addition to her love, support, and encouragement, she has also acted as my own personal librarian, responding to my inane questions day and night. I dedicate this book to Melissa and our two children, Richie and Sam, who were there with me through it all. Finally, I wish to dedicate this book to the late Dr. Muhammad Ibrahim BastaniParizi. A prominent historian of Iran, and a native of Kirman, Dr. Bastani-Parizi dedicated his life to the study of his home province and produced numerous studies, editions, and annotations of texts critical to the completion of this book. I dedicate this modest contribution to the historiography of Kirman to his memory.

Note on transliteration

Transliteration of Persian in this work follows the method utilized in the Cambridge History of Iran with some modifications. Diacritical marks have been omitted for the sake of clarity for the reader. The diphthongs “au” and “ai” have been transliterated “aw” and “ay” to better reflect pronunciation. Names and terminology commonly known in English have been left in their familiar forms (e.g., “Tehran” instead of “Tihran”), while terms common both to Arabic and Persian have been transliterated to reflect Persian orthography (e.g., vaqf instead of waqf ).

Introduction The politics of households in Qajar Kirman

In the summer of 1905, a series of factional riots shook the southern Iranian city of Kirman. The violence began in July when a relative of the town’s leading Shiʿi cleric led a mob through the Bazar-i Shah quarter of the city wielding sticks, clubs, and rifles. Their objective was to seize the Bazar-i Shah mosque belonging to the local Shaykhi community, adherents to a metaphysical spiritual movement inspired by the teachings of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsaʾi (d. 1826). After the group took control of the Bazar-i Shah mosque, they installed a new mutasharʿi (“juristic” or so-called orthodox) Shiʿi preacher and occupied the grounds to physically prevent Shaykhis from entering. The mob then turned and made its way to lay siege to the home of the Shaykhi spiritual leader, Hajj Muhammad Rahim, provoking a conflict with provincial troops outside the man’s home in which at least forty people were killed.1 These tensions held through the summer and fall of 1905, punctuated by a number of violent confrontations between Kirman’s mutasharʿi and Shaykhi communities, including attacks on prominent Shiʿis who dared to intervene on behalf of the provincial government.2 Although commonly understood as a sectarian conflict between two mutually hostile religious groups, this conflict began over the mundane issue of administrative appointments when a new Shaykhi administration came to power by purchasing the office of provincial vazir from the Qajar court. This was but one episode in a long, ongoing factional competition between two sets of families in Kirman over wealth, power, and prestige. In the midst of this mutasharʿi–Shaykhi “war” in Kirman, as it has become known, an incident took place which is frequently recalled as a symbolic turning point in Qajar history.3 Kirman’s governor took the unprecedented step of arresting the town’s leading cleric, Mirza Muhammad Riza Mujtahid, whose cousin led the seizure of the Bazar-i Shah mosque, and then inflicted the bastinado on him for his role in inciting this unrest. The violent treatment of a prominent member of the Shiʿi ʿulamaʾ inflamed tensions with the Qajar monarchy (1795–1925) and proved to be a key event bringing together the modernist-clerical alliance pivotal in Iran’s Constitutional Revolution (1906–11) the following year.4 Families like the Ahmadis, an important mercantile, clerical, and landowning family in the province, had deep connections to this revolution. Not only did they support a community of radical modernist and nationalist thinkers in Kirman like Mirza

2

Introduction

Aqa Khan Kirmani, Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, and Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi, they were also pivotal in curtailing the reach of revolutionary institutions after 1906, like the provincial councils (anjumans) that threatened to further erode the power of local families over administration and tax collection. Within just a few years, when revolutionary councils were established to take control over local administration, however, the Ahmadis and other local families led the way in opposing and marginalizing them. Frequently the dynamics of change in regional settings far from the Qajar court in Tehran were in fact central to shaping developments like the successes and failures of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and the acceleration of international trade and encroachment of British and Russian imperialism that preceded it. These stories are too often told from the outside-in, top-down, and center-out perspectives of Qajar chroniclers and European administrators. Given the abundance of local histories, geographies, travelogues, consular works, and other such documents produced in local and regional settings, we have a set of alternate perspectives available on the shape of these developments beyond the orbit of Tehran. Throughout Iran, the Qajars were but one of several outside forces whose influence was shaped and repurposed by powerful local families during this critical transitional period in modern world history. This book will explore the dynamics of political, economic, and social change in one such community as a means to explore the local dimensions of modernity in Iran and explore the history of Qajar Iran without the Qajars at the center. *** There is a growing interest in local and regional histories throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, and the greater Indian Ocean world, decentering narratives away from capitals of imperial power and exploring the great variety of local experiences. We are also discovering that these regional developments had a profound influence on changes affecting imperial centers, as in the aforementioned 1905 Shaykhi–mutasharʿi conflicts in Kirman. These local and regional histories make up a complex web of interconnected experiences which were, in many ways, far more influential than the politics of empire in reshaping 19th century societies from the Ottoman world to South Asia. Whereas the Kirman region was a remote province on the margins of empire in Tehran-centric views of Qajar Iran, it possessed its own unique set of circumstances and experiences within the context of broader global transformations extending far beyond its relationship with the Qajar Empire. Over the course of the 19th century, local merchants expanded their networks of trade through the Persian Gulf as they found markets for locally produced cotton, wool, and textiles in Bombay and Calcutta. With the explosion of commercial opium and carpet production, these networks expanded through middlemen as far as China and England. British, Russian, and Qajar competition in Central Asia in the “Great Game” brought new patterns of political interaction to the region, in which the Qajars appear in local sources as but one of several external powers with whom Kirmani elites interacted. By the turn of the 20th century, Kirmani elites had truly global networks of exchange, not only through

Introduction 3 politics and trade, but through engagement with intellectual and cultural currents as well. A radical intellectual community, born out of Kirman’s elite households and inspired by the legacy of the prominent local radical Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani, played a leading role in advocating constitutional limits to Qajar patrimonialism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There is a troubling tendency to compartmentalize the history of Iran more generally within the framework of a global “periphery.” This is partially a legacy of Immanuel Wallerstein’s famous World-Systems Theory paradigm, describing the development of capitalism as a global structural transformation centered on Europe.5 Wallerstein positions regions like Iran, the Middle East, the Indian Ocean world, and Africa as a global periphery caught in the orbit of a Western “core,” placing Euro-American industrialists, merchants, and middlemen as the primary agents of change, with non-Western societies reshaped from the outsidein as objects of mercantile and imperial competition. Recent scholarship on Asian commerce has demonstrated the need to recognize the activities of non-Europeans in shaping the development of global capitalism and, in turn, its broader social and cultural effects.6 In Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution, John Foran traced Iranian social history within the WorldSystems Theory paradigm, with Iran moving from an “external” to a “peripheral” position and experiencing dependent development through external pressures.7 Foran asks important questions about the relationship between global structural patterns and local social transformations with the rise of capitalism but at the same time reinforces the assumption that Iranians were objects, rather than agents, of change. In turn, local histories are too often provincialized and placed in the service of state-centered narratives of change which diminish a much wider range of transregional and global connections. This is particularly an issue in the case of Qajar Iran, in which the state was a weak, ineffective façade and ultimately only one of several external poles of power from the perspective of a place like Kirman. Vanessa Martin described the politics of empire in 19th century Iran as “the Qajar pact,” a careful negotiation of power between the Qajar court and the various communities making up its periphery as provincial holdings.8 Rudi Matthee has discussed a similar dynamic in Safavid times, in which politics involved a “bargaining process in which central power and domination confronted local clout and peripheral recalcitrance.”9 When combined with the tendency to view Iran as a periphery in global terms, as Heidi Walcher noted in her study on Qajar Isfahan, local histories are further marginalized as the “periphery of the periphery.”10 An alternate set of viewpoints are available in the field of local historiography and geographical writing which flourished throughout Qajar Iran. These narratives reveal the great variety and distinctive character of regions under Qajar rule. Local historians relate the story of their communities with great pride of place, each possessing a unique sense of locality built over centuries of interaction between physical environment and human activity. The closely related field of local geographical writing, as well as travelogues and other such texts, present prominent local elites, merchants, and administrators as part of the cultural

4

Introduction

landscape of their communities, not unlike their mosques, or mountains, or fine pomegranates. Each community possessed its own colorful blend of poets and clerics; landowners and provincial administrators; mystics and warriors. These individuals were understood as prominent players in their societies and involved in shaping change during this important transitional period. While shaped by influences that were intensely local, these developments were also part of the changing pattern of relations between Kirman and the wider world, which often had very little to do with the Qajar state or European commerce. In dealing with local dimensions of change, it is necessary to consider the influence of local social and cultural institutions like the elite patrilinear household, the basic structural feature of local societies involved in mediating change and shaping it locally. Patrilinear households were essentially locally rooted networks of social power, built around relationships of power and prestige among prominent local individuals. Kirman, like other Iranian communities under Qajar rule, was dominated not by the state but by a handful of these prominent local household networks. Such families dominated Kirman throughout the Qajar period in the absence of direct control by the court, skillfully adapting to changing circumstances and reproducing the power of their households from generation to generation. Throughout Kirman’s history under Qajar rule, a group of these households were active in adapting to and shaping changes in their community, and did so in an environment of intense factionalism. Factionalism not only drove competition between local households, but was also routinely manifested in unrest or outright violence. Indeed, the 1905 factional violence in Kirman was related to a long-standing conflict in the province between two groups of Shaykhi and mutasharʿi households in Kirman City, who were locked in a competition for resources.11 The initial riots were set off by the rather mundane issue of administrative appointments. Kirman’s newly appointed governor, Rukn al-Dawla, had taken up the increasingly common practice of selling off administrative posts to the highest bidder. A member of the Ibrahimi family, the heads of the local Shaykhi community, bought the office of deputy governor (nayib al-hukuma) and used this position to appoint members of his own family to various posts in the provincial government. This directly challenged the power and prestige of Kirman’s mutasharʿi establishment. The Vakil al-Mulkis, who had long dominated the provincial administration, appealed for support from Kirman’s other leading mutasharʿi elites. Mirza Muhammad Riza Mujtahid, the cleric arrested and beaten by the provincial government after his cousin seized the Bazar-i Shah mosque, came from the Ahmadi family. The Ahmadis came to prominence as landowners, making a fortune on cash cropping and international trade, before producing Kirman’s leading religious scholars for the past three generations and holding substantial influence over the local population. Given the Ahmadis’ centrality to the Shiʿi community, and the Ibrahimis’ Shaykhi affiliations, this political conflict over administrative posts ostensibly took the form of religious sectarianism, engulfing the provincial community at large once they called their networks of supporters to the streets. It is striking that early in the 20th century, the intense factionalism of prominent families could transform a

Introduction 5 simple matter of administrative appointments into widespread violence spilling far beyond its frontiers. This study will address precisely the question of how provincial elites participated as agents of change in reshaping their communities in the Qajar period by mediating political, economic, and social change in the context of intense factionalism and growing transnational connections. This small core of urban elite families remained powerful intermediaries between their community and the wider world into the 20th century, and actively shaped a series of local transformations through their estate-building practices in the context of broader global developments and laid the foundations for a more assertive top-down transformation of Iranian society under the Pahlavi monarchy (1925–79). This process is commonly termed the beginnings of a complicated process of “modernization” in Iran, in which outside forces transformed and reshaped Iran into a component of an emerging world system. Little has yet to be said, however, on the influence Iranians themselves had in reshaping the world around them, particularly outside of the center of Qajar power in Tehran. A central place must be given to understanding how the normative foundations of elite society, in becoming “modern” in its own particular way, articulated and repurposed by elites, influenced the shape of newly emerging patterns of social, political, economic, and cultural life alongside significant areas of actively constructed continuities. To maintain and reproduce social power required attention not only to changing economic circumstances, in terms of both opportunities and challenges, but also to maintaining the sociocultural standing of the family collective and its estate. This entailed maintaining connections with Qajar appointees to the provincial administration, regional networks of religious scholars, interregional trade networks, and expatriate scholarly communities, while at the same time maintaining the social power of their families locally through the adaptation of their estates economically and socioculturally.12 Elite families, in a highly factionalized environment, were compelled to adapt to ever-changing circumstances to maintain and reproduce their social power from generation to generation. The dynamic relationship between global forces and local mediation is perhaps nowhere more significant, nor more readily viewed, than in the survival and adaptation of the politics of households, a long-standing institution of social power in the Islamic world at the heart of Iran’s modern transformation.13 This work will contribute directly not only to our understanding of social and economic change in Qajar Iran, but also to the growing debate over the development of global capitalism and the variety of local, contingent forms of modernity in the non-West. This builds on the assumption, long held in sociological studies of modernity, that social and cultural change emanates from underlying economic transformations, while also recognizing the role of human agency in shaping those changes in tension with the social and cultural norms they act upon. In studies of Qajar Iran, it was long held that a dual-class system emerged in the 19th century, highlighted by the rise of a new class of “big merchants” connected intensely to global networks while standing aloof from their own societies.14 Scholars of the late Ottoman Empire have long recognized the influence of local players and

6

Introduction

power structures in regional change in the 18th and 19th centuries. Most notably, Beshara Doumani demonstrated in his groundbreaking work on Palestine how local merchants fostered new patterns of production and exchange that bound together regional economies through interpersonal networks.15 Michael Meeker, too, has detailed the influence of Ottoman-era provincial elites, tied to the center of imperial power, in the creation of “Turkish modernity” by skillfully adapting to new forms of political life during critical transformative periods.16 In the Indian Ocean region, too, there is a thriving field of study detailing how non-European merchants carved out niches in the global capitalist system and in many cases thrived, despite the impression that these communities at large were subordinate and peripheral in the Eurocentric world system.17 This study will demonstrate, in the case of Kirman, that it was largely the same group of elite households, engaged in landowning, administration, and control over religious institutions, that led the transformation of their communities through the nature of their estate-building strategies in competition with other elite households. This engages the discussion prompted by scholars of the Ottoman and Indian Ocean worlds in exploring the entirety of the mediating influence of local elite households in regional transformations. Rather than placing Kirman’s history in the framework of an expanding Eurocentric narrative of modernity, this work will be concerned with the question of how Iranians shaped the modern world for themselves at the level of a discrete community.

Modernity and agency in Qajar Iran The terms “modern” and “modernity” are a central feature of world historiography, covering a wide variety of developments even as there is still no commonly accepted definition of what these terms mean. Many historians now reject this terminology as code for “Western” or “European,” reinforcing a Eurocentric view of world history and denying the agency of non-Western subjects in shaping change in their communities. Abandoning the term “modern” is tempting, in that it is applied in such haphazard ways, often without interrogation, and covers such an impossibly broad array of things as to become a meaningless abstraction. Abandoning the term “modernity” for non-Western history would only reinforce this implicit link in much scholarship between the modern and Western. Instead, historians have sought to salvage this term through a search for “multiple modernities,” each a part of a larger interconnected whole, with local contingent forms shaping how becoming modern develops in various contexts.18 As a study in the local dimensions of modernity in Iran, this book will engage with a long-ongoing debate over how we might fruitfully apply this term to non-Western history. Attempting to pin modernity down to one or another individual thing runs counter to the tendency in historical studies to embrace complexity in search of understanding, rather than constructing universal theories that can explain change independently of context. Modernity is best understood as a complex of interrelated, global changes emanating from global economic integration, neither identical to European hegemony nor an objective entity with its own will or agency. The

Introduction 7 growing interconnectivity of the global economy, the growth of transnational networks, cross-cultural exchange, and migration clearly form the backdrop of myriad other changes taking place simultaneously and globally—including Iran—but in a striking variety of forms all dependent upon one another. It is still common to hear that “modernity struck Iran”19 or that the central dynamic of Iranian social and cultural history in the past two centuries is a complicated engagement with modernity as an external, often malignant, entity.20 In this study, rather than seeking Iran within a Eurocentric story of modernity, we will be seeking modernity within the activities of Iranians as participants in a broader, global transformation. When combined with the outside-in, top-down, and center-out approach, seeking modernity in Qajar Iran has reinforced an exaggerated focus on Tehran, the Qajar court, and transnational networks of modernist elites. The literary and cultural production of elites tied to these groups is allowed, by default, to stand in for Iranian “national” attitudes.21 Addressing this issue requires broadening the scope of our analysis to consider the contributions of a wide range of participants in reshaping their communities beyond Tehran. This also presents an opportunity to address and reconsider some of the most basic assumptions that have shaped the field of Qajar studies in this way. First of all, Qajar Iran was not a nation-state, nor was it a nation-state in its infancy. The Qajars ruled a vast, loosely integrated collection of territories with diverse, multi-ethnic, and multiconfessional populations through an imperial system. There was certainly a growing community of nationalists among the elite by the late 19th century that viewed themselves as “Iranians,” united by a common culture and heritage.22 The natural existence of the nation, however, was by no means a widespread assumption, nor was it particularly salient as a political identity even among Iranian elites or in shaping the normative basis of the Qajar imperial system. It must be remembered that nationalism has a history and cannot be projected back unproblematically into historical contexts where it was not a meaningful political concept.23 By extension, it is necessary to consider the varied experiences of regional communities and integrate those into the historiography of Qajar Iran. The Qajars directly controlled an area extending no farther than the gates of Tehran in any meaningful sense, and throughout the rest of their domain they held power through a delicate negotiation of power.24 As with their predecessors, the Qajars relied heavily on maintaining relationships with local elites who possessed local knowledge, connections, and prestige to exercise power in the provinces. Marshall Hodgson termed this the “aʿyan-amir system of social power,” wherein locally rooted aʿyan (notables or elites) regulated social and political life in provincial cities with minimal interference from the state, in negotiation with a small military entourage headed by an amir (military appointee).25 This system provided a degree of stability to the social, cultural, and political life in provincial communities through the dizzying rise and fall of often distant, poorly integrated dynastic states. In Qajar Iran, the state itself functioned as a family enterprise, with networks of power emanating from the center organized around the Qajar royal family and encountering local traditions of power in their engagement with provincial

8

Introduction

communities.26 The role of the state in provincial administration was restricted primarily to the collection of taxes and the maintenance of basic order, and even these modest goals relied almost entirely on the intermediacy of local elites. Several recent studies have signaled a beginning in this shift in perspective, viewing the politics of the Qajar Empire through the experiences of communities beyond Tehran. Christoph Werner’s An Iranian Town in Transition surveys in detail changes in social, economic, and cultural institutions among the elites of Tabriz from the mid-18th to mid-19th centuries, demonstrating, among other things, the continuity of local history across dynastic boundaries.27 The history of Qajar Isfahan, told through Heidi Walcher’s biographical sketch of PrinceGovernor Zill al-Sultan and his engagement with the Qajar court, British consular officials, and Christian missionaries, similarly demonstrated the intensely local nature of power and the importance of seeing the Qajars as one of several external poles of power from the perspective of provincial communities.28 Several studies on tribal communities have affirmed the usefulness of looking at the Qajar Empire from the “margins.” Notably, the recent study of the Bakhtiyari tribe by Arash Khazeni showed that much could be learned about the Qajar imperial project from the experience of tribal groups and their navigation of various types of political projects affecting their political relationship with the center.29 While this is not a book about the Qajars but about a regional community for whom the Qajars were one of several external reference points, the insights of these scholars in turn provide insights into considering what was “Qajar” about Qajar Kirman. Despite the momentum toward a shift in the historiography of Qajar Iran, many studies on social and economic history still commonly begin with the view of Iran as a unified category of analysis possessing a common national culture emanating from Tehran, a unified economy, and many other characteristics of the “modern” nation-state. For instance, Willem Floor’s unique contributions to the field of Qajar studies through an oeuvre of research on social and economic institutions in Qajar Iran, while painstakingly and minutely detailed in their empirical foundations, are based on the assumption of Qajar Iran, its economy, social institutions, and the like being, in themselves, suitable unified categories of analysis.30 Indeed, even the studies on provincial and pastoral-nomadic, or tribal, history often give very little context on social power beyond the center, or how it is exercised. This book will suggest an alternative approach to integrating the varied experiences in the social and economic history of provincial communities in the Qajar Empire beyond simply a center–periphery approach, but through the dynamics of social power, elite competition, and estate building. Indeed, the skillful adaptation by elite families to changing circumstances, which were partially of their own making, is a key feature of the social and economic history of the Qajar period and central to how each community became modern in its own distinct way.

The politics of households in Qajar Kirman While the nature of Qajar politics, and the delicate negotiation of power it entailed in encounters with local elites, has been theorized from the perspective of the

Introduction 9 center by Abrahamian, Martin, Sheikholeslami, and others, the immediate context of the social power of the provincial elite, or aʿyan, has rarely been examined in detail. In provincial communities, the aʿyan were often drawn from only a small number of locally rooted households standing at the center of extended patrilinear kinship groups (khandan, tayifa, or silsila) who were often able to reproduce the social power of their lineage from generation to generation along common normative patterns. In Qajar Kirman, a small number of such families maintained their status as local elites through control over three key areas of social, political, and cultural life: (a) landholdings, which accumulated in the hands of a small number of urban families connected to Kirman City over the course of the 19th century; (b) religious institutions, which involved control over extensive vaqf (religious endowment) revenues, religious ceremonies, the provision of various social services, and opportunities for patronage; and (c) access to stipendiary administrative posts. What is most common among this group of urban elites is that they were drawn from a small set of local households and their networks of social power. Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri-Kirmani, a native of Kirman who produced a local history and geography of the region in the 1870s, employs the terms ʿaʾila (“family” or “household”), khandan (often a unitary or nuclear household), and tayifa (“tribe”) interchangeably in reference to local elites.31 These describe part or all of an extended patrilinear kinship group, similar to tribal affiliations. Vaziri uses the term tayifa, for example, to describe pastoral-nomadic tribal groups and urbancentered sedentary family networks, as well as numerous shades in between. As with tribal affiliations, the household is a socially constructed relationship including a shared identity, and as such is an open and fluid institution. Leading families, especially those connected to Kirman City, are well documented in Vaziri’s Geography, catalogued by their eponyms and arranged by their roles as sociocultural categories. However, Vaziri’s sociocultural categories, like ʿulamaʾ and administrators, overlap so heavily that they should be conceived more as functional elements of families and their estates. These categories reflect norms surrounding the expectations of what elites ought to involve themselves in in the cultural performance of elite status, at least from the perspective of Vaziri, a member of one such urban elite family in Kirman. Monetary wealth appeared to be a secondary consideration at best. Kirman’s merchants, for instance, are listed last by Vaziri alongside astrologers and poets. This reinforces the notion that religious education and provincial administrative posts remained central elements of elite sociocultural status for Kirmani families, even if these same families were building their wealth through landownership and commercial activities. Max Weber identified some key characteristics of elite families which will, with some significant modification to account for certain aspects of their analogues in Islamicate societies, form the basis of our understanding of the family and its estate. In Economy and Society, Weber makes reference to the social role of the family in reference to Italian city-states, which despite his insistence on the uniqueness of Christian European civilizational forms, bears great resemblance to the provincial elite families at the center of this study. To Weber, kinship

10

Introduction

relations, beyond that of a mother and child, are not simply natural but socially constructed relationships.32 Thus he conceives of most social groups as essentially economically determined and the family, in particular, as a “unit of economic maintenance,” implying “solidarity in dealing with the outside and communism of property and consumption of everyday goods within.”33 Families, then, in the Weberian view, are essentially “collective self help” groups, based on a recognized common ancestry, communal handling of property, and solidarity in their dealings with other social groups.34 The Arabic term ʿaʾila (family), which appears frequently in Persian works, has been applied to numerous social groups in Islamic societies sharing the basic features of a patriarchal kinship group, from the nuclear family to an extended tribal organization.35 There is a growing field of studies on the family in Islamic, and especially Arab, societies that has moved away from a purely theoretical lens, which produces an image of the family as a relatively stable institution grounded in tribal social structures or Islamic legal norms. Margaret Meriwether, in The Kin Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770–1840, explored the dynamics of household organization, marriage, and inheritance with a particular focus on both women’s studies and the construction of gender categories.36 Ultimately, after breaking with the long-standing academic view of pre-modern families through their normative characteristics, Meriwether concludes that the available narrative and legal sources show the family to be an incredibly complex, porous, and diverse institution that is difficult to pin down either in an ideal form or in its relationship to a broader community. While this nuanced view is certainly appropriate, one gets the sense that it was also somewhat unsatisfying to Meriwether. Much of the work, in fact, deals with the conversation surrounding gender that was ultimately playing out in relation to the household and shies away from an analysis of family structure, its broader networks, or its social significance. An important part of the social power of the individuals in elite Kirmani society was their claim to membership in an elite family, bearing the name of a prestigious eponym. More than simply blood ties, the elite family was a network of individuals with claims to a common membership in the institution. This was, of course, more than a social club. Bonds of kinship tied members together into an identity group of the most fundamental kind. The focus on elite families in their capacity as mediators between the provincial community and the wider world requires a more defined approach to the family that highlights not only its internal structure, but also its broader social significance. For the purpose of drawing connections between the elite families of Kirman and the process of social change at the level of a community, elite families will be viewed as collectivities based on the principle of patrimonial kinship but ultimately connected to their communities as networks of political, economic, social, and cultural authority. Households operated much in the way that Michael Mann describes networks of “social power,” as household networks provided an institutional grid through which currents of ideological, as well as political, military, and economic power flowed.37 Rudi Matthee applied a “Mannian approach,” as he called it, to a study of the interaction of the Safavid court and other networks of authority in early

Introduction 11 modern Iran when analyzing the silk trade.38 Matthee uprooted the court from the center of analysis and contextualized its role in the overall political economy of the Iranian plateau, describing its operation in concrete terms as one of several interconnected networks of power. Household networks operated as the basic framework for the exercise of social power in Iranian provincial communities and interacted with other such networks of power, be it from the Qajar court and its local officials, wealthy foreign firms and merchants, or representatives of European powers present in consular offices throughout the empire. Beshara Doumani demonstrated how mercantile networks in Palestine in the late 19th century helped consolidate a regional political economy by regularizing and institutionalizing patterns of interaction and exchange.39 Elite household networks, when their operation is viewed in totality as networks of social power of various interlocking types, form the intermediate structure between changes in the global context and their local manifestations. That is, the household network was the structural context in which Iranians shaped a local, contingent form of “modernity” in their own communities. The evolution of family estates will therefore be the analytical tool used here to draw this relationship between Kirman’s elite families and broader social, political, and economic change in the community at large. Household estates in this work will include not only, strictly speaking, “economic” resources held by a family group, but the totality of the resources at their disposal. Sociocultural resources like authority over religious texts and religious institutions are difficult to express quantitatively, yet clearly served as important forms of capital for elite families. Without discarding notions of piety, religious education should be considered a performative aspect of sociocultural elite status, acquired through investment in cultural prestige, and was useful to maintaining the family collective. Likewise, economically significant activities like land investments and stipendiary administrative posts clearly possessed a symbolic character that went far beyond their monetary value. Control over endowments, stipendiary religious posts, and administrative offices tended toward hereditary control, sometimes for centuries, as in the case of the Kalantari family, who reportedly held the office of kalantar since the 17th century. The office confirms and reinforces an individual’s social power, as social power itself was intimately related to the networks of elite patriarchal families. This explains why a large number of families adopted a nisba title based on an administrative office. Among Kirman’s urban elite we find Vaziris, Kalantaris, Munshis, and Mustawfis. It also helps explain why two of Kirman’s most successful merchants in the 19th century (both named Aqa ʿAli and both from Rafsanjan) ended up investing much of their wealth not in further mercantile activities, but in relatively less financially enriching activities like landownership, while their descendants took up stipendiary administrative and religious posts. It is therefore important while tracing the evolution of family estates to recognize the importance of sociocultural resources as well as, strictly speaking, economic ones. While the state had little direct reach into the province, and almost nothing in the way of formal institutions, its presence was nonetheless significant given the reciprocal relationship that developed between the Qajar court and local elite

12

Introduction

households. Elites nearly monopolized access to Qajar appointees, affirming and legitimizing their status and prestige. Local elites also aided in legitimizing Qajar rule given their social and cultural prestige locally as landowners, administrators, ʿulamaʾ, and the like. This would seem to explain why there was a dearth of autonomous movements in Iranian cities even under the eminently unpopular Qajars. The “art of not being governed,” as James Scott called it, would hardly be a beneficial art to these local elites, who drew their prestige and legitimacy in part from their relationship with the state.40 One of the more important patterns of interaction with the outside world from the perspective of Kirman was found in this encounter between the imperial top-down networks of power and the intermediaries found amongst the local elite. Neither of these networks of power can be effectively explained without reference to the other.

Analyzing Kirman’s household networks and their estates: a note on the sources A common complaint among historians of modern Iran is that appropriate source materials do not exist or are inaccessible to researchers to explore many important areas of social and economic change in the Qajar period. Archival sources are limited and for the most part closed to foreign researchers.41 Court chronicles deal primarily with political and military developments at the center, and similarly most of the letters, correspondence, and private papers deal with elite, and especially modernist, circles connected to Tehran.42 The observations of British and Russian travelers and consular officials are of limited use for the study of provincial social history given the relatively superficial nature of their commentary.43 Analyzing household networks and their estates along the lines elaborated above requires a close examination of the available sources coming from provincial elites themselves, writings which have yet to be systematically explored by scholars. These include a thriving tradition of local historiography, provincial geographical writings, Persian-language travelogues, the occasional administrative report (often in the form of a travel narrative), and a few collections of private papers, vaqf documents, and the like. These documents provide a wealth of information on the social and economic history of Qajar Iran once attention is directed beyond the center to incorporate the varied experiences of provincial communities. Knowledge of communities beyond Tehran was also a concern for the Qajars themselves. When Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96) briefly led an attempt at centralization in the effort to create a more efficient and integrated political apparatus out of the empire’s skeletal administrative structure, he recognized that any significant strengthening of central authority would require additional financial resources through more systematic taxation and a greater base of knowledge about Qajar territorial possessions. In the 1860s, the court began a process of intelligence gathering. Nasir al-Din’s travels to Mashhad in 1867 and 1870 resulted in detailed travelogues held at court as administrative records, while a third trip in 1882 led to the compilation of the more systematic Matlaʿal-Shams detailing taxable properties, elite communities, and surveys of infrastructure and economic

Introduction 13 activity throughout Khurasan. This quest for information culminated in the ambitious Mirʾat al-Buldan project, an attempt to produce a detailed geographical dictionary of Iran’s towns and villages. Four volumes of this work were completed between 1876 and 1880 (two of which devolve into chronicles glorifying the reign of Nasir al-Din) covering the first six letters of the alphabet, alif to jim, before the project was abandoned.44 The Mirʾat al-Buldan project coincides neatly with the resurgence of local historiographical traditions through the appearance of a series of historical and geographical works in major urban centers. The first of these works, the 1871 Miʿrat al-Qashan, is organized as responses to a questionnaire sent by Nasir al-Din Shah to the elites in major provincial centers.45 Centralizing and integrating Iran by the Qajar government through the Mirʾat al-Buldan project was attempted through tapping into the local knowledge of provincial elites, and the project ultimately served as the catalyst for a revival of local historical and geographical writing in the 1870s and 1880s.46 The most significant source for the social and economic history of Qajar Kirman was produced in line with this same project: the Jughrafiya-yi Kirman [Geography of Kirman], a detailed geographical survey of the province written by Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri-Kirmani between 1872 and 1874 as an introduction to his much larger Tarikh-i Kirman [History of Kirman].47 The Tarikh-i Kirman is a detailed political history of the province from its establishment in pre-Islamic times to the beginning of the Qajar period, which, notably, utilizes several texts known to the author that are now lost to historians.48 ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farman Farma Salar-i Lashkar (governor of Kirman, 1891–93, 1894–95, 1905) commissioned additions to the text to bring it up-to-date, and several copies were compiled in 1907 under the title of the Salariyya in honor of their patron. The treatment of the Qajar period in this work is a somewhat less reliable source than earlier portions of the text, and in fact simply omits a number of important events and developments.49 Vaziri’s work is essential for reconstructing Kirman’s household networks and analyzing the management of household estates, both in terms of economic activities and in terms of the evolution of sociocultural norms governing elite standing. He highlights prominent members of his community in brief biographical sketches which relate each individual to the local clique of prominent households, the administrative positions they have held, and their connections to local mosques, madrasas, tariqahs, and shrines. Sometimes personal details are given that offer a glimpse into individual personalities in his community and tell us something about the qualities that, in the eyes of a member of Kirman’s elite, make an individual “notable.” There is occasional gossip on families that have fallen from once-lofty positions in Kirman’s elite circles, and people whose behavior and personal habits made them disreputable in his eyes, like the two sons of a local accountant who changed their clothes a little too often and shamelessly called out at women from the city’s alleyways.50 This information does not lend itself to statistical analysis, given its inconsistency, incompleteness, and impressionistic presentation, and no such attempt will be made in this work. It does, however, allow for a qualitative sketch of

14

Introduction

Kirman’s elite households by carefully reconstructing the primary networks of households through kinship and discipleship, a rough idea of the scope of the estates connected to these networks, and the ways in which these networks were involved in the exercise of social power in their communities. Moreover, through a comparison of Vaziri’s information in the 1870s with the comments of travelers, administrators, and other local historians (including the 1907 annotation of Vaziri’s local history), we can get some idea of how household networks and their estates adjusted over time to changing circumstances (partially of their own creation), and what strategies elite families pursued in competition with one another in the context of a rapidly changing relationship between their community and the wider world. The Farman Farma family, a branch of the Qajar royal family that dominated the governorship of Kirman in the 1880s and 1890s, produced a number of especially significant travelogues and official reports that provide information on rural communities, including administration, landholdings, infrastructure, and patterns of trade. Perhaps the most important of these is the Musafaratnama-yi Kirman va Baluchistan [Account of a Journey to Kirman and Baluchistan], written by Kirman’s governor ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farman Farma between December 1893 and April 1894.51 This text includes detailed information on the military elites of Bam, records on landholdings and tax dues, relations with tribal communities, agricultural production, and trade. Also notable are three travelogues written in the early 1880s by ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza’s father and elder brother, both of whom were also governors of Kirman in this period.52 These, and several other such works, have only recently become available to researchers and provide critical detail to our understanding of rural Kirmani societies and their relations with the state and the urban center. Several important narrative sources on the history of Qajar Kirman which give some depth to the picture provided by Vaziri were written by two of the central players in the modernist and constitutional movements in the first decade of the 20th century, Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi (a Kirmani delegate to the Tehran Majlis) and Mirza Muhammad Nazim al-Islam Kirmani (a founding member of the Anjuman-i Makhfi “secret society”). Nazim al-Islam’s history of the constitutional movement Tarikh-i Bidari Iraniyan [History of the Awakening of the Iranians] provides detailed information on Kirman’s modernist intellectual circles and the events surrounding the factional riots in Kirman in 1905, all from the perspective of a leading participant in the constitutional struggle.53 Nazim al-Islam also encouraged his lifelong friend Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi, who was unable to leave Kirman to take part in the revolutionary struggle, to write on local society and history and continue his studies in this way in Kirman. Shaykh Yahya produced two major works dealing with Qajar Kirman as a contemporary observer: his seventhousand-year history of the world, Tarikh-i Yahya [Yahya’s History], covering annual developments in Kirman alongside those of the wider world,54 and, most importantly, a detailed history of Kirman in the Qajar period, Farmandihan-i Kirman [The Rulers of Kirman].55 This latter work provides a critical sketch of developments in the Qajar period, including lengthy critical commentary on

Introduction 15 the defective sections on the Qajar period in Vaziri’s Tarikh-i Kirman. Given his extended residence in Kirman as a member of the powerful Ahmadi family, he was able to provide detailed information on contemporary figures and developments. Travelogues published by numerous European visitors to Kirman over the course of the 19th century, while certainly less reliable than the writings of native Kirmanis, do comment on many aspects of Kirmani society evaded or taken for granted in Persian-language accounts. Nicolas de Khanikoff in 185956 and A. Houtum-Schindler in 187957 wrote detailed descriptions of Kirman and commented heavily on productive practices in both the agricultural and handicraft sectors. The 1872 Perso-Kalat Boundary Commission also produced a volume of travel writings by its members, including, notably, the travelogues of Major General Goldsmid, and Captains Euan Smith and St. John, who left detailed accounts of working conditions in Kirman’s shawl and carpet manufactories, an aspect of local society completely absent from the works of local Persian writers.58 Even more unique is Edward Browne’s memoirs of his two months in Kirman in 1888 in A Year Amongst the Persians, during which time he caroused with the locals, smoking opium and discussing the finer points of metaphysics.59 European administrators provide us with much of the available data on economic developments in Qajar Iran, although the statistics are, overall, considered faulty, impressionistic, and generally unreliable by economic historians. The economic data found in consular reports and other commissioned papers in the UK House of Commons Parliamentary Papers and the archives of the British Foreign Office will be explored in this book, but no quantitative analysis will be attempted, since the data available are poorly suited to it given the above qualifications and in any case would not contribute significantly to the goals of the present work. The Parliamentary Papers provide annual economic reports which give the best available picture of the intensification of Iran’s connections to global economic structures as a producer of raw materials. The Foreign Office archives contain detailed reports by British consular officials on local developments throughout Iran and reports on numerous diplomatic issues. Critical for the study of Qajar Kirman are the reports on journeys to the province by Keith Abbott (1850),60 John Richard Preece (1894),61 and A. H. Gleadowe-Neucomen (1904),62 as well as the memos on the progress of commercial agriculture in the province by Lucas63 and Baring.64 In 1894, the British government opened a consulate in Kirman City under the direction of Percy Sykes, who, unlike many of his diplomatic colleagues elsewhere in Iran, spoke fluent Persian and immersed himself in the study of Iranian history and society.65 He later wrote a History of Persia66 and a travelogue on his time in Iran in which Kirman factors prominently.67 Unlike the often terse and direct letters of other consuls, Sykes’ diplomatic reports are often lengthy and peppered with historical vignettes and references to Persian poetry. As Kirman was deemed significant to British interests in the context of the Great Game, Sykes spent much of his time as consul traveling the province and dispatching detailed reports on diplomatic and commercial matters. He developed a close personal relationship with ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farman Farma during his first journey in Kirman, which helped him acquire and hold on to control of the consulate

16

Introduction

for most of the period from 1894 to 1904 before leading the South Persia Rifles in the First World War. Not only are there numerous sources available for the study of provincial social and economic history, but the available material is particularly well suited to reconstructing household networks and analyzing the adaptive strategies of local elites. They also demonstrate the significance of the mediating role of local elite families in the process of reshaping Kirman over the course of the Qajar period. In exploring the political interaction between Kirman and various imperial projects appearing on its frontiers, the consolidation of a regional economic zone in the province with the commercialization of agriculture and craft production, and social change related to the expansion of urban household networks both regionally and globally, we find Kirmanis themselves at the center of these transformations, acting to adapt their estates to take best advantage of the situation within the context of social norms while engaged in intense factional competition with other, like-minded families.

An outline of the present study The present study is divided into three thematic sections covering political, economic, and social change while progressing roughly chronologically through the activities of four generations in Kirmani households between the Qajar conquest in 1794 and the beginning of World War I. Part One, “Kirman and the Politics of Empire,” discusses the concurrent rise of several prominent Kirmani households in the early 19th century – the Kalantari, Vaziri, and Ibrahimi families – and their political relationships with external imperial projects, including, but not limited to, the Qajar Empire. Chapter I, “Kirman and the Qajar Empire,” will introduce the geographical and historical setting of 19th century Kirman. Rather than viewing Kirman as a natural or integral part of an Iranian nation-state, this chapter details the historical development of the political relationship that developed between Kirmani elites and the Qajars’ imperial project in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, as well as the larger intermediary position that prominent Kirmani families held between their communities and the wider world. Building on this discussion, Chapter II, “Local Historiography and the Politics of the Great Game,” will contextualize the major sources used for this book, a resurgence of local historical and geographical literature that appeared throughout Iran in the 1870s. These texts will be considered as artifacts of a tension between a local historiographical tradition and attempts by external imperial projects by the Qajars and British to tap into local knowledge in their attempts to know and control the region. Provincial histories and geographies produced by local elites represent the type of knowledge and connections that made Kirman’s elite households useful intermediaries for the Qajar and British Empires. Part Two, “A Regional Political Economy,” will discuss how Kirmani households mediated economic change during the province’s greater integration into global economic networks. A particular emphasis will be placed on the period following the arrival of the prominent Qajar governor Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan

Introduction 17 Vakil al-Mulk I in 1859, whose family’s private investments in Kirman’s infrastructure were influential in transforming the province’s global trade relations. Chapter III, “Household Networks and Rural Integration,” analyzes the dual process of the commercialization of Kirman’s agriculture and the greater integration of rural districts around Kirman City through the networks of elite households. Contrary to the long-standing assumptions held by economic historians, based on readings of European sources, that commercial agriculture was carried out largely by foreign agents and market forces, this chapter will demonstrate through attention to the activities of prominent Kirmani families that the commercialization of agriculture was largely carried out by local initiative. Kirmani elites actively shaped commercialization and rural integration through the dynamics of their estate-building endeavors, in an environment of intense factionalism. As household networks expanded their reach throughout the province in search of landholdings, they also assumed administrative positions over those territories at the expense of rural elites, the so-called Aqayan, who appear in sources as a relic of a bygone age by the early 20th century. This process of regional economic integration is the subject of Chapter IV, “From Cotton to Carpets: Consolidating a Regional Economy,” which discusses the challenges faced by successive generations of prominent Kirmani households through waves of booms and busts in new commodities like opium and carpet production. Part Three, “Patrimonialism and Social Change,” will assess the wider social and cultural dimensions of change in Qajar Kirman, in tension with the norms and institutions created by elite intermediaries. Chapter V, “Contesting Urban Patrimonialism,” discusses not only change, but the striking continuities through late 19th century Kirman in norms surrounding prestige and social power. Forces tying the provincial society together will be weighed against social movements challenging the system of power emanating from the political center of Kirman City. As in the Ottoman Empire and South Asia, regional political and economic integration was also manifested ideologically and created a basis for a more concrete notion of “Kirman” and being “Kirmani.” The extension of urban patrimonial networks formed the conduits of political and economic interconnectivity in the province, and patrimonialism itself became the normative framework behind it all. At the same time, both the institutions for integration created by urban elites and discussions of the status of rural and tribal communities, gender, and labor participated in articulating the proper social order in Kirman. The final chapter, “The Household Politics of Revolution,” will then discuss the tension between challenges to patrimonialism in Kirman and the struggle to impose constitutional limits on the patrimonial rule of the Qajars. Curiously, during the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11), we find the Ahmadi family, once at the center of a Kirmani network of radical intellectuals involved in the revolution, as agitators against the revolution once the new parliament introduces a provincial anjuman (council) that threatened the interests of their estate by usurping the administrative role of their household and their broader networks of support. In each case, the regional dynamics of factionalism and estate building were central in creating a distinctly Kirmani version of becoming modern. At the same time, Kirmanis were active

18

Introduction

participants not only in mediating modernity in their own community, but also in shaping (in their own modest ways) imperial competition, global economic integration, and their sociocultural effects in the wider overlapping spheres of the Middle East, Central Asia, and Indian Ocean world.

Notes 1 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari-i Iraniyan (Tehran 1967), I: 312. 2 In August, when a member of an important mutasharʿi family (the Vakil al-Mulkis) assisted in clearing the occupants of the Bazar-i Shah mosque in hopes of bringing an end to the crisis, a group of mutasharʿis formed a mob to attack his home as well, driving the unfortunate man to flee in terror over his rooftop and across a latrine to seek refuge in the citadel across town. FO 248/846, “Diary for Week Ending 31st August 1905.” Documents from the UK Foreign Office archives are cited hereafter as FO. 3 Gianroberto Scarcia, “Kerman 1905: La ‘Guerra Tra Šeihi e Balasari’,” Annali, Istituto Orientale Di Napoli N.S., no. 13 (1963). “Balasari” was a term used pejoratively by Shaykhis in reference to the mutasharʿi Shiʿi community. 4 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, 316. This event is widely regarded as “the spark that first set the fire of the Constitutional Revolution.” Mangol Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious Thought in Qajar Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1982), 183. 5 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011). 6 Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 7 John Foran, Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993). 8 Vanessa Martin, The Qajar Pact: Bargaining, Protest and the State in NineteenthCentury Persia (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005). 9 Rudolph Matthee, The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600–1730 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 62. 10 Heidi A. Walcher, In the Shadow of the King: Zill al-Sultan and Isfahan under the Qajars (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008). 11 FO 248/846. “Week Ending 23 July 1905.” 12 This is, partially, to draw a distinction from newly emerging “big merchants,” who maintained these broader connections but whose activities left them outside the normative framework for inclusion among the “notables,” or aʿyan. 13 Boaz Shoshan, “The ʿPolitics of Notables’ in Medieval Islam,” Asian and African Studies (Israel) 20 (1986). 14 Gad G. Gilbar, “The Muslim Big Merchant-Entrepreneurs of the Middle East, 1860– 1914,” Die Welt des Islams 43, no. 1 (2003); Ahmad Ashraf, “The Roots of Emerging Dual Class Structure in Nineteenth-Century Iran,” Iranian Studies 14, no. 1/2 (1981). 15 Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 16 Michael E. Meeker, A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 17 Markovits, Global World of Indian Merchants. 18 S. N. Eisenstadt, Multiple Modernities (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2002). 19 Farzin Vahdat, God and Juggernaut: Iran’s Intellectual Encounter with Modernity (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 27. 20 See, for example, Hamid Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted (New York: New Press, 2007); Ramin Jahanbegloo, Iran: Between Tradition and Modernity (Lanham, Md.:

Introduction 19

21

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32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

Lexington Books, 2004); Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography (New York: Palgrave, 2001). A similar approach is taken to the study of gender and sexuality in Qajar Iran in Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 40. See discussion in John Alexander Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). Martin, Qajar Pact. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), II: 64–69. Ervand Abrahamian, “Oriental Despotism: The Case of Qajar Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 5, no. 1 (1974). Christoph Werner, An Iranian Town in Transition: A Social and Economic History of the Elites of Tabriz, 1747–1848 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000). Walcher, Shadow of the King. A. Khazeni, “On the Eastern Borderlands of Iran: The Baluch in Nineteenth-Century Persian Travel Books,” History Compass 5, no. 4 (2007). Willem M. Floor, Agriculture in Qajar Iran (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2003); Labour Unions, Law, and Conditions in Iran (1900–1941) (Durham, England: University of Durham, 1985); Labor & Industry in Iran, 1850–1941 (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2009); Industrialization in Iran, 1900–1941 (Durham, England: University of Durham, 1984); A Fiscal History of Iran in the Safavid and Qajar Periods, 1500–1925 (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 1998); Traditional Crafts in Qajar Iran (1800–1925) (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 2003); The Persian Textile Industry in Historical Perspective, 1500–1925 (Paris: Harmattan, 1999). Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman (Tehran: Ibn Sina, 1974). Vaziri wrote this local geography as an introduction to a lengthy local history: Tarikh-i Kirman (Tehran: Nashr-i ʿIlm, 2006). Their composition, contents, and usages will be considered in depth in Chapter II. Max Weber, Guenther Roth, and Claus Wittich, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 357. Ibid., 357–59. Ibid., 366. J. LeCerf, “Aʿila,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam. A similar set of principles is applied in an excellent collection of works on the family, Beshara Doumani, Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gender (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 4 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012). Matthee, Politics of Trade. Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine. On autonomous movements in the highlands of inner Asia, see James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009). The reciprocal relationship between state and local elites and the relative lack of local autonomous movements in the Islamic world are noted by Albert Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables,” in Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Richard L. Chambers and William R. Polk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968). A. Reza Sheikholeslami, The Structure of Central Authority in Qajar Iran, 1871–1896 (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1997).

20

Introduction

42 Hafez F. Farmayan, “Observations on Sources for the Study of Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Iranian History,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 5, no. 1 (1974). 43 Many of the consular documents from southern Iran in the Qajar period are housed among the Foreign Office documents in the UK National Archives in Kew. Annual consular reports delivered to parliament are available in the UK Parliamentary Papers database. 44 Muhammad Hasan Khan and Muhammad Ali Nuri Ala Partaw Sipanlu, Mirʾat al-Buldan (Tehran: Nashr-i Asfar, 1985). 45 This work has now been edited and published as Abd al-Rahim Salih Allahyar Kalantar Zarrabi and Iraj Afshar, Tarikh-i Kashan (Tehran: Muassasah-i Intisharat-i Amir Kabir, 1999). 46 In addition to the work on Kashan, see Husayn ibn Muhammad Ibrahim Tahvildar Isfahani and Manuchihr Sutudah, Jughrafiya-yi Isfahan: Jughrafiya-yi Tabiʾi va Insani va Amar-i Asnaf-i Shahr (Tehran: Intisharat-i Muassisa-yi Mutaliʿat va Tahqiqat-i Ijtimaʾi, 1963); Ghulam Husayn Afzal al-Mulk, Tarikh va Jughrafiya-yi Qum (Tehran: Vahid, 1976). The notable exception to this is the Jughrafiya-yi Tabriz, written by a Qajar notable, as Tabriz was normally governed by the Qajar crown prince and thus was more closely tied to the court than other cities. Nadir Mirza and Abd al-Husayn Lisan al-Mulk, Tarikh va Jughrafiya-yi Dar al-Saltana-yi Tabriz: bi-Zamima-yi Sharh Hal-i Buzurgan (Tehran: Iqbal, 1972). 47 Vaziri, Jughrafiya; Tarikh. For a brief summary of the geographical portion of this work, see Heribert Busse, “Kerman im 19. Jahrhundert nach der Geographie des Waziri,” Der Islam 50 (1973). 48 Vaziri, Tarikh. 49 Most notably, a significant revolt by the Ismaʿili imam Aqa Khan Mahallati in 1844 is given only passing reference; Hafez Farman-Farmaian, “Introduction to First Edition” in ibid., 1–7. 50 Jughrafiya, 76–77. 51 ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farmanfarma and Iraj Afshar, Musafaratnama-yi Kirman va Baluchistan : Buluk-Gardisi bih Muddat-i Sih Mah: 21 Gumadi at-Tani ta 25 Ramadan 1311 Qamari; Nusha-yi Hatti-i Mikht 853 dar Kitabhana-i Milli-i Utris (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek) (Tehran: Intisharat-i Asatir, 2003). 52 ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza’s father was Nusrat al-Dawla Firuz Mirza Farman Farma, a son of the renowned Qajar Prince ʿAbbas Mirza (d. 1833). Firuz Mirza served as governor of Kirman twice, 1837–39 and again as an old man in 1878. He authored two travelogues in the early 1880s: Firuz Mirza Farmanfarma and Mansura Ittihadiyya, Safarnama-yi Kirman va Balucistan (Tehran: Babak, 1981), from his first trip in 1880; and “Safarnama-yi Firuz Mirza Farmanfarma – 1297AH / Kirman” in Firuz Mirza Farmanfarma et al., Mallahan-i Khak va Sayyahan-i Aflak: Safarnama-yi Firuz Mirza Farmanfarma, Kirman 1289 Hijri Qamari; va, Safarnama-yi Mirza Riza Muhandis, Kirman, Yazd, Shiraz, Bushihr 1322 Hijri Qamari (Kirman: Markaz-i Kirmanshinasi, 2007), from a trip the following year in 1881. Firuz Mirza’s eldest son, and ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza’s elder brother, was Sultan ʿAbd al-Hamid Mirza Farman Farma, who governed Kirman from 1881 to his death in 1891. At some time between 1882 and 1886 he traveled to Baluchistan and compiled a report published as Muhammad R. Daryagast, Safarnama-yi Baluchistan: az Mahan ta Chahbahar (Kirman: Markaz-i Kirmanshinasi, 1991). 53 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari. 54 Yahya Ahmadi, Tarikh-i Yahya: Salshumar-i Tarikh-i Iran va-Jihan az Khilqat-i ʿAlam ta Sal-i 1336 Hijri Qamari (Kirman: Danishgah-i Shahid Bahunar-i Kirman, 2007). 55 Farmandihan-i Kirman (Tehran: Danish, 1975). 56 Nicolas de Khanikoff, Memoire sur la Partie Meridionale de l’Asie Centrale (Paris: L. Martinet, 1861).

Introduction 21 57 Albert Houtum Schindler and Heinrich Kiepert, Reisen im Südlichen Persien 1879 (Berlin 1881). 58 India–Persian Boundary Commission et al., Eastern Persia: An Account of the Journeys of the Persian Boundary Commission, 1870–71–72 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1876). 59 Edward Granville Browne, A Year Amongst the Persians: Impressions as to the Life, Character, and Thought of the Persian People (London: Kegan Paul, 2002). 60 Keith Abbott’s reports have been edited and published as Keith Edward Abbott and Abbas Amanat, Cities & Trade: Consul Abbott on the Economy and Society of Iran, 1847–1866 (London: Ithaca Press, 1983). 61 J. R. Preece, “Report of a Journey made to Yezd, Kerman, and Shiraz, and on the Trade, &c., of the Consular District of Ispahan, 27 Feb 1894” (27 Feb 1894) in Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.7293] (Cambridge, UK: Chadwyck-Healey, 2005). 62 A. H. Gleadowe-Neucomen, “Report on the Commercial Mission to South-Eastern Persia During 1904–1905,” in FO 368/38. An account of this mission by Neucomen’s Iranian guide and translator was also recently published in Farmanfarma et al., Mallahan-i Khak. 63 G. Lucas, “Memorandum on the Cultivation and Exportation of Opium in Persia, 23 Jan 1875” (23 Jan 1875) in Reports from Her Majesty’s Consuls on the Manufactures, Commerce, &c., of their Consular Districts. Part II [C.2529] (Cambridge, UK: Chadwyck-Healey, 2005). 64 Walter Baring, “Report by Mr. Baring on Trade and Cultivation of Opium in Persia, 23 Sept 1881” (23 Sept 1881) in Reports by Her Majesty’s Secretaries of Embassy and Legation on the Manufactures, Commerce, &c., of the Countries in which they Reside. Part I [C.3103] (Cambridge, UK: Chadwyck-Healey, 2005). 65 For a recent and accessible biography on Percy Sykes, see Antony Wynn, Persia in the Great Game: Sir Percy Sykes, Explorer, Consul, Soldier, Spy (London: John Murray, 2003). 66 Percy Molesworth Sykes, A History of Persia (London: Macmillan and Co., 1921). 67 Ten Thousand Miles in Persia; or, Eight Years in Iran (London: J. Murray, 1902).

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Part I

Kirman and the politics of empire

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1

Kirman and the Qajar Empire

In 1794, Kirman was in a dangerous predicament, caught between the imperial ambitions of two rival warlords from the Zand and Qajar dynasties. In his effort to consolidate Qajar control over the Iranian plateau, Aqa Muhammad Khan Qajar (d. 1797) tracked the last prominent Zand prince, Lutf ʿAli Khan (d. 1794), to the remote city of Kirman in southern Iran. He was aided by one of Kirman’s leading landowners, Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi, who had been recently relieved of his wealth and properties in the city by the Zand prince. Lutf ʿAli Khan used these and whatever resources he could pull together to build a base of support among regional tribal groups to make a stand in Kirman City and restore Zand rule. A lengthy siege of Kirman City by Qajar troops ensued, in which as many as a third of the city’s population died from famine; and two successive waves of refugees, numbering as many as 22,000 men, women, and children, were sent out from the city.1 By fall 1794, a group of riflemen from Jupar responsible for guarding a section of the city’s defensive walls decided they had seen enough and, on October 4, opened a gate to allow Qajar forces to enter the city.2 Lutf ʿAli Khan managed to flee the city in the midst of the fighting, cross a ditch along the defensive wall on an improvised bridge, and flee to the Citadel of Bam with three of his supporters, leaving Kirman’s inhabitants at the mercy of Aqa Muhammad Khan. He was eventually betrayed at Bam and captured by Qajar troops, who gouged out his eyes before sending him off to Tehran, where he was later strangled to death in prison. For three nights following the Qajar conquest of Kirman City, Aqa Muhammad Khan’s army plundered and destroyed much of the city. The Qajar ruler also reportedly ordered his troops to present him with a pile of eyeballs by blinding thousands of Kirmani men, and to massacre the others, for their tacit support of the Zand prince. The women and children of the town were handed over to the Qajar soldiers, and many were subsequently taken away as slaves.3 Lieutenant Henry Pottinger also attested to seeing a pyramid of heads belonging to Zand supporters in Bam in 1810, constructed at the approximate site of Lutf ʿAli Khan’s arrest.4 With this ugly scene, Kirman witnessed the demise of the last serious challenge to the rise of the Qajar Empire. Curiously, these acts of brutality ultimately restored political stability to the Iranian plateau after more than seventy years of

26

Kirman and the politics of empire

intermittent warfare that followed the fall of the Safavid Empire (1501–1722). The Qajars quite fluidly assumed political power along a long-standing model in the Islamic world, ruling indirectly from their new capital at Tehran through a careful negotiation of power with local intermediaries throughout the empire.5 The Qajar presence in communities they controlled was generally limited to a governor (normally a member of the Qajar royal family) and a modest entourage, who administered territories indirectly through the intermediacy of local elites. The developing Qajar imperial system reinforced the influence of a small group of locally rooted households, like the Shamaʾis (later known as the Vaziris), who would continue to dominate social, political, and economic life in Kirman with remarkably little interference from the central government throughout the nineteenth century.6 This intermediacy extended far beyond imperial politics, encompassing much of Kirman’s interaction with the wider world. The active intermediary role of local elite families in Kirman developed parallel to the rise of Qajar central authority. Between the conquest of the city in 1794 and the arrival of the important transitional figure Vakil al-Mulk as de facto governor in 1859, there was a significant realignment of social forces in Kirman. With the physical reconstruction of the city also came the practical reconstruction of normative patterns surrounding social power, with areas of strong continuity with the past. The primary feature of this was the dominance of a small group of prominent elite families in Kirman City and larger villages throughout the countryside, standing at the center of wide-reaching networks of social power built around their wealth and prestige. Land, stipendiary administrative posts, and control over local religious institutions formed the core of family estates, granting steady access not only to wealth, but also to Qajar governors, prestige in the eyes of the community, and a means of reproducing their power in successive generations. Competition among Kirman’s elites was fierce, even violent, yet integral to shaping the sweeping changes that reoriented Kirman’s economy, politics, and social structure over the coming century. The story of Kirman and the Qajar Empire is more than that of a center dominating a periphery. Rather, we find a fascinating story of regional change developing alongside the rise of Qajar power in Tehran as but one of several external factors exerting influences mediated locally by Kirmani elites.

A view from across the desert: geography and history in Kirman Kirman is situated in the vast desert landscape of southern Iran, more than eight hundred kilometers across the Iranian plateau’s central salt desert, the Dasht-i Kavir, from the capital of Tehran and the other major urban centers to the north and west. Prior to industrialization and the development of a transportation and communication infrastructure, the Dasht-i Kavir was a formidable natural barrier slowing the passage of people, goods, and information anywhere from several weeks to several months between Kirman and other urban centers to the north. The historian Edward Browne described the approach to Kirman City, also known to its inhabitants as Gavashir, early one morning in June 1888.7 He observed the

Kirman and the Qajar Empire

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plain he had followed since leaving Yazd narrow into a slender valley surrounded by high mountains. “When the dawn began to brighten over the hills before us, Kirman, nestling, as it seemed at the very foot of their black cliffs, and wrapped like one of her own daughters in a thin white mantle of mist and smoke, gladdened our straining eyes.”8 As Nicolas de Khanikoff had noted in his memoir ten years prior, “this city is perhaps the least well known of all the cities of Persia; very few Europeans have been there.”9 Indeed, Browne and Khanikoff each made quite a diversion to reach Kirman, some four to eight weeks from the usual itinerary of northern towns. As late as the 1890s, Percy Sykes, the first British consul at Kirman and later the commander of the South Persia Rifles in World War I, noted frequently during his explorations that he felt himself walking in the footsteps of Alexander the Great and Marco Polo as the first European since their times to step foot in this remote corner of the world.10 Unlike larger and more heavily traveled towns like Isfahan, which European travelers felt were adequately documented in their former glory in the Safavid era (1501–1722), Kirman’s few visitors often felt compelled to write vivid accounts of Kirman City and the surrounding province.11 Kirman’s few European visitors were usually disappointed in what they found here. Dwellings were primarily mud brick, with a few monumental works and government buildings constructed of stone or ornamented with tile work. A distinctive feature of many structures in southern Iran were large wind towers protruding from the rooftops, capturing and directing the heavy winds down to cool the interior, necessary relief in the arid climate. While considered today a great contribution to Iran’s architectural and cultural heritage, these local curiosities did little to impress 19th century visitors.12 St. John, visiting in 1872, noted that “there is not a single building of beauty or importance in the town.”13 Preece, too,

Figure 1.1 Kirman City in the late 19th century

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Kirman and the politics of empire

in 1894 writes of “the town of Kerman having no public buildings of prominence or beauty, the only exception being the Kabba-i Sabz [the “green dome,” which was actually blue] which lifts its head above the mounds of mud which cover the habitations of the people.”14 Perhaps for the sake of consistency, this singular display of beauty was destroyed in an earthquake that struck the city two years later in 1896.15 Several contemporary Kirmani writers gave their own descriptions of their community, with a much greater appreciation for the nuances of place, community, and identity, as will be discussed in some detail in the following chapter. The writings of local elites describe Kirman City as a regional hub, yet a city of relatively modest size throughout the Qajar period. Vaziri, the author of a local geography in the 1870s, stated that the city was “cucumber-shaped, approximately one farsakh (3 miles) in circumference, possessing six gates [a seventh opened in 1311/1893–94], more than a dozen major mosques [and some seventy others], six active madrasas, fifty one bathhouses, and eight large caravansarai.”16 It followed a common developmental pattern with other major cities on the Iranian plateau, with urban space oriented around an imposing citadel, a central bazaar along the town’s east-west thoroughfare, internally homogenous (or relatively homogenous) walled districts (mahallat), and a central complex of religious institutions centered on two communal Friday Mosques built by the Saljuqs and Muzaffarids and frequently repaired by Kirman’s rulers.17 Although population figures for Iranian cities at the time are notoriously haphazard approximations, British travelers consistently cite a figure of around 30,000 throughout the mid- to late 19th century. Vaziri cites a census conducted by Kirman City’s kadkhudas (headmen of the city quarters) in the 1870s, who counted a known population of 40,227, and estimated that an additional 60,000 people resided in the outlying villages within three farsakhs (roughly nine miles) of the urban center.18 Population growth over the Qajar period was slow and offset by periodic plagues and famines. The administrative zone controlled by Kirman City and its officials extended north to the rich plains of Rafsanjan, west beyond the settlements of Sirjan, south to the coastal mountains separating the province from the Persian Gulf ports, and the east to frontiers of the tribal lands of Sistan and Baluchistan. This region was divided by local geographers into two zones: the garmsir, or warm regions bordering the deserts, making up some three quarters of the province, and the sardsir, or cold mountainous regions cutting through the province northwest to southeast. Its settlements consisted of a patchwork of scattered oases reliant on artificial irrigation. A diverse array of nomadic tribal communities carried on regular migrations throughout the province and regular interaction with settled communities, paying taxes, buying and selling goods, and at times cutting off roads and harassing caravans. Paul Ward English, who conducted extensive fieldwork in Kirman in the 1960s, connected the scarcity of water to the sparse settlement pattern in the region and the strong ties that existed between village communities and the urban hub. Many of Kirman’s settlements relied on qanats, a form of subterranean water channel constructed by hand by local experts known as muqannis, a major achievement

Kirman and the Qajar Empire

29

of pre-industrial engineering in Iran.19 Without literally mining water from the highlands at enormous expense, agriculture, the basis of Kirman’s provincial economy, could hardly exist in this rugged, arid terrain. Lieutenant Pottinger, who passed through Kirman in 1810, described the province as “barren and waste” with “extensive desolate plains,” such that without the abundance of painstakingly constructed underground aqueducts, “the natives could not possibly exist.”20 To English, this signaled the necessity of an integrated regional society, not the separate, cohabitating worlds of urbanites, villagers, and tribesmen in classical anthropological descriptions of Iran and the Near East. He argues that only input from urban groups with capital, technical knowledge, and the ability to recruit labor could have been responsible.21 Marxist scholars in turn theorized that the high degree of organization and stratification required to construct qanats must have come from urban centers and supported a peculiar form of “hydraulic despotism,” which filtered into politics at higher levels.22 The debate over regional integration is a critical one, which will be taken up in due course, but suffice it to say that regional integration was not a zero sum scenario; the degree of urban–rural integration became significantly more marked over the 19th century with changes in the social, political, and economic environment. The staple crops produced in Kirman’s villages with the use of these qanats were primarily wheat and barley, supplemented by dried fruit and nuts from local orchards; Rafsanjan’s pistachios, in particular, were considered locally to be the finest in the world. After the division of the crop, much of the surplus made its way in the hands of landowners to the bazars in the larger towns. A considerable surplus from Kirman also made its way to Yazd and Khurasan. Over the course of the 19th century, trade through the Persian Gulf with India intensified as demand for raw materials and foodstuffs during the Industrial Revolution drove prices up sharply on the international market. Commercial agriculture blossomed beginning in about the 1840s, as producers replaced or augmented food production with cash crops like cotton and especially opium, which fetched high prices in India, China, and western Europe. As a result, local production became ever more sensitive to international fluctuations, marking Kirman’s integration into the global economy as a producer of raw materials. Kirman was remote from the various external poles of power like the Qajar court in Tehran, the major Shiʿi centers and shrine towns in the Ottoman Empire and Khurasan, and trade partners in Indian Ocean ports, East Asia, and western Europe. Yet Kirman’s population was also quite diverse and eclectic. The province’s mountainous terrain formed a series of natural barriers that contributed to a great range of diversity among the village and pastoral nomadic populations. Vaziri notes some twenty Arab families amongst a branch of the Afshars in Jiruft who, despite reportedly migrating to the province as early as the first Islamic century, continued to be Arabic speakers as a consequence of their physical isolation.23 There were a large number of at least partially nomadic Turkic “tribes” in Kirman of Central Asian origin. The distinction between sedentary and nomadic, family and tribe, was not often made by local chroniclers. These groups are often described by local writers in the same terms as settled families (ta’ifa or silsila)

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and often contained a large number of sedentary people among their number. Several of these semi-nomadic groups were significantly more extensive in number, however. The Afshars, for instance, numbered some 9,300 people in at least thirteen subtribal groups.24 The overall pastoral nomadic community in Kirman was quite diverse. Many of the tribes in the eastern portion of the province were branches of the Persianate Baluchis, who, unlike most of the settled population, were primarily Sunnis. The ʿAtaʾ Allahi tribesmen in Sirjan and Shahrbabak, in the west of Kirman, were Ismaʿili loyalists and a key base of support for Kirman’s dynasty of Ismaʿili imams.25 In line with the overall pattern in Islamic societies historically, Kirman’s nomads engaged in regular economic exchange with settled populations, selling animal products, including the fine local goat’s wool known as kurk, in Kirman City to purchase food and other necessities from the bazars.26 Nomadic groups also performed other services to merchants and the provincial government based on their resources and abilities. The Afshars, for example, employed pack animals to carry loads for merchants to the Persian Gulf port of Bandar ʿAbbas from Kirman City and Yazd. They were also renowned warriors, including some 700 experienced riflemen who could be called on as auxiliary troops for the provincial armies in times of necessity and good relations. Conversely, when they were under pressure or the central government appeared weak, they would use their military strength to cut off roads and attack caravans to augment their wealth.27 A sizable Zoroastrian community resided on the outskirts of Kirman City and held strong ties to the more numerous and well-organized Zoroastrian population residing in the next major town to the northwest of Yazd. A small but active group of Hindu traders connected to a broader regional mercantile network centered on Sind were present in Kirman City as well.28 A number of religious movements that developed from within Islamic thought and practice thrived in Qajar Kirman as well, most notably the Ismaʿilis and Shaykhis. The Ismaʿili imamate resurfaced in Kirman in the 18th century after several centuries of obscurity, where it remained until an ill-conceived revolt by the Ismaʿili imam Aqa Khan Mahallati in the 1840s failed and led to his removal to India. Kirman also proved fertile ground for the growth of a branch of the Shaykhi movement in the 19th century. Rooted in the teachings of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsaʾi (d. 1826), the Kirmani branch of Shaykhism was founded by Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan, the son of Kirman’s first Qajar prince-governor. The connections, status, and resources of the Shaykhi community, tied as it was to a branch of the Qajar elite, not only made them a major sociopolitical force throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries in Kirman, but also brought them into violent conflict with the mutasharʿi Shiʿi community on several occasions. Even Kirman’s majority mutasharʿi Shiʿi community was considered relatively liberal by European travelers. As Nicolas de Khanikoff wrote in his account of a voyage to Kirman in 1859, this liberal atmosphere was apparent even in the graffiti etched into the postal stations throughout the province. Unlike in the rest of Iran, he says, where one found philosophy, Quranic verses or political statements against local rulers, throughout Kirman one found long rhymes on the beauty

Kirman and the Qajar Empire

31

of women and the quality of the wine; “one should not believe however that the Kirmani thinks only of the material pleasures of this life, he is very inclined to theological extravagance.”29 While not quite “cosmopolitan,” at least in the early to mid-19th century, the image of a remote, isolated, and homogenous population breaks down very quickly on investigation. In fact, the diversity of Kirmani families and the global connections tied in to their networks was a critical component shaping the many changes and continuities there throughout the Qajar period.

Reconfiguring urban politics This geographical insularity granted local elites a certain degree of autonomy from the state, which likewise had very little influence on social and economic change. While distant from the center of Qajar power in Tehran, Kirman was on the front lines of pressures related to global economic integration emanating from the booming Persian Gulf trade and the Great Game on its eastern frontiers in Central Asia over the course of the 19th century. Kirman in the Qajar period thus represented its own discrete geographical entity with its own particular set of historical, social, and political circumstances within the wider sphere of the Iranian plateau. The Qajar court ruled a very lightly integrated land empire and held a very loose grip on regions like Kirman. Governors acted as proxies of the Shah, and in theory were quite powerful figures. Abrahamian has described the Qajar Shahs themselves as “despots without the instruments of despotism,” and their representatives suffered the same difficulties.30 Instead, the Qajar governors had a limited range of responsibilities, namely collecting taxes and maintaining basic order, and accomplished these tasks through the influence of local households. The most prominent households in Kirman, in turn, were able to bargain using their social power to impose certain limits on the exercise of power by Qajar appointees.31 Provincial elites eagerly participated in this political arrangement as the state legitimized and sanctioned their own exercise of power and extractive practices.32 Thus while the Qajar Empire was an exterior and extractive network of power in its relationship with Kirman, it was operating under significant limitations. In effect, it was largely superficial, like a façade. At the onset of the Qajar period, there was very little to actually extract from Kirman following the devastating conquest of the city. In 1794, after seizing Kirman, Aqa Muhammad Khan appointed a local notable named Aqa Muhammad Taqi to, as one early 20th century Kirmani historian put it, “govern the rubble.”33 Aqa Muhammad Taqi was the son of Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi, perhaps the wealthiest landholder in Kirman. According to a brief biographical sketch from his great grandson, Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi resisted Lutf ʿAli Khan Zand during his brief reign in Kirman and as a result saw his cash and properties in the city confiscated, members of his family arrested, and his daughters married off to Lutf ʿAli Khan and his uncle Nasr Allah Khan. In response, Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi fled the city and contacted the Qajar camp, encouraging Aqa Muhammad Khan to take the city.34 For his loyalty, Aqa ʿAli had his wealth restored to him, and he maintained control over his extensive landholdings around Kirman. The 12,000 or so refugees who took bast

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(sanctuary) in his properties were reportedly the only people in the city spared the mass blindings, executions, and enslavements that accompanied the conquests. Aqa ʿAli’s family, the Vaziris, developed a mutually beneficial relationship with the Qajars. As prominent players among the local elite, they were in a position to legitimize the very tenuous Qajar grip on the province. Aqa Muhammad Khan, soon to become Aqa Muhammad Shah, also helped to reinforce Aqa ʿAli and his family’s position among the local elite through critical appointments within the provincial administration. Aqa ʿAli’s family became known as the “Vaziris” after his younger son Mirza Husayn, who was appointed the vazir of Kirman alongside his brother, the governor. The Vaziri family remained one of the most prominent players in Kirmani politics into the 20th century. Aqa ʿAli’s great grandson, Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri Kirmani, the author of the Tarikh-i Kirman and Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, two of the most important sources for the history of Qajar Kirman, noted that even in the 1870s when composing his works, his connections to the Vaziri household afforded him a governmental stipend that allowed him to concentrate wholly on his studies of local history. The Vaziris are but one example of the significant continuities crossing the dynastic threshold with the rise of Qajar rule, not only in the shape of political power, but also in the very actors themselves. Another notable example is the Kalantari household, who had been a fixture in the politics of Kirman City since the Safavid period (1501–1722) and remained perhaps the most powerful urban bureaucratic household in Qajar Kirman after the Vaziris. The Kalantari name came from the family’s de facto hereditary control over the office of kalantar (chief magistrate), the highest post in Kirman’s urban administration.35 Similar to the employees of the divan, the kalantar was appointed by the Shah in the major cities of the Qajar state, but for the appointee to be effective, he needed to be a person of high standing locally. This, again, highlights the importance of sociocultural prestige, and the norms that govern it, in our understanding of the makeup of the provincial elite. These households stood at the center of regional networks of social power, not only in terms of their connections to members of their own families residing in rural districts, but also in their relationships with other notable families. These connections were often tied closely to religious institutions. The Kalantaris, for example, developed strong connections to the Niʿmat Allahi Sufi brotherhood, based in the village of Mahan just east of Kirman City, and the head of the Kalantari family is named as a disciple of the head of the order, Niʿmat ʿAli Shah, in the 1870s. Interhousehold networks can also appear as patron–client relationships, often tied into control over administrative offices. There was, for example, a certain Mirza Khalil, mentioned as an orphan from Kirman City who came to enter the entourage of the kalantar in the late 18th or early 19th century. Through his connections with the Kalantaris, Mirza Khalil was eventually appointed as a kadkhuda, or headman of a city quarter, in Kirman City. He and his sons entered Kirman’s elite as essentially clients of the Kalantaris. His two sons then entered the service of Mirza Husayn Vazir and thus further built up the profile of their

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line through connections with the Vaziris as well.36 Later in the 19th century, Hadi Khan, the great-grandson of Mirza Khalil, was well placed in the provincial divan, as well holding the title of “head kadkhuda” as a hereditary right from his father, although Vaziri noted, “he has no authority over the other kadkhudas of the quarters.”37 It seems even the descendants of an orphan could attain a measure of power within Kirman when connections to the networks of prominent households were procured. The ability of urban households like the Kalantaris and Vaziris to maintain their place among Kirman’s elite rested not only on their ability to reproduce their wealth and prestige from generation to generation, but, like the Vaziris, also on their ability to maintain their usefulness both to Qajar appointees and the local population alike. This arrangement was reciprocal. For the governor, they provided indispensable knowledge of local administrative affairs, substantial and long-standing ties with other members of elite society, and credibility and familiarity with the local population. This was especially essential in reorienting urban politics in the early 19th century when the Qajar dynasty, recently responsible for the near total destruction of Kirman City, attempted to establish itself at the head of a sedentary empire.

The Ibrahimi family: reconstruction and renewal The establishment of Qajar rule in Kirman is closely intertwined with the establishment of the Ibrahimi household, one of the region’s wealthiest and most powerful families over the following century. The Ibrahimis were the descendants and relatives of Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla (d. 1826), the first in a series of Qajar prince-governors of Kirman. Ibrahim Khan was appointed to govern Kirman by his uncle, the second ruler of the Qajar dynasty, Fath ʿAli Shah (r. 1797–1834), as part of his efforts to transform Aqa Muhammad Shah’s conquests into a coherent political entity by regularizing the relationship between Tehran and provincial elites. Ibrahim Khan would hold this post for more than two decades, until his death in 1826, during which time he was tasked with rebuilding and restoring Kirman as a prosperous territory.38 In doing so, he also successfully established himself and his family first as representatives of Qajar rule, and then as an integral part of the local elite. He was remembered by Kirmani historians for restoring and regularizing the provincial administration, subjugating the powerful tribal khans in Baluchistan to the person of the governor, and reviving commerce by securing transportation and trade routes.39 Over time, this political stability was matched by economic prosperity as well. By the 1820s, artisans and merchants began to make their way to Kirman from Fars and Khurasan and contributed in their own right to Kirman’s renewed prosperity.40 The most significant legacy of Ibrahim Khan’s governorship in Kirman was undoubtedly his campaign to rebuild and develop Kirman City after the devastating Qajar conquests. One European source suggests that the governor was permitted to appropriate Kirman’s tax revenues for the upkeep of his guard rather than dispatch it to Tehran.41 This would have amounted to a considerable sum,

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and it seems likely that these funds were applied at least in part to reconstruction. Ibrahim Khan commissioned the addition of a Citadel Gate to the reconstructed city walls, the Bagh-i Gulshan divan office on the citadel grounds, a large new congregational mosque, a bazar complex, and numerous water reservoirs and bathhouses.42 However, the centerpiece of the reconstructed Kirman City, built somewhat northwest of the pre–Qajar era town, was a cluster of buildings in the center known as the Ibrahimiyya Complex.43 Completed in 1814–15, this complex was centered on the Ibrahimiyya Madrasa, supported by a vaqf endowment which funneled in revenues from Ibrahimi landholdings, and included a mosque, bathhouse, and bazar (qaysariyya).44 His efforts to rebuild and bring prosperity to the city cemented the legacy of Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla for local historians, who placed him alongside the Safavid-era governor Ganj ʿAli Khan, as one of Kirman’s most significant figures in making the city so prosperous.45 The construction of a major center of religious learning was a conspicuous act of public piety, performed by a ruler for the benefit of the community and the promotion of the sharʿia. This complex quite literally inscribed the good name of the Ibrahimi into the physical structure of Kirman City. Ibrahim Khan’s popularity was even conceded in Pottinger’s disparaging remarks on the governor, whom he met in Kirman during his three-week stay in May 1810: In private life he is considered a humane mild man, and as a governor, very equitable and just. For a governor in Persia, perhaps he may be so, as in that country tyranny and extortion are so habitually the attendants of authority, that certain degrees of them are scarcely looked upon as evils.46 Most of Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla’s twenty-two sons, and an unrecorded number of daughters, set deep roots in Kirman following this urban development cum private estate building project. The Ibrahimis, as they were known, blurred the line between “Qajar elites” and “local elites.” The Ibrahimis were a branch of the Qajar royal family, as Ibrahim Khan was the brother of the late Aqa Muhammad Shah and the uncle of Fath ʿAli Shah. Yet the following generations appear as prestigious Kirmani landowners, administrators, and religious leaders. The Madrasa-yi Ibrahimiyya and the complex surrounding it held a central place in the family estate. The pious act of opening a place of Islamic learning was of course a prestigious act, but the family also funneled in enormous revenues through its vaqf endowments from their rural landholdings. These funds held much of the family’s landed properties together as part of the family estate, rather than dividing them into dozens of small units through inheritance rights. This unified estate, tied into an institution of Islamic learning, also provided material benefits through relatively secure stipendiary posts for leading members of the Ibrahimi household in Kirman City, opportunities for patronage and network building by controlling the vaqf expenditures.47 That the Ibrahimis had become “local,” rather than functioning as an arm of the Qajar state, is well illustrated by a revolt orchestrated by the head of the family

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in 1827. When Ibrahim Khan died in 1826, one of his sons, ʿAbbas Quli Mirza, who, unlike his elder brother Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan, was mothered by a Qajar princess, received the governorship of Kirman through his mother’s intercession.48 The following year, however, ʿAbbas Quli Mirza conspired with Muhammad Qasim Khan Damghani to gather a large backing from among Kirman’s elites and bring together a military force 20,000 men strong to lead a campaign ostensibly to put down a revolt by ʿAbd al-Riza Khan Yazdi.49 Once they reached Shams, the notables in his entourage, led by Mirza Husayn Vazir, son of Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi, determined the intentions of the campaign to be a revolt against Fath ʿAli Shah and disbanded the army in the middle of the night, abandoning ʿAbbas Quli Mirza and Muhammad Qasim Khan.50 The entire Ibrahimi household was thus placed under a cloud of suspicion and members of the family were not permitted to leave the city for some time without government approval. The Qajar prince Shujaʿ al-Saltana was subsequently sent by Fath ʿAli Shah to restore order. The elites of both Kirman and Yazd resisted the renewed attempts by the Qajars to assert their authority and Shujaʿ al-Saltana was eventually recalled in favor of the famed Crown Prince ʿAbbas Mirza, who arrived to personally reestablish Qajar power. Revolts by local notables were a common occurrence in Qajar Iran, in fact an integral part of the politics of empire, demonstrating the ability of local notables to enforce limits on Qajar authority and, by extension, their ability to renegotiate the relationship at will.

Shaykhi–mutasharʿi sectarianism An important part of the Ibrahimi story, which would come to define their relationship with other elites, was this family’s intimate relationship with a thriving “Kirmani” branch of Shaykhism. Shaykhism was a theosophical movement that coalesced around the teachings of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsaʾi (d. 1826) and his disciple Sayyid Kazim Rashti (d. 1844) in the early 19th century, and thus shares a common spiritual and intellectual lineage with the later Babi and Bahaʾi movements. In 1772–73, al-Ahsaʾi migrated from Bahrain to the ʿatabat and was attracted to usuli jurisprudence, which was returning to prominence in the shrine towns in the late 18th century. He received ijazas from many of the leading ʿulamaʾ of his time, earning him strong credentials as a mutasharʿi Shiʿi scholar. What distinguished al-Ahsaʾi from his peers was an attachment to Islamic mysticism, to the extent of claiming visionary experiences in which he achieved direct contact with the imams. This connection, he argued, allowed him to tap into a vast reservoir of intuitive knowledge and attain a privileged understanding of the imams’ teachings.51 Later in his life, al-Ahsaʾi was subjected to severe criticism by usuli scholars for these claims and was repeatedly denounced as an apostate. Al-Ahsaʾi came to Iran in 1806–07 and received patronage from members of the Qajar household, including Fath ʿAli Shah, the future shah Muhammad Mirza, and Kirman’s governor Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla.52 Having established this connection, several of al-Ahsaʾi’s disciples made their way to Ibrahim Khan’s revitalized Kirman in search of patronage and protection during the

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Wahhabi uprisings in the 1820s. The Qajar prince’s eldest son and heir to his estate, Muhammad Karim Khan had an encounter with one of these Shaykhi scholars that he credited with transforming his life, which he would devote to al-Ahsaʾi’s speculative philosophy.53 When al-Ahsaʾi died in 1826, a small but devoted following developed around his chief disciple Sayyid Kazim Rashti, which can be said to be the origins of Shaykhism as a school of religious thought. Rashti, like Ahsaʾi, adamantly denied that there was any such thing as a Shaykhi school, stressing that they differed with usuli jurisprudence not in core principles, but only in matters of subsidiary importance ( farʿ).54 Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla himself had a close relationship with both al-Ahsaʾi and Rashti, as both a patron and a devotee.55 Likewise, his son Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan, when he had completed his studies locally, became a disciple of Rashti and quickly established himself as one of his leading students, along with Sayyid Javad’s relative, the future “Bab,” ʿAli Muhammad Shirazi. After Rashti’s death in 1844, his disciples split, coalescing around several radically divergent interpretations of his teachings. Sayyid ʿAli Muhammad Shirazi, who preached a radical interpretation of Shaykh Ahsaʾi’s teachings, focused on the function of the “Perfect Shiʿa” as a living, breathing gate, or bab, through which he connected the community with the imams. As an intermediary between humanity and the imams, he claimed he was granted privileged access to divine knowledge and guidance.56 This was an extension of al-Ahsaʾi’s and Rashti’s own claims to visionary experiences and access to intuitive knowledge of the imam, for which they were also heavily criticized. Al-Ahsaʾi and Rashti both insinuated to their followers that they represented the figure of the Perfect Shiʿa, but never as explicitly as Sayyid ʿAli Muhammad Shirazi. In 1844, he took the pulpit and openly declared himself to be the Bab, or “gate” to divine knowledge, which raised considerable ire among the mutasharʿi ʿulamaʾ, leading to his public execution as an apostate in 1850. Following the revolt of his younger brother, ʿAbbas Quli Mirza, the Ibrahimi family were not allowed to travel outside of Kirman without explicit government consent. Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan decided to flee the city secretly in order to continue his studies in the ʿatabat with Sayyid Kazim Rashti.57 In his absence, his claims to administer the endowments of the Ibrahimiyya Madrasa were put in peril. In fact, Muhammad Karim Khan’s control over the entire Ibrahimi estate was soon challenged by one of Sayyid ʿAli Muhammad’s (the Bab) relatives, a man named Aqa Sayyid Javad Shirazi (d. 1287/1870–71). Attracted to the newly flourishing climate of religious learning in Kirman, he accepted an invitation from Kirman’s governor, Hulaku Mirza (the son of Shujaʿ al-Saltana) to come to the city in 1246/1830.58 Around the time of his arrival in Kirman, Shaykh Niʿmat Allah Bahrayni, the Imam Jumʿa, died, and Sayyid Javad was appointed to take his place.59 This provided Aqa Sayyid Javad an opportunity to assert his authority as the city’s leading religious authority, which he then attempted to parlay into control over the vast wealth and prestige of the Ibrahimi estate in Muhammad Karim Khan’s absence. He shrewdly attached himself to the Ibrahimi family by marrying a daughter of Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla and installed himself as the

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head of the Ibrahimiyya Madrasa along with a group of his loyal students, subsequently claiming control over its endowments.60 Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan was forced to return to Kirman to reassert himself as the head of the Ibrahimi household. The conflict between Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan and Sayyid Javad would center on the Ibrahimiyya Madrasa. It was not only a major endowed institution, control of which thus involved the control of vast financial resources, but also the Ibrahimi household’s chief statement of their cultural standing and charitable contributions to religious education. According to the Shaykhi account, Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan returned to Kirman shortly after Sayyid Javad’s arrival in the city, in 1830, to find the madrasa already occupied by Sayyid Javad’s students, who stubbornly refused to leave. The dispute erupted into a violent factional dispute, with Sayyid Javad’s students eventually being driven out forcibly by a group of lutis loyal to Muhammad Karim Khan.61 This was the first in a series of major outbursts of Shaykhi–mutasharʿi violence that would occur in Kirman in the Qajar period. In each case, political and economic issues related to family estates, rather than religious sensibilities, were the key factor. It was out of this context that a markedly more conservative branch of the Shaykhi movement developed around Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan and his disciples, closely connected with the legacy and the prestige of the Ibrahimi household. Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan interpreted Ahsaʿi’s doctrine of the Perfect Shiʿa and recourse to divine knowledge through direct communication with the imam as an advocation generally for a strong sociopolitical role for the ʿulamaʾ.62 Following the Bab’s radical declarations and subsequent execution, Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan then made explicit his rejection of the Bab’s claim to prophetic renewal. Thus while conducting a feud with one of the Bab’s relatives, he also drew an explicit distinction between the Bab’s challenge to the authority of the Shiʿi ʿulamaʾ and his own attempts to reconcile Shaykhi teachings with the majority usuli position, if only as a necessity for survival.63 The Kirmani branch of Shaykhism was therefore manifested as a conservative, and largely elite, cultural phenomenon strongly identified with the Ibrahimi household. After the execution of his cousin, the Bab, Sayyid Javad was rumored to be a Babi himself, which in most cases would have been met with severe consequences.64 Having been ousted from the Ibrahimiyya Madrasa in 1830, Sayyid Javad nonetheless remained a central figure in the mutasharʿi Shiʿi community in Kirman until his death in 1871.65 Apart from his role as Imam Jumʿa, Sayyid Javad, as well as his descendants, became associated with two other prominent local madrasas, the Madrasa-yi Quli Bik and the Madrasa-yi Muhammad.66 His status within the Shiʿi community in Kirman was perhaps the only thing that saved him from further persecution during the ensuing Babi witch hunt.

Patterns of landownership and rural administration As factional politics coalesced around prominent urban households like the Vaziris, Kalantaris, and Ibrahimis in Kirman City, their rivalries also extended

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into rural districts through their family networks and estates. While heads of these families resided in the city, it was common for many of their relatives to hold land, administrative positions, and elite cultural status in a particular set of rural districts as well. Several urban families carved out these types of enclaves, connected through family networks to the urban center and built around the wealth and status afforded by their family estates. The relationship between the urban household and its rural branches was reciprocal. To urban households, connections to landholdings were not only financially lucrative, but also afforded them prestige and standing. Elite status and landholding were intimately connected in the eyes of elites, as evidenced by the amount of detail on these arrangements in local histories and geographies. Rural households were able to draw upon the economic and sociocultural resources of the family collective, sharing a common identity within a status group as descendants of a prestigious eponym, and relatives of their powerful urban counterparts. Each of these family networks represented a classic Weberian model of a collective self-help group, with networks of social power that extended their influence into the hinterland. The shape of these rural enclaves had origins in the Zand period. According to Vaziri, in the 18th century, Karim Khan Zand divided Kirman into six districts, each placed under the authority of a member of the local elite.67 The administration of two particularly large sets of territories was granted to the most prominent urban elites of the time. Nearly the entire western portion of Kirman, including Shahrbabak, Sirjan, Iqtaʿ, Arzuya, Kushk, and Sughan, was granted to Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi, the ancestor of the Vaziri household.68 The other major division, including Kirman City and the districts of Rayin, Jiruft, Sarduya, and Rudbar, was granted to Mirza Husayn Khan, from a line of local sayyids (recognized descendants of the prophet Muhammad) in Jiruft.69 The descendants of both of these lines, the Vaziri and Mirza Husayn Khan households, respectively, passed on control of the landholdings and administration well into the Qajar period. However, their authority in these districts was based not on the initial grant of office by the Zand state, but on their prior local rooting as landowners in the core agricultural districts of these enclaves; for Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi, his landholdings in Sirjan; and for Mirza Husayn Khan, his landholdings in Jiruft, augmented by his recognition as a descendant of the prophet. The Kalantari household later carved out an enclave of landholdings in the rural hinterland to the northeast of the city in the district centered on Khabis and Gavk early in the 19th century, where they would act as representatives of the provincial governor, carrying out the responsibilities of tax collection as the local ʿamils or mubashirs.70 Three categories of landownership were recognized in the Qajar period, similar to those identified by Lambton for the Safavid period: arbabi (privately held), khalisa (crown lands), and vaqf (religious endowments). The most common classification of landholding were arbabi lands, those held by an absentee landlord (arbab) as private property (milk). Cultivation of these lands was accomplished through a cooperative agreement between the absentee landlord and the peasant laborers. The landowner normally provided all capital and material factors (land, water resources, and most or all of the seed), with the peasants providing the

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labor. At harvest, the produce was divided according to either a customary agreement or an annual contract drawn up or agreed upon orally between the landlord and the peasant laborers in which the landowner would take roughly 70–80% of the crop.71 Second were khalisa, or “crown lands,” owned by the state. These comprised, according to one estimate, between one-third and one-half of all land in the Qajar Empire by the second half of the 19th century, making the Qajar court by far the largest landholding entity in regions like Kirman.72 Khalisa lands were theoretically the property of the Shah, and their revenues were collected and distributed by the provincial divan. As Lambton notes, by the mid-19th century, the pretension that these lands belonged to the person of the Shah rather than the government divan had already begun to break down, and by later in the century they were treated as governmental properties.73 Khalisa lands were notoriously less productive than privately held lands, and early in the 19th century a sizable portion was rented out and managed by provincial elites and soldiers.74 An agent of the provincial government was placed in charge of overseeing khalisa lands in each district and acted in all other ways as a typical landlord, even receiving a share of the crop in lieu of salary. The government acted as the ultimate landlord and, according to one account, “two-tenths of all agricultural produce, or its value in money, is supposed to be the amount payable to the crown by the landholders. As a general rule, however, this was somewhat exceeded, and 25 per cent may be taken as the average assessment.”75 This is far lower than the estimates for landlords’ shares on arbabi lands, which amounted to roughly 70–80%. The state’s share was gathered at harvest and taken to government granaries along with the sums collected elsewhere through taxation. All dues were paid to the government in kind, usually wheat and barley. This was then stored in government granaries and used to pay salaries and supply the military.76 A third category of landholdings were vaqf lands, those bequeathed under the Islamic endowment institution to support charitable deeds or religious institutions. A privately held piece of land, once bequeathed as vaqf, became frozen (vaqf means literally to “stop”) and recognized as the inalienable property of God. Without discounting notions of piety, it is clear that many households established vaqf endowments with privately held property in part to circumvent the Islamic law of inheritance which tends to break up large estates among multiple heirs. In the logic of elite household competition, this would effectively break up the concentration of economic and sociocultural resources these elite households relied upon. Bequeathed properties were immune from laws of inheritance and, as pious foundations, were more secure from arbitrary confiscations. By establishing an overseer (mutavalli) within the family, they ensured that regular stipends were paid from the revenues of these properties while also committing resources to conspicuous acts of public piety like supporting religious education, buying food and clothing for pilgrims, and providing other basic social services. There were also opportunities for patronage in appointments attached to the endowed institutions, from hiring a preacher for the Friday Mosque, to custodians of shrines, to reciters of the Quran at madrasas. Those working on the social history of the

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Ottoman Empire in this period have noted that those households who controlled sizable endowments tended to enjoy greater stability and longevity than similar households without them.77 This was true not only for the financial stability such holdings provided, but for their role in establishing ties of patronage and reproducing the sociocultural prestige of the household for generation after generation. In surveying the social and political importance of landed properties in Qajar Kirman, it is critical to note that landownership and village administration often directly overlapped. This was in part an outgrowth of the administrative system in place under Qajar rule. The Qajar Empire administered Kirman as a province (ustan), divided into districts (buluk), each consisting of one or more large villages (qasba), along with the smaller villages or hamlets (dih) and agricultural settlements (mazraʿa) connected to them. The two basic functions of the provincial government, namely the collection of taxes and maintenance of order, were carried out by an ʿamil, appointed by the provincial governor for each district (buluk). Just as the central government maintained control over major cities and provincial centers through the cooperation of elite local households, provincial governors were likewise able to collect taxes and maintain order in their domain only with the aid of elite households with the sociocultural prestige and local know-how that made their administration possible, even within their modestly proscribed limits. These ʿummal (sing. ʿamil) were thus commonly drawn from the local landholding elite in each district. The authority of the ʿamil was based not on his position within a bureaucratic system of functionally differentiated offices, but through the personal authority of the individual appointee. He was not paid by the treasury; it was common practice to collect a sum on top of the amount due to the provincial government, a practice which was again repeated by the provincial government in its receipts to the central government, particularly after the sale of governorships became standard practice. In essence, the office and title of ʿamil amounted to an endorsement for an individual to exercise power as a proxy of the governor without delineating the roles or responsibilities of that official in abstraction. This is a reflection of the overall patrimonial structure of politics in the Qajar Empire, reliant on the personal authority of individual appointees rather than on the offices themselves. Prior to the spread of commercial agriculture in the 1840s and 1850s, the overall pattern of rural administration was for landholdings to be under the control of rural elite households residing in districts in which they held property and hereditary control over tax collection and administration, and often with only loose ties to the city. While urban households had each carved out a sphere of proprietary interests in the rural hinterland, there were many more rural households and tribal groups residing in these districts that dominated the bigger picture, particularly outside of the core agricultural zones of Rafsanjan and Sirjan. As many of our local sources from Qajar Kirman date from the 1870s and later, these households appear in these works as remnants of a not so distant past, before economic forces drew in urban households in greater force to consolidate their control of rural districts. The situation of the Rudbari khans is a prime example of the political arrangements between Qajar governors and rural and tribal groups in administering

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outlying districts. Nur al-Din Rudbari was one of the wealthiest men in Kirman in the mid-19th century, as head of a landholding family in Rudbar who came to the area from Khurasan in the last decades of Safavid rule. This family is said to have held the position of ʿamil of Rudbar for 150 years by the 1870s. Nur al-Din’s father, Amir Saʿid Khan, developed much of the land in Rudbar and Jiruft by early in the 19th century, matching administrative control with landownership.78 Captain Euan Smith of the Perso-Kalat Boundary Commission, who traveled through Kirman in 1872, visited Nur al-Din at Khanu and provides some commentary on the relationship of the Rudbaris with the governor of Kirman as an example of how rural districts were administered and taxed: The governorship has descended from father to son, in an unbroken line for more than four centuries [sic], and is in fact a small hereditary kingdom. The Governor of Karman, it is true, is the acknowledged superior, and receives tribute from the Governor of Khanu, but he would never dream of appointing any Governor, other than the acknowledged heir of the reigning family; and indeed were he to do so, his nominee would not be received.79 Another interesting aspect of the Rudbaris is what they tell us about the blurred lines between tribal-nomadic kinship groups (tavayif ) and sedentary, elite landholding households (also tavayif ) in rural settings. These are indeed very difficult to distinguish in contemporary Persian sources, suggesting that this is not such a useful way of conceptualizing and categorizing rural elites. “Nomadic” tribal chiefs like the Rudbaris often owned land, settled in villages and larger towns, and acted as tax collectors and administrators for the provincial government, maintaining kinship affiliations that were indistinguishable from those of other extended rural households. The crucial difference was the control of military resources, through which they remained in control of certain rural districts as tax collectors and military elites where provincial governors and urban landlords were unable or unwilling to challenge tribal influence, save for exceptional cases like the 1844 revolt of the Ismaʿili imam Aqa Khan Mahallati, with the support of the militarized ʿAtaʾ Allahi tribes.

The Mahallati revolt: networks of social power and the state As Qajar rule was established through the intermediacy of Kirman City’s leading Shaykhi and mutasharʿi households, two other closely intertwined socioreligious movements with broad rural support mounted a challenge to this new realignment of Kirmani politics: the Ismaʿili Shiʿis, whose imams had broad support among the ʿAtaʾ Allahi tribes in Kirman; and the Niʿmat-Allahi Sufi order, based in Mahan, which had developed an intimate relationship with Kirman’s Ismaʿili community. The origin of this relationship is obscure, but was surely aided by the prevalence of gnosticism and mystical contemplation in Ismaʿili teachings. There is evidence of the Ismaʿili imams’ connections to this Sufi tariqa in the first generation of Ismaʿilis residing in Kirman under the imam ʿAtaʾ Allah Nizar

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(d. 1628). Nizar’s tribal following, the ʿAtaʾ Allahis, remained the tribal military arm of the Ismaʿili imamate into the Qajar period and were, too, initiates into the Niʿmat Allahi tariqa. There is no direct evidence of the Ismaʿili imams’ initiation into the order themselves from this point forward until the late 18th century, when both Abu al-Hasan Biglirbigi and Mirza Sadiq, the Ismaʿili imams governing Kirman during the Zand-Qajar conflicts, were initiated into the tariqa as disciples of Shaykh Muzaffar ʿAli Shah.80 These ties with the Niʿmat Allahi order only reinforced the animosity of the mutasharʿi Shiʿi community for the Ismaʿilis and their pretense to the imamate. The mutasharʿi ʿulamaʾ were responsible for repeated attacks on influential members of both the Ismaʿili and Niʿmat Allahi communities in the Zand and Qajar periods. This harassment reached to the very leadership of these communities, including prominent shaykhs in the Niʿmat Allahi order like Mushtaq ʿAli Shah and Muzaffar ʿAli Shah. In 1815, the imam Shah Khalil relocated to Kuhak, near Yazd, to escape persecution from the local ʿulamaʾ. Kuhak proved no safer. In 1817, he became entangled in a conflict between the Ismaʿili community and a group of shopkeepers. A group took refuge in his home and the imam was killed by a mob in the ensuing violence. Much of his household’s property was in turn confiscated by the authorities.81 As unlikely as it may seem, the murder of Shah Khalil led to a reversal of fortunes for the Ismaʿili imams. Following the murder of Shah Khalil, his mother sought recourse with the Qajar court on behalf of the household. Fath ʿAli Shah, who maintained relations with a wide variety of religious figures, was receptive. He not only punished the instigators of the violence against the Ismaʿili imams but also restored much of the family’s estate in Mahallat. Shah Khalil’s son, Mulla Hasan, was granted the title of Aqa Khan by the Qajar court, a title which has been passed down through the line of imams to the present day. To cement their relationship with the Qajars, Aqa Khan married a daughter of Fath ʿAli Shah, with the Shah even paying 23,000 tumans to cover wedding expenses. Aqa Khan and his household then returned to Mahallat and began to build up a large military force around themselves from among their loyal tribal following.82 By the time Fath ʿAli Shah died in 1834, Aqa Khan and his military supporters had established themselves as a major force in southern Iran. Fath ʿAli Shah was succeeded as head of the Qajar state by his grandson Muhammad Shah, who was noted for his attachment to Sufism, and was in fact himself an initiate into the Niʿmat Allahi tariqa centered in Mahan, which maintained a strong relationship with the Ismaʿili community. During Muhammad Shah’s reign (1834–1848), he funded major repairs to the Shah Niʿmat Allah Vali shrine at Mahan and established an enormous vaqf for its future maintenance.83 In 1834, during the interregnum, often a time of grave instability, Aqa Khan threw his full support behind Muhammad Shah and used his tribal military following to help maintain order and secure the new Shah’s passage to Tehran.84 Muhammad Shah subsequently granted the governorship of Kirman to Aqa Khan in 1836, restoring the province to the household which had long ruled there prior to the rise of the Qajars.85 Upon taking up the governorship, Aqa Khan

Kirman and the Qajar Empire

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Mahallati set himself to consolidating his authority in the province. He began by confronting the relatives of the previous governor, Qajar prince Shujaʿ al-Saltana. The Qajar prince had left two sons, Hulaku Mirza and Furuq al-Dawla, to govern Kirman as he went to Shiraz to help support the claim of Husayn ʿAli Mirza Farman Farma for the throne.86 On the arrival of Aqa Khan with a large military force, the two brothers abandoned Kirman and fled to the Citadel of Bam, and from there to Qandahar. Aqa Khan’s show of force was funded entirely through his own personal wealth. He even refused funds from the Qajar treasury.87 The Qajars were notoriously suspicious of anyone building an independent military following outside of the framework of Qajar patrimonialism and their networks of power.88 Aqa Khan was thus watched closely by the Qajar court after this incident. Perhaps sensing his fall from favor, Aqa Khan declined to send the province’s taxes in to the treasury that year, instead spending much of it locally on the poor and on patronage for his supporters.89 Aqa Khan was promptly dismissed and a force was sent out under Suhrab Khan to recover tax revenues and install Qajar prince Firuz Mirza Farman Farma as his replacement.90 His removal was also, it appears, linked to the internal dynamics of the Niʿmat Allahi order. Upon the ascension of Muhammad Shah, who was himself an initiate into the tariqa, he appointed as his prime minister (Sadr ʿAzam) Mirza Aqasi, a major player in the Niʿmat Allahi tariqa who was actively seeking recognition as the head of the order. His rival, Mast ʿAli Shah, counted Aqa Khan Mahallati among his disciples, which may have contributed to animosities between the two men and raised suspicions over Mahallati’s intentions in building a private military following.91 As the new Qajar appointee approached, Aqa Khan Mahallati resisted, fleeing to Bam and, like Lutf ʿAli Khan Zand and the sons of Shujaʿ al-Sultana before him, taking shelter in the citadel. After a fourteen-month siege, Aqa Khan was granted safe passage in 1838 and made his way to Tehran.92 After being pardoned by Muhammad Shah, he was forced to retire to his estate at Mahallat. He continued to command considerable financial and military support, however, and under the pretense of going on pilgrimage, was granted leave from Mahallat in 1255/1839–40 and again revolted.93 He forged letters of appointment from the Qajars and reclaimed the government of Kirman. As it took more than a month to make the journey to Tehran to verify the appointment, this provided him ample time to establish himself in power.94 He quickly developed a very strong following among the local population, even when it was clear his appointment letters were forgeries. However, upon the arrival of a large Qajar force, most of Aqa Khan’s supporters deserted him and he eventually made his way via Bam to India, where the Ismaʿili imamate has continued under his descendants to this day.95 Hamid Algar suggests several possible interpretations for the local support behind the Mahallati revolt. He rightly rejects the notion that this should be considered an Ismaʿili revolt, that is, an attempt to establish an Ismaʿili state or clash with the Qajars in the name of Ismaʿili Islam. Rather, Mahallati’s position as the Ismaʿili imam is viewed by Algar as something secondary to his standing as a respected local notable. Algar suggests, curiously, that Aqa Khan may have been seeking British patronage and was revolting directly in accord with British

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strategic thinking.96 Nasrollah Pourjavady, in his analysis of the ties between the Ismaʿili and Niʿmat Allahi communities, suggests that the entire episode was a result of the competition between Mirza Aqasi and Mast ʿAli Shah, with Aqa Khan’s support for the latter leading to his fall from favor and subsequent revolt.97 As for the element of local support, Algar suggests “the massacre enacted at Kirman by Agha Muhammad Khan cannot have been lightly forgotten, and testimony to the continued unpopularity of Qajar rule in the area is supplied by a number of uprisings, one of which coincided with the second stage of the Agha Khan’s revolt,” while his tribal support simply speaks to “traditional nomad hostility to central power.”98 However, when looking at the makeup of Aqa Khan’s non-Ismaʿili supporters from among the urban elites, another striking element of the revolt is apparent. According to the Qajar chronicler Mirza Taqi Sipihr, the author of Nasikh al-Tavarikh, local support for the Mahallati revolt was tied to two Kirmani households in particular, the Vaziris and Kalantaris.99 These two households were among the leading factional competitors of the Qajar princely household of the Ibrahimis. The Ibrahimis’ attempts to establish themselves as not simply representatives of the central government, but as a firmly rooted local household with claims to cultural prestige, tied to the Ibrahimiyya Complex in the newly reconstructed Kirman City, command of important stipendiary posts, and, increasingly, wealth from landed properties throughout the province, directly threatened the interests of the Vaziris and Kalantaris as heads of the mutasharʿi establishment. Thus emerging household factionalism along an Ibrahimi/Shaykhi–mutasharʿi axis can be said to have played a role in the local support for the Mahallati revolt alongside the myriad other factors laid out by Algar and Pourjavady/Wilson. In turn, the removal of the Ismaʿili–Niʿmat Allahi element from the center of local elite factionalism opened the door to a sharper factional division between the Shaykhi and mutasharʿi communities in the decades that followed.

Conclusion From the moment the dust settled after the conquest of Kirman, a realignment of social forces began in the region, built around the networks and estates of prominent Zand-era elite households and newcomers tied to the Qajar Empire. The first generations of the Ibrahimi, Vaziri, and Kalantari families under Qajar rule operated in an atmosphere of near total autonomy from the central government. Beyond Kirman City, the familial networks centered on these urban households were joined by a large number of rural landowners residing in larger villages in provincial districts. These elites owned much of the land in the province, maintained control over the resources of local religious institutions, and controlled the sparse provincial administrative apparatus. As a prestigious status group within the normative traditions of social power, these families seized the role of intermediaries between the local community and the wider world, in which the Qajars were but one of several external poles of power.

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At the same time, factionalism between urban households and their familial networks was fierce. The activities of local elites were conditioned by these factional rivalries and played out in competition over the development and composition of household estates. The Ibrahimis’ association with Kirmani Shaykhism and their possession of a new complex of Shaykhi religious institutions in the heart of the newly rebuilt city that rivaled the leading mutasharʿi mosques and madrasas fueled a factional conflict between these families and their networks of supporters that was often manifested as religious “sectarianism.” At its core, the Shaykhi–mutasharʿi rivalry was always about competition between household networks over the objects of social power among their leading members. The removal of the Ismaʿili imamate from Kirman after an ill-fated revolt by its leadership at a low tide in Qajar power was not only shaped by this growing Shaykhi–mutasharʿi factionalism, it cleared space for its acceleration as the 19th century progressed.

Notes 1 Vaziri, Tarikh, 738–40; Shaykh Yahya similarly notes a large migration from the city: Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 38–40. 2 Vaziri, Tarikh, 738–40. 3 Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 41–42. 4 Henry Pottinger, Travels in Beloochistan and Sinde; Accompanied by a Geographical and Historical Account of those Countries (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), 202. 5 Martin, Qajar Pact. 6 On the Qajar administrative system, see Sheikholeslami, Structure of Central Authority. 7 “Kirman” derives from the name of the ancient province of Karmania, whose etymology is a matter of controversy. Rüdiger Schmitt, “Carmania,” Encyclopaedia Iranica IV, no. 7. Geographers distinguish the city of Kirman from Kirman province as a whole by referring to it as either Kirman City (shahr-i Kirman), Kirman Dar al-Iman (Kirman the Abode of Faith), or the local name Gavashir, which refers to a type of turquoise stone found abundantly in the region. “Kirman,” Encyclopaedia of Islam. 8 Browne, Year Amongst the Persians, 468–69. 9 Khanikoff, Memoire, 186. 10 In addition to a trove of archival documents from the consulate, Sykes wrote a detailed memoir of his time in Kirman in Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles. 11 Walcher, Shadow of the King. 12 Iran’s wind towers were submitted in 2014 for consideration as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. “Irsal-i Parvanda-yi Badgirha bi UNESCO,” Islamic Republic News Agency, 8 April 2014. 13 Oliver B. St. John, “Narrative of a Journey through Baluchistan and Southern Persia, 1872,” in Eastern Persia: An Account of the Journeys of the Persian Boundary Commission, 1870–71–72, ed. F. J. Goldsmid (London: Macmillan and Co., 1876), 93. 14 Preece, “Report of a Journey” (27 Feb 1894), 27. 15 Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles, 194. 16 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 27–33. 17 Lisa Golombek, “The ‘Citadel, Town, Suburbs’ Model and Medieval Kirman,” in The City in the Islamic World, ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Renata Holod, Antillio Petruccioli, and André Raymond (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2008). 18 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 40–41.

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19 “These underground adits, hand-made and particularly Persian, are a way of bringing water to the surface in a desert area. Essentially, each is a well lying on its side. A vertical arrangement means that someone or something has to pull any water to the surface, but if the shaft is built horizontally there is no need for further work by anyone or anything. This means the well-mouth has to be at a lower point than the well-head; but in Persia, so we learned, this is feasible almost everywhere if sufficiently big distances are planned. There may be twenty-five miles or so between a water-bearing area and the convenient lower region where the tapped resource will flow to the surface. There may also be 300 feet or more between that seepage area and the land above it.” Anthony Smith, A Persian Quarter Century (London: Hodder and Staughton, 1979), 24. 20 Henry Pottinger, Travels in Beloochistan and Sinde; Accompanied by a Geographical and Historical Account of those Countries . . . (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1816), 220. 21 Paul Ward English, City and Village in Iran: Settlement and Economy in the Kirman Basin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1966). 22 Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957). See also Robert Joseph Dillon, “Carpet Capitalism and Craft Involution in Kirman, Iran: A Study in Economic Anthropology” (thesis, Columbia University, 1976). 23 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 118–19. 24 Ibid., 145. 25 Ibid., 157. 26 Georg Stöber, “The Nomads of Kerman: On the Economy of Nomadism,” in The Nomadic Peoples of Iran, ed. Richard Tapper and Jon Thompson (London: Azimuth, 2001), 252–59. 27 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 146. 28 Markovits, Global World of Indian Merchants. 29 Khanikoff, Memoire, 197. 30 Abrahamian, “Oriental Despotism,” 9. 31 Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables.” Boaz Shoshan demonstrated that this system was not particular to the Ottomans, but was rather a “structural, long-term feature of the political domain in the Middle East, as well as other Islamic regions.” Shoshan, “The ‘Politics of Notables’ in Medieval Islam.” 32 Martin, Qajar Pact. 33 Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 47. 34 Vaziri, Tarikh, 736–7. 35 On the office of kalantar, see Willem M. Floor, “The Office of Kalantar in Qajar Persia,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 14 (1971). 36 Ibid., 65–66. 37 Ibid., 68. 38 Bastani-Parizi suggests, though without reference, that one of Fath ʿAli Shah’s wives, who was a native of Kirman, urged him to turn his attentions to her homeland and was ultimately behind the effort to rebuild Kirman. Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 12. 39 Vaziri, Tarikh, 758–62. 40 Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 54–55. 41 Pottinger, Travels, 226–27. 42 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 28–31, 36–37; Tarikh, 759–62. 43 Jughrafiya, 30. See also Golombek, “The ‘Citadel, Town, Suburbs’ Model and Medieval Kirman.” 44 Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 52. 45 Ibid. 46 Pottinger, Travels, 209. 47 Denis Hermann and Omid Rezai, “Le Rôle du Vaqf dans la Formation de la Communauté Shaykhi Kermani à l’Époque Qajar (1259–1324/1843–1906),” Studia Iranica 36, no. 1 (2007).

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48 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 55. Tarikh, 764. 49 Contemporary Qajar chronicles as well as Vaziri and Shaykh Yahya all put the blame for this incident on Muhammad Qasim Khan and portray ʿAbbas Quli Mirza as an impressionable youth that he led astray. Vaziri suggests that his followers took advantage of the fact that he was a terrible drunk to manipulate him: “Muhammad Qasim Khan Damaqani and the other agents of the city and districts of Kirman and elsewhere, who were in his military retinue, presented themselves day and night at ʿAbbas Quli Mirza’s tent and each gave long, flattering speeches, and at night, when he took up the wine goblet and marijuana he would bestow upon the present amirs the governance of a province, command of an army, head of a ministry, and other government posts.” Tarikh, 764–67. 50 Ibid., 767–68. 51 Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent, 38. 52 Denis MacEion, “Shaykhiyya,” Encyclopaedia of Islam. 53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Niʿmat Allah Rizavi, Tadhkirat al-Awliya fi Sharh Ahwal . . . Muhammad Karim Khan al-Kirmani (Bombay1895). 56 Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent. 57 Rizavi, Tadhkirat, 67. 58 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 49–50. Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 67–68. 59 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 49. 60 Rizavi, Tadhkirat, 72–73. 61 Ibid. 62 Denis MacEion, “Early Shaykhi Reactions to the Bab and His Claims,” in Studies in Bábí and Baháí History, ed. Moojan Momen and H. M. Balyuzi (Los Angeles: Kalimát Press, 1982). 63 Ibid. 64 H. M. Balyuzi, The Bab: the Herald of the Day of Days (Oxford: G. Ronald, 1973), 32–33. 65 Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 115. Abbas Amanat mistakenly recorded his death occurring in 1848 in Amanat, “In Between the Madrasa and the Marketplace: The Designation of Clerical Leadership in Modern Shiʿism,” in Authority and Political Culture in Shiʿism, ed. Said Amir Arjomand (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988). 66 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 31. 67 Ibid., 68–69. 68 Ibid., 58, 68. 69 Ibid., 68–69. 70 Ibid., 64. 71 Precise information on crop sharing agreements from the Qajar era are not available. In his fieldwork in Kirman in the 1960s, Paul Ward English reports that a long-standing 70% share for the landowner remained standard at that time, though it is unclear that this was true for the Qajar period. English, City and Village. Willem Floor estimates an 80% share for landlords in the Qajar period in Floor, Agriculture in Qajar Iran. The consensus is that the peasants received but a small share of the produce from the land they worked, with the majority making its way into the hands of elite households in larger villages and urban centers. 72 Edward B. Eastwick, “Report by Mr. Eastwick, Her Majesty’s Secretary of Legation” (5 July 1861) in Reports by Her Majesty’s Secretaries of Embassy and Legation, on the Manufactures, Commerce, &c., of the Countries in which they Reside, no 5 [2960] (Cambridge, UK: Chadwyck-Healey, 2005), 70. 73 Ann K. S. Lambton, “Khalisa,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam. 74 Floor, Agriculture in Qajar Iran, 72. 75 Ronald F. Thomson, “Report by Mr. Thomson, Her Majesty’s Secretary of Legation, on the Population, Revenue, Military Force, and Trade of Persia” (20 April 1868) in

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76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99

Kirman and the politics of empire House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports by Her Majesty’s Secretaries of Embassy and Legation, on the Manufactures, Commerce, &c., of the Countries in which they Reside [3954-I-IV] (Cambridge, UK: Chadwyck-Healey, 2005), 252. Ann K. S. Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia: A Study of Land Tenure and Land Revenue Administration (New York: Oxford University Presss, 1953), 152. Peter Sluglett, The Urban Social History of the Middle East, 1750–1950 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), 27. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 126. C. B. Euan Smith, “The Perso-Afghan Mission,” in Eastern Persia: An Account of the Journeys of the Persian Boundary Commission, 1870–71–72, ed. F. J. Goldsmid (London: Macmillan and Co., 1876), 234–35. Nasrollah Pourjavady and Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Ismaʿilis and Niʿmatullahis,” Studia Islamica, no. 41 (1975). Hamid Algar, “The Revolt of Agha Khan Mahallati and the Transference of the Ismaʿili Imamate to India,” Studia Islamica, no. 29 (1969): 62. Ibid., 61–62. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 83. Pourjavady and Wilson, “Ismaʿilis and Niʿmatullahis,” 126. Vaziri, Tarikh, 771–72. Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 69–71. Algar, “Revolt of Agha Khan,” 63–64. The classic example of this is the Zill al-Sultan, governor of Isfahan, who was stripped of his military support and nearly all of his large enclave of governorships in southern Iran in 1888. Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 73. Algar was relying on the Ismaʿili account when suggesting that tax arrears were paid to the state following the conflict with Hulaku Mirza and Furuq al-Dawla. Algar, “Revolt of Agha Khan,” 64. Algar, “Revolt of Agha Khan,” 65. Nasrollah Pourjavady and Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Ismaʿilis and Niʿmatullahis,” ibid., no. 41 (1975): 128–29. Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 74, 77. Ibid., 78–79. Vaziri, Tarikh, 782–83. Algar, “Revolt of Agha Khan.” Ibid. Nasrollah Pourjavady and Peter Lamborn Wilson, “Ismaʿilis and Niʿmatullahis,” ibid., no. 41 (1975). Hamid Algar, “The Revolt of Agha Khan Mahallati and the Transference of the Ismaʿili Imamate to India,” ibid., no. 29 (1969): 72. Muhammad Taqi Sipihr and Jamshid Kiyanfar, Nasikh al-Tavarikh: Tarikh-i Qajariyya (Tehran: Intisharat-i Asatir, 1998), 750.

2

Local historiography and the politics of the Great Game

I can claim, without fear of contradiction, that in the present generation no Englishman, and indeed no European, has travelled more extensively in Eastern and Southern Persia than myself, while my official position has given me exceptional opportunities, such as are rarely if ever enjoyed by unofficial travelers, of meeting the better classes of natives, and thereby of obtaining accurate information. I have taken the deepest interest in the geography and history of this little known country, and have made a special study of the famous journeys of Alexander the Great and Marco Polo. Percy Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles in Persia; or Eight Years in Iran (1902)

By 1848, when Nasir al-Din Shah ascended the throne, the Qajar Empire had established a system of imperial control in Kirman predicated on a negotiation of power with prominent local households and diffused through their networks of influence and prestige. Qajar control over outlying regions like Kirman was anything but entrenched and systematic. As Great Britain and Russia began steadily advancing their interests in the Qajar Empire and Central Asia in the “Great Game,” Nasir al-Din and his political advisers responded with a series of piecemeal reforms, concessionary agreements, and balance-of-power tactics to maintain control over the empire’s frontiers.1 These strategies are widely considered by historians to have been spectacular failures, given the limited control exercised by the Qajar court and Nasir al-Din’s lack of political will to see them through.2 Despite the Qajars’ active participation in the politics of the Great Game, both within and beyond its frontiers, Great Britain and Russia gradually chipped away at Qajar imperial possessions through boundary commissions and wartime treaty arrangements. Despite their apparent ineffectiveness, Nasir al-Din’s half steps toward centralization and reform contributed to the resurgence of local historical and geographical writing throughout the Qajar Empire. Reform was an expensive proposition, and one that required building a greater base of knowledge on the vast and diverse lands and peoples under Qajar rule, as well as their taxable commodities and activities. The Qajars began playing their own version of the Great Game in the late 19th century, not only along the northern and eastern frontiers with Russia and the Central Asian khanates, but in contested spaces within their own domain

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as well.3 With the assumption in most 20th and 21st century historiography that Qajar-held territories like Kirman were an integral part of “Iran” as a naturally existing entity, a nation-state in its infancy, it is often forgotten that such areas were not only contested, but also nearly as remote and obscure to the Qajar court as they were to British and Russian administrators. As discussed in the previous chapter, maintaining political control of a region like Kirman, removed as it was from the center of power in Tehran, required access to local families who could provide not only political support, but also a base of practical local knowledge and connections to the Qajars as intermediaries. Within the very local nature of imperialism in 19th century Iran, provincial elites, or as Sykes put it, “the better classes of natives,”4 became invaluable partners in these imperial projects.5 From the time of Nasir al-Din Shah’s ascension to power in 1848, the Qajar quest for knowledge became increasingly systematic. After producing a series of court travelogues, recording details of the lands and peoples under Qajar rule, Nasir al-Din Shah commissioned a monumental geographical dictionary of towns and villages in Iran, the Mirʾat al-Buldan, or “Mirror of the Lands.”6 The compilation of this sort of knowledge required tapping into local sources of information, in this case through a questionnaire sent to various provincial administrations. Although the Mirʾat al-Buldan project was abandoned after only four volumes, the efforts of local elites to research and collect information lives on in the great proliferation of local histories and geographies that appeared in the 1870s and 1880s. These were not simply the creation of Qajar politics, but part of a tradition of local historiography on the Iranian plateau since the Saljuq period (945–1055). These local histories and geographies were clearly hybrid texts, in which the catalyst of the Qajar quest for knowledge led to projects drawing on past historiographical traditions, and both instrumental and literary in their approach. In the context of this failed Mirʾat al-Buldan project, a local notable named Ahmad ʿAli Khan of the Vaziri family compiled a monumental work on Kirman’s history, his Tarikh-i Kirman [History of Kirman], including a lengthy geographical introduction that was edited and published separately in the 20th century by Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani-Parizi (another figure in a long line of local historians) as Jughrafiya-yi Kirman [Geography of Kirman]. Vaziri was informed by the rich tradition of local historiography in Kirman in the composition of these works, blending elements of the instrumental approach favored by the Qajar state building project with the literary form of works like the Iqd al-ʿUla and Tarikh-i Gavurdiyya. This curious hybridity lends us a window into the social, political, and economic transformations of the late Qajar period in Kirman through the eyes of a prominent member of the local elite. This chapter will consider Vaziri’s text through the changing dynamics of Kirman’s political interaction with the outside world. The curious life of his History/ Geography of his community, from its commission and production to its use within Qajar and British imperial projects, stood at the intersection of empirebuilding projects and literary production, and allows us to properly contextualize this important source for the history of Kirman. As Qajar methods of governance under Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96) emphasized access to the knowledge of

Local historiography and the Great Game 51

Figure 2.1 Sketch of southern Persia

provincial elites like Vaziri, this text is an expression of the central role played by the core of elite Kirmani families in mediating, adapting, and at times contesting the exercise of power by outside parties. The texts produced by 19th century Kirmani elites about the world around them remain our most detailed and systematic sources for social and economic conditions, including the study of household estate building and elite factionalism as mediating influences on reshaping Qajar Kirman. Works by participants in these processes, like Vaziri and his local commentators, are anything but neutral and objective. It is of course necessary to outline not just the conditions under which local geographical and historical writings appeared, but the integral role of such texts as interactive players in this story, produced and utilized in the context of local contests for prestige and authority and in the midst of competing imperial projects in late 19th century Kirman.

The quest for knowledge in the Great Game One of the common lenses used for the study of 19th century Iran and Central Asia is that of the Anglo-Russian competition for empire in the so-called Great Game. Popularized by a series of works by Edward Ingram and Peter Hopkirk detailing the exploits of British and Russian operatives, this approach tends to objectify Iran and Central Asia as the playthings of European imperialism. A recent work by Antony Wynn, for instance, entitled Persia in the Great Game, is in fact a biography of Kirman’s first consul, Percy Sykes, while “Persia” denotes simply the sphere of his operations as an agent of European imperialism.7 These types of works overlook the very real, if ultimately unrealized, ambitions of the Qajars in extending their control into the Turkic khanates beyond their eastern frontiers and

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maintaining a hold on territories under their existing imperial structure through local intermediaries. In this way, the Qajars were involved in playing their own version of the Great Game even within their own imperial domain. One complaint common among British, Russian, and Qajar administrators was the great difficulty involved in gathering information, a critical component in the strategic planning involved in the contest to expand and maintain commercial networks and spheres of influence. Geography presented special challenges to the flow of information. Given the vastness of the Qajar Empire and the difficulty of the climate and terrain, it could take months for information to travel between Tehran and the southern provinces. A telegraphic service was in place relatively early in Iran, with the first connection between Tehran and Tabriz established in 1859 – but it took a bit longer to connect outlying provinces to the system.8 Kirman was only linked up to the telegraphic network in 1879.9 European diplomats tended to blame the Qajars for communication and infrastructural problems. For instance, in the 1870s, just as Vaziri was writing his History and Geography of the province, Count Dubsky arrived as the first Austro-Hungarian ambassador to Qajar Iran. He complained bitterly in his correspondence with Vienna about the communication and intelligence difficulties he encountered in his first few months. “Nothing,” he said, “could better describe the deplorable disorganization of all branches of the Persian administration than the absolute lack of regular and direct communication between the provinces and the capital.”10 The problem was only compounded when trying to gather information on the steady encroachment of the Russian Empire on the khanates of Central Asia, which the AustroHungarians were keen to follow. If it is already not easy to keep aware here of the actual situation of the provinces, it is almost impossible to gather in Tehran accurate information on events that may occur in neighboring countries. Indeed the borders of Persia, especially those in the East, are virtually marked by a wide strip of land occupied by half-wild tribes, recognizing the authority of no one, and dealing with any stranger as an enemy, intercepting this way entirely any direct communication with the outside.11 By the 1870s, the British and Russian Empires already had several decades of experience in gathering information and procuring contacts in the Qajar Empire through their own networks, but the difficulties of gathering reliable intelligence remained a common complaint for them as well. This was particularly true of events in the south and southeast, as their respective consular networks would not reach Kirman for a further two decades. It is often forgotten that the Qajars suffered from the same difficulties as these European diplomats in keeping tabs on their vast territorial holdings, many of which, like Kirman, were remote, lightly integrated into the imperial administration, and not terribly well known to the court. In the 1860s, Nasir al-Din Shah began compiling detailed court travelogues when making official visits throughout the empire as official records surveying taxable properties, communities, and

Local historiography and the Great Game 53 activities, as well as details on powerful families in each settlement.12 After a number of such works were completed, a more systematic attempt was made in the late 1860s to compile this information into a voluminous geographical dictionary of Iranian towns and villages in the ambitious Mirʾat al-Buldan project, the “Mirror of the Lands,” under the direction of Muhammad Hasan Khan ʿItimad al-Saltana. Only four volumes of this ambitious work were actually produced before the project was abandoned, with two volumes (I and IV) covering the letters alif to jim, and the other two (II and III) devolving into chronicles glorifying the reign of Nasir al-Din Shah.13 With the abandonment of the Mirʾat al-Buldan project, each work seems to have taken on a life of its own, blending elements of the grand tradition of local historical writing with the instrumental approach suggested by the questionnaire. To attempt a gazetteer on the scale of the Mirʾat al-Buldan project, the Qajars had to rely on their local intermediaries possessing knowledge and connections. Accompanying the abortive Mirʾat al-Buldan, we find a striking resurgence in local historiographical and geographical writing throughout Iran, with works appearing in in Kashan (1871), Kirman (1874), Isfahan (1877), Fars (1883), and Tabriz (1884), with remarkable similarities in their form and content. The authors of these geographies were frequently members of those elite families, playing the role of elite local intermediary in the context of the very modern project of imperial intelligence gathering.14 As C. A. Storey noted, the earliest of these, Miʿrat al-Qasan, was composed in response to a questionnaire from the court requesting information on towns and villages in Kashan.15 This questionnaire was partially preserved in the text, which is composed in a question and answer format in six sections covering (1) physical geography, (2) settlement patterns, (3) flora and fauna, (4) local notables, (5) government, and (6) religious sites and other points of interest.16 This question and answer format appears only in the Miʿrat al-Qasan, but a similar form and scope is found in other local historical and geographical works of this era. While the Miʿrat al-Qasan is concerned with geography and society in Kashan and its broader hinterland, the Jughrafiya-yi Isfahan focuses on similar criteria but only within the city of Isfahan and its immediate surroundings.17 Its extensive coverage of the structure and layout of Isfahan’s grand bazar is particularly valuable. Others, like the Farsnama-yi Nasiri and the Tarikh va Jughrafiya-yi Tabriz expand into local histories, drawing from existing local historical and geographical literature, while simultaneously compiling a gazette of empirical knowledge on urban centers, villages, rural districts, pastoral-nomadic groups, and uninhabited deserts and mountainous areas.18 Together, these works represent a well-defined subgenre within the Persianate tradition of historical and geographical literature. They are hybrid literary works, combining the very modern imperial project of collecting information on local communities with the sensibilities of the local historian. These texts both construct and reflect the unique identities, histories, and cultures of each region through the intersection of human activity and physical environment. The Tarikh-i Kirman and its geographical preface, which are the major sources for the

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later Qajar period, require some consideration and context before they are applied to the project of analyzing estate building, factionalism, and the global networks of elite families in Qajar Kirman.

Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri-Kirmani and his works In Kirman, our local interlocutor was Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri-Kirmani, the great grandson of Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi, who had aided the Qajars in their conquest of the city back in 1794.19 Little is known about Vaziri beyond the precious little he tells us about himself and his family in his works. Throughout his passages on his family’s history, Vaziri attempts to portray them as a group that was intimately connected with the historical and spiritual essence of the community, and even the physical structure of the city itself, as an integral part of Kirman’s elite. This corresponds closely to the central norms he uses as a frame for discussing elites and elite status throughout the rest of the text, in which landowning, control over religious institutions, and the holding of administrative posts were all key features. Vaziri says that his family had deep historical roots in Kirman as descendants of Amir Baraq Hajib, a 13th century Qara Khitai ruler of Kirman. However, he emphasizes the strong connections between his family and the Qajars, in particular. This is constructed through the likely embellished story of Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi’s stand against the Zand ruler, which appears in both the Tarikh-i Kirman and the biographical entries in its geographical introduction.20 He goes on to relate the good works of his grandfather, the Vaziri eponym Mirza Husayn Vazir, who ran the local divan under his brother, Aqa Muhammad Taqi, who served as the first Qajar governor of Kirman. These two are credited with the first steps towards establishing Qajar rule in Kirman, as loyal servants of the Qajar state. Mirza Husayn Vazir and his brother are also noted for constructing important spiritual sites in the city prior to, and during, the rule of the more assertive reconstruction efforts of Qajar prince-governor Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla discussed in the previous chapter. He notes especially the grand takiyya Mirza Husayn Vazir built in Kirman City, which still stood in his day as a major spiritual and educational center. Through these narratives, he idealizes his family’s place in the history of the city, its physical structure, and even its spiritual life. In the 1870s, at the time Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri was writing his local history, the Vaziri household remained one of the leading landowning and administrative families in Kirman. According to Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani-Parizi, Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri did not himself hold a government office or administer landholdings, but was rather afforded a government stipend as a member of the Vaziri family, which freed him to spend time on his scholarship on local history.21 It is clear in his writing that Vaziri was well read, and in particular had great pride in Kirman’s local historiographical tradition, citing frequently Afzal al-Din’s Saljuq-era history of Kirman, ʿIqd al-ʿUla and the now lost Bamnama.22 He also gives critical commentary throughout his writings on Qajar chronicle works, the writings of European historians like John Malcolm, and the writings of past Persianate historians, lexicographers, and geographers, while sprinkling in the

Local historiography and the Great Game 55 suitable quantity of verse expected of any self-respecting Persian gentleman. He is frequently critical, too, of those who pretend towards knowledge, particularly those casually using foreign scientific terms they do not understand. For instance, even a member of the ʿulamaʾ, who asserted at a gathering of local dignitaries that the interval between the lives of Jesus and Muhammad was 34,000 years, became a subject of Vaziri’s ridicule.23 He frequently makes such offhand comments, almost as informal gossip, about the goings-on of his friends, neighbors, and peers. The picture that emerges of Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri is that of a welleducated, but unpretentious, member of the elite, who was profoundly proud of his local heritage in all its distinctiveness while also tapped in to broader global developments in the world beyond. Vaziri composed his Tarikh-i Kirman between 1872 and 1874, tracing the history of the Kirman region from the beginning of human history to the present from the perspective of a prominent member of the local elite. He added a lengthy geographical introduction to this work, which was edited and published separately in 1974 by Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani-Parizi as Jughrafiya-yi Kirman. The Jughrafiya provides an enormous amount of detail on Qajar Kirman, from patterns of landownership, agricultural production, natural resources, physical infrastructure, trade and trade routes, and flora and fauna, as well as various curiosities that make Kirman a distinct and defined place.24 He raves about the fine melons, grapes, and opium of Mahan,25 the fine henna of Khabis,26 the climate producing the world’s finest pomegranates,27 and a bottomless lake in Gavk that will spontaneously fill with rock on Wednesdays to allow passage – although, take care, because many believe it is also the favorite haunt of a certain inland sea monster.28 This information represents well the sorts of local knowledge, spiced with a touch of distinctive local flavor, that made Vaziri a valuable source of information as an imperial intermediary. The geographical setting that is detailed in Vaziri’s writing is only one aspect of what defined Kirman and bounded it off from other such entities. As Christine Noelle-Karimi notes in her recent work on the local history of Herat, geographical boundaries are constantly invoked by indigenous and foreign writers as a means of delineating Herat and the wider sphere of Khurasan. The Oxus River, for example, is a common reference point in geographical writing, going back to early in the Islamic era, as a frontier between Khurasan and Transoxania. But as Noelle-Karimi notes, “the river itself hardly presented a barrier in practical terms and did not prevent movement or military expansion in either direction.”29 It was, rather, perceived as a frontier and is reinforced discursively in geographical and historical writing. Vaziri’s History and Geography were not simply reflections of a local context, they were participants in generating this context. Vaziri is an active producer not only of the concept of locality, but also of a textual grounding for a local identity which endows Kirmanis with a story grounded in time and space. His exposition of “local knowledge” is key to this. As Arjun Appadurai notes, “much that has been considered local knowledge is actually knowledge of how to produce and reproduce locality under conditions of anxiety and entropy, social wear and flux, ecological uncertainty and cosmic volatility, and the always present quirkiness of

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kinsmen, enemies, spirits and quarks of all sorts.”30 Vaziri’s careful attention to holy sites, points of pilgrimage, and religious architecture all function to locate Kirman within the broader matrix of the Dar al-Islam, and tie this geographically peripheral space into a more central narrative of Islamic history and spirituality, granting it recognition and meaning.31 In a sense, Vaziri is involved in the production of space and generating meaning within it, not unlike the way the physical setting provides context and meaning for the practice of daily life.32 In this way, Vaziri and his text are interactive players in the process of defining Kirman as a locale and the transformations that took place within this space over the course of the late Qajar period. Vaziri defines Kirman through the relationship between a political community and a geographical locale. He begins his description of Kirman with the urban hub of Kirman City, which he refers to both as shahr-i Kirman and by its local nicknames Gavashir and Dar al-Iman (abode of faith). He first comments on the origins and physical setting of Kirman City, surveying institutions of historical, aesthetic, or spiritual significance like its mosques, madrasas, and bathhouses, much like in the Miʿrat al-Qasan and Jughrafiya-yi Isfahan. He then carries this directly into a discussion of prestigious notable households. Families like the Kalantaris, Ahmadis, and Rudbaris appear as much a part of the city as anything in its physical setting. The families of two Qajar governors who came to Kirman from the outside, Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla and Vakil al-Mulk, also seem to have successfully met the criteria for becoming “local.” They bought land, built prominent public works, and settled in the province, inscribing themselves into the physical setting of Kirman. They became part of Kirman’s distinct local history, as descendants of prominent governors who married into prominent families in the community, and then participated in elite culture as landowners, administrators, and, in the case of the Ibrahimis, spiritual figures. By contrast, Vaziri’s biographical entries on the elites of Kirman City includes a heading titled “nonKirmani people” (ashkhas-i ghayr Kirmani), whom he defines as people who are not from Kirman who work in the administration (divan) and the entourage of the governor. In contrast, families like the Ibrahimis and Vakil al-Mulkis had numerous individuals residing in the province, owned landed properties in the rural hinterland, and/or established connections to Kirmani religious institutions.33 Importantly, the governors who founded both the Ibrahimi and Vakil al-Mulki households, as shall be detailed in the following chapters, had also been involved in major building campaigns in the city and had quite literally inscribed their names into the physical structure of the city with elaborate new buildings bearing their names and attesting to the legitimacy and prestige of their lines. These families form part of the local identity, inscribed in the history, organization, and physical structure of the city itself. Thus not only was Kirman a political community to Vaziri, carried through the networks of local notable intermediaries, but that community was also clearly bounded off socially and culturally by their adherence to certain normative qualities in how one becomes “local.” For the broader region, Vaziri delimits Kirman through both physical and human geography. In this text, Kirman is constituted by communities, occupying

Local historiography and the Great Game 57 physical space, under the administration of the provincial government or that pay their taxes to district authorities under the provincial administration. Initially, he attempts a positivistic description of the extent of the province, drawing clear boundaries for “Kirman” spatially. A physical landscape is detailed, centered on Kirman City, extending to the Lut desert in the north, Yazd and Fars to the west, and the south and east hemmed in by Baluchistan and Sistan, for all of which he gives precise measurements, as far as possible, in farsakhs – not along straight or abstract lines, but along the practical measure of well-traveled routes.34 Once he begins to fill in along the margins, he gives a more careful consideration to the question of what is, and what is not, part of his Kirman. The extent of the region fluctuates with the ability of the governor to administer and collect taxes on communities, thus including only “the distance in the possession of . . . the ruler of Kirman,” for which he amends several outdated figures that did not reflect recent realignments of political forces under the Qajars.35 On the margins of the province, the boundaries are not indeed defined by geographical barriers or abstract lines, but by interpersonal political relationships. His boundary objects are human ones. It is perhaps surprising to note that pastoralnomadic communities that traverse frontier zones seem to present no special difficulty to Vaziri in the way they challenged the political ambitions of British, Russian, and even Qajar administrators as modern states that became “the enemies of ‘people who move around.’ ”36 Taxes levied on pastoral-nomadic groups are done so at the level of the district, making them, geographically speaking, part of the district itself.37 Not all pastoral-nomadic groups residing within a district would necessarily be considered a part of that district and subject to local taxation there – the taxes for that community might be levied elsewhere.38 Out of these discussions, a strong sense of being “Kirmani” as a political identity appears in the text. Kirman was much more than simply a slice of Iran, or a province of the Qajar Empire to Vaziri – the Qajar hold on Kirman being quite tenuous in any case. Writing the history of Kirman endows its inhabitants with a common past, rooted in human origins and persisting through the rise and fall of countless dynasties. This local identity is grounded in the text through frequent references to select elements of the physical environment that bear the marks of both human and divine interaction within that space. He identifies what made Kirman distinctive and unique as a regional, cultural, and historical construct, maintaining a unique Kirmani identity bounding it off from other such constructs in the wider world. In reference to two Safavid-era histories of Kirman’s western neighbor, Yazd, Derek Mancini-Lander comments that “these authors used their Commemorations of local sites as a means of articulating a local perspective and, at the same time, a sense of belonging in the world outside Yazd.”39 In the Jami Mufidi, for instance, Mancini-Lander notes the frequent use of the trope of the “waters of life” as a narrative tool linking place to human activity through a divine channel.40 Frequent references to poetry similarly identify a Kirmani cultural identity embedded within the wider canon of Persian literature.41 This is another common convention seen widely in works of local history. Setrag Manoukian has

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argued that history and poetry formed two distinct modes of interpretation and representation of the past and present in his study on the relationship between history and poetry in the 20th century Shiraz. “Today in Shiraz” he writes, “while local histories of the 1950s structure the interpretation of the city and its cultural excellence, people turn to political poetry to know ‘what really happened.’ ”42 Poetry, for Manoukian and his Shirazi interlocutors, holds an interpretive power above the level of historical chronologies and narratives. Yet it is worth noting that poetic elements such as the piece that follows appear frequently in historical texts as well, and carry their own function within the elaboration of the historical narrative. Vaziri, for example, integrates bits of poetry like the following passage as a way of highlighting certain distinctive local qualities that are uniquely Kirmani, reinforced through an appeal to the poetic sensibilities of the reader. Its air always has a cool breeze, and its dirt A musk gifted by streams throughout the land This makes this land like a paradise Whose basins are full of the waters of al-Kawthar This land is an emirate And in this land the heads of the people kneel to the kings The weak become strong, and those who are afraid to sleep Feel safe and rest; and the poor become rich43

The Qajars, the British, and their local intermediaries Having considered thematic and generic elements of Vaziri’s text and the circumstances of its production, it is important to consider now the curious life and uses of this text as they intersect with Kirman’s global political networks in the Great Game. The Tarikh-i Kirman and its geographical introduction encompassed the rich historical and geographical knowledge of a member of one of Kirman’s prominent elite families. It was precisely this type of information and access that made members of these families important intermediaries in establishing and maintaining empire. Vaziri’s text thus became an important resource for imperial projects in the context of the Great Game, as access to information about the geography, history, economics, politics, social conditions, and demographics were of chief importance to administrators and intelligence agents. Often the beginnings of competing imperial ambitions in Kirman are traced to 1894, when Percy Sykes, a young officer eager to make a name for himself in the service of the British Empire, opened the first British consulate in Kirman City.44 Percy Sykes was hardly the usual diplomat. During his time in Iran, he made a careful study of Persian literature and of Iranian history and society, penning not only an account on his early travels in Ten Thousand Miles in Persia: or Eight Years in Iran,45 but also collected historical manuscripts and the accounts of previous European explorers as the basis for a two-volume History of Persia, which is widely recognized as one of the great classics of Orientalist literature.46 Unlike the dry, terse reports filed by his peers, Sykes’s consular diaries, collected now in the British National Archives in Kew, are peppered with allusions to Persian literature

Local historiography and the Great Game 59 and references to the travels of Alexander and Marco Polo – often to the annoyance of his correspondents in the India Office.47 Percy Sykes remained closely involved in Kirmani politics for more than a quarter century, with intermittent appointments as British consul, and later in forming the South Persia Rifles during World War I, which drove out a German military expedition from the province. Sykes’s quest for knowledge was no benign academic pursuit. He was collecting vital information in the service of the British Empire. In the words of one India Office clerk, Sykes “though nominally a Consul is really an intelligence officer.”48 The collection of information on the geography, history, society, and culture of Kirman was a critical tool in the contest for empire. Sykes spent much of his time early on surveying potential commercial and military routes in vast, remote areas to fill in substantial “blank spots” on the map, which members of Goldsmid’s Anglo-Persian Boundary Commission had pointed out with dismay some twenty years earlier.49 This process played out throughout the Qajar Empire, the foreign political presence steadily growing through the expansion of British and Russian consular networks, boundary commissions delineating international borders, and concessionary agreements granting monopoly rights over various economic activities to foreign nationals. By 1907, with the Anglo-Russian Agreement, the British and Russian spheres of influence were formalized in a secret treaty, recognizing rather than originating the influence of foreign imperial powers under the theoretical sovereignty of the Qajar court. As the British began to chart Kirman and establish their commercial and diplomatic presence (albeit a very minimal one until after World War I), the Qajars too advanced their own imperial interests in the region. The Qajars attempted to better integrate Kirman into a centralized imperial system through a variety of means in the late 19th century, although their grasp on the province remained uneasy at best. Nasir al-Din Shah constantly attempted new methods of centralization, by creating new ministries, enlarging the administration, expanding the army, and attempting to curtail the influence of local elites.50 Technological innovations like the introduction of the telegraph line between Tehran and Kirman in 1879 cut the rate of communication from the capital from several weeks to several minutes, but had little practical effect on the system of imperial control.51 These projects to expand central authority, however, were carried out by “despots without the instruments of despotism” and were confronted by local traditions of social power which carried far greater weight with local populations.52 Indeed, this center–periphery relationship was one of many networks of power that connected Kirman to other Iranian communities and to the wider world, including the competing imperial presence of the British Empire in particular. In these competing visions of empire, and the corresponding intelligencegathering operations that accompanied them, local historical and geographical texts were of obvious importance. It was in this context that Vaziri’s text gained new life. When Sykes arrived in Kirman, he immediately made the acquaintance of the Qajar prince-governor ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farman Farma and made the rounds of the Kirmani elites, collecting information on local history, society, and culture that would later form the basis of his published work. When writing his study of Kirman’s history as part of his travelogue and his later History of

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Persia, he cites a certain unnamed “native chronicler” as the source for much of his information on Kirman’s history for the centuries since the composition of Afzal al-Din’s Saljuq-era history of the province.53 This material follows closely the plan of Vaziri’s Tarikh-i Kirman and its geographical introduction, leaving little doubt that it was one of his major unreferenced sources.54 The value of this text was recognized by Qajar notables as well. When the Qajar notable ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farman Farma was reappointed governor of Kirman in 1905 for a third time, he commissioned numerous copies of the text. At least seven manuscripts ended up in Tehran, and numerous others appeared in various private libraries around Iran. Farman Farma also entrusted Vaziri’s grandson, Pasha Vaziri, to edit his grandfather’s work and bring it up-to-date to cover developments between 1874 and 1907. The re-edited, annotated, and updated text, renamed the Salariyya in honor of Farman Farma (who also carried the title of Salar-i Lashkar), adds particular depth to social and economic developments in the region since his father’s time, including the development of several waves of booms and busts in commercial agriculture, the development of an export carpet weaving industry, the consolidation of social, political, and economic power by urban families over rural districts, and the origins of the Constitutional Revolution, all of which will concern us in Parts II and III of this book. In a sense, he puts his father’s “snapshot” of Kirman in the 1870s in motion and provides a greater sense of how the ongoing transformation of the region appeared to a member of one of its most influential families.

Figure 2.2 Percy and Ella Sykes and ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farman Farma

Local historiography and the Great Game 61 The production of the Salariyya between roughly 1905 and 1907 corresponds with a second wave of local historical writing which appeared around the years of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution (1906–11). The emergence of a community of radical constitutional activists, inspired by one of 19th century Iran’s most recognizable intellectual figures, Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani (d. 1897), was the major impetus behind this second wave of historical writing. Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani was closely connected to the Ahmadi family of Kirman, and became a mentor for the constitutional-era activists in Kirman. Among his students was Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, the renowned author of the most detailed and reliable chronicle of the Constitutional Revolution, Tarikh-i Bidari Iraniyan [The History of the Awakening of the Iranians]. Nazim al-Islam considered Mirza Aqa Khan’s mentorship to have had a tremendous influence on his intellectual development and political activism.55 Nazim al-Islam left Kirman in 1891 to study theology in Tehran and, like many of his contemporaries, became politicized during the protests over the Tobacco Regie. He went on to found the Anjuman-i Makhfi, or “Secret Society,” which debated radical social thought and revolutionary political theory as applied to the Iranian situation and helped organize the early revolutionary movement. Nazim al-Islam maintained ties to his home town and even devoted a lengthy section of the first volume of Tarikh-i Bidari Iraniyan to developments in Kirman in 1905, when an outbreak of factional violence between Shaykhi and mutasharʿi families, and the Qajar’s inflammatory response by beating a member of the local ʿulamaʾ, helped give momentum to the constitutional movement. Nazim al-Islam in turn influenced another local writer in Kirman within the powerful Ahmadi household who became actively involved in the flowering of local historiography. While studying in Kirman with the mujtahid Abu Jaʿfar Ahmadi, he developed a particularly strong relationship with his mentor’s younger brother, Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi. Shaykh Yahya, despite belonging to an important mutasharʿi clerical family, was something of a freethinker, and even married the Shaykhi granddaughter of the merchant Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani and settled down with her in Kirman.56 When Nazim al-Islam departed in 1891 to take part in political activism, Shaykh Yahya declined to leave Kirman to join him. Nazim al-Islam remembered his young friend fondly in Tarikh-i Bidari Iraniyan, recalling that “when I departed, he was unable to go because he was married. The two of us were very close and I still am sorrowful when I think of these 17 years [spent apart].”57 Through Nazim al-Islam, Shaykh Yahya was exposed to a wide range of works on history and social and political thought at a young age. In the opinion of Bastani-Parizi, without the influence of Nazim al-Islam, “after his brother’s death, he would certainly, as his younger brother, have taken up his position.”58 Instead, Nazim al-Islam suggested that Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi immerse himself in the study of local history and continue his intellectual pursuits and political activism in this way. He was twice elected to represent Kirman in the Majlis-i Shawra-yi Milli (National Assembly) and served later in his life as the head of the Muʿarif va Vaqf-i Kirman (Ministry of Sciences and Endowments of Kirman) until his death from malaria in 1921.59

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Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi soon produced two of his own works of local history. One, the Farmandihan-i Kirman [The Rulers of Kirman], is a typical dynastic history but focused solely on Kirman’s governors, relating important events and developments occurring during each of their reigns. Importantly, though, it forms a critical commentary on Vaziri’s text, constantly referring to his interpretation of events while constructing his own critical narrative. Ahmadi is much less timid in addressing controversial or unflattering developments, like the Aqa Khan Mahallati revolt, which are passed over entirely in Vaziri’s texts. Importantly, too, while he was a member of an important mutasharʿi family (the Ahmadis), he was married to Shaykhi woman from a rival family in the province and was somewhat more sympathetic in his discussion of the Shaykhi community. This is particularly true of his description of the 1878 and 1905 Shaykhi–mutasharʿi conflicts in the province, refusing to lay blame on either group but instead tying it into a long-standing sectarian division in Kirman, as “fitna [strife] . . . called ‘HaydariNiʿmati,’ and sometimes too called Shaykhi and Balasari [mutasharʿi].”60 Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi composed another work of local history, Tarikh-i Yahya [Yahya’s History], as a timeline of events, with a strong emphasis on the years of the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11).61 The organization of this text is peculiar. The timeline is divided into three parallel categories covering developments in three concentric circles that concern him as a local historian: Kirman (the local), Iran (the “national”), and the world (the international). This is perhaps the clearest reflection of the enormous changes that took place in the four intervening decades between the composition of Ahmad ʿAli Khan’s Tarikh-i Kirman and Shaykh Yahya’s Tarikh-i Yahya. The networks of Kirmani elites expanded considerably in the late 19th century, and developments in the wider world were more immediate and tangible. Implicit in this text is the author’s Iranian nationalist sensibility, considering developments in Kirman as Iranian concerns, as those of an identity group marked off from the wider world. Being Kirmani was one of several concentric circles of identity that appear throughout Kirman’s local historiographical tradition. At the most basic level, the identities used to categorize individuals, illustrate sociocultural status, and draw inferences were those of hometown or village, membership in a notable family (given through a patronym), occupation, or religious scholarly credentials. Groups of elite families tended to group together into the leadership of broader factional groups aligned with sectarian identities, as with the close association between the Vaziri, Ahmadi, and Vakil al-Mulki families with mutasharʿi Shiʿism, and the Ibrahimis with Kirmani Shaykhism. Beyond being Kirmani, one also finds here the notion of being Iranian. Although modern nationalism was by no means established as a political identity in 19th century Kirman, there is nonetheless a strong notion of being Iranian in the works of local elite historians. Historians of Iranian nationalism have tended to view its rise in part through the breakdown of local, cultural, or sectarian particularisms. Richard Cottam plainly stated that “the local outlook is inhibitive to the development of nationalism, which requires an ability to see one’s country as a whole.”62 In Vaziri’s work, and in the writings of early 20th century Kirmani historians like

Local historiography and the Great Game 63 Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi, there is no zero sum game between being Iranian or being Kirmani; being Kirmani was positioned as an aspect of one’s Iranianness. Moreover, the role of the Qajar state was marginal at best in this process, as being a subject of the distant Qajars was not representative of one’s Iranianness, nor were Qajar statesmen involved in the propagation of the idea in provincial settings.63

Conclusion This chapter has considered the production, intents, and usages of Qajar Kirman’s local historical and geographical literature. Although initiated by inquiries by the Qajar court as an attempt to know and control the region, these works were not merely administrative records providing information to imperial projects as objects of competition. Local historians were historical agents in their own right, with their shifting world views actively shaping the content of this imperial knowledge. These texts, from two generations of writers, not only provide a sense of the types of local information furnished formally by Kirman’s imperial intermediaries in their written works, but also reflect changes in how Kirmani elites viewed themselves and their communities in the context of the wider world during a period of significant social and economic change. Consider them as texts, but also as interactive players in the story, intersecting with attempts by outside political networks to know and control Kirman. Texts created in the context of imperial competition provide critical information compiled as Qajar and British imperial knowledge. These include material completed in the context of intelligencegathering operations by the Qajars and the material that appears in Sykes’s work, in Qajar commissioned works, and in later commentaries by Kirmani historians during the constitutional era. Indeed, their own world views, ideologies, political interests, and the like can be drawn out of these works, along with the subtle, but significant, changes that distinguish works from the constitutional period compared with Vaziri’s work in the 1870s. Vaziri and Ahmadi’s works from the Qajar period are part of a long tradition of local historiography in Kirman and remain the best sources for the activities of Kirmani families in the period under discussion in the present book. It bears mentioning that these works were edited, annotated, and published in the 1970s largely through the efforts of another major figure in Kirmani historiography, the late Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani-Parizi (d. 2014), who passed away during the preparation of this book. Bastani-Parizi’s heavily annotated editions of Vaziri and Ahmadi’s manuscripts were works of local history in their own right. Although his lengthy notes lack the sort of citation-and-reference rigor common in Western academia, making it difficult to cross-reference or verify much of his commentary, they provide the perspective of yet another local scholar who, like Vaziri and Ahmadi, was intensely proud of his Kirmani heritage. These works of local history are the major sources for the present study, as they possess a trove of also critical information on prominent local households and their estate-building projects in the contexts of the intense local factionalism and growing connections to the wider world through their global networks throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries.

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Notes 1 On the Great Game, see especially Edward Ingram, The Beginning of the Great Game in Asia, 1828–1834 (New York: Clarendon Press, 1979), and Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (New York: Kodansha International, 1992). 2 Abbas Amanat, Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831–1896 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 374. 3 James M. Gustafson, “Qajar Ambitions in the Great Game: Notes on the Embassy of ʿAbbas Qoli Khan to the Amir of Bokhara, 1844,” Iranian Studies 46, no. 4 (2013). 4 H. Lyman Stebbins, “British Consuls and ‘Local’ Imperialism in Iran, 1889–1921” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2009), 491. 5 Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles, ix. 6 Muhammad Hasan Khan and Sipanlu, Mirʾat al-Buldan. 7 Wynn, Persia in the Great Game. 8 Soli Shahvar, “Telegraph, i: First Telegraph Lines in Persia,” Encyclopaedia Iranica. 9 Ahmadi, Tarikh-i Yahya, 321, 25. 10 “Dubsky to Andrássy: Les Troubles dans le Seistan” (2 Apr 1873) in Österreichisches Staatsarchiv PA XXVIII Kart.7. 11 “Dubsky to Andrássy: Les Affaires de Chiva” (2 Apr 1873) in Österreichisches Staatsarchiv PA XXVIII Kart.7. 12 See, for example, Nasir al-Din Shah, Ruznamah-yi Khurasan (Tehran1869); Safarnamayi Duvvum-i Khurasan (Tehran: Intisharat-i Kavish, 1984); Ruznama-yi Safar az Tehran ila Karbala va Najaf va Sayir-i Amakin (Tehran1870); Kitab-i Ruznama-yi Safar-i Humayuni bi Mazandaran (Tehran1877); Muhammad Hasan Khan, Matlaʿal-Shams (Tehran: Saziman-i Shahinshahi-yi Khadamat-i Ijtimaʿi, 1976). 13 Muhammad Hasan Khan and Sipanlu, Mirʾat al-Buldan. 14 With the exception of Tabriz, where a member of the Qajar family was present to conduct the survey, it was local notables themselves who produced these works – initially in response to the request of the court. 15 C. A. Storey, Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey (London: Luzac & Co., 1927), 350. 16 This was edited and published as Afshar, Tarikh-i Kashan. 17 Husayn ibn Muhammad Ibrahim Tahvildar Isfahani and Sutudah, Jughrafiya-yi Isfahan. 18 On Fars, see Hasan Husaini Rastgar Fasaʾi Mansur Fasaʾi, Farsnama-yi Nasiri, vol. 2 (Tehran: Muʿassasa-i Intisharat-i Amir Kabir, 1988). The historical sections of this work were translated as Hasan ibn Hasan Fasaʾi and Heribert Busse, History of Persia under Qajar rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), which excludes the volume on the geography of Fars. For Tabriz, see Nadir Mirza and Abd al-Husayn Lisan al-Mulk, Tarikh va Jughrafiya-yi Dar al-Saltana-yi Tabriz: bi-Zamima-yi Sharh Hal-i Buzurgan. 19 Vaziri, Tarikh, 736–37. 20 Ibid., 342–69; Jughrafiya, 58–61. 21 Jughrafiya, 14. 22 Afzal al-Din Kirmani, Ahmad ibn Hamid, Ali Muhammad Amiri Naini, Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani-Parizi. Kitab-i ʿIqd al-ʿUla lil-Mawqif al-Aʿla: Qadimitarin Tarikh Marbut bih Havadis-i Kirman dar ʿAhd-i Salajiqa [in Persian]. Tehran: Ruzbihan, 1977. 23 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 47. 24 For a detailed summary of this work and its importance to the historiography of Qajar Kirman, see Busse, “Kerman im 19. Jahrhundert nach der Geographie des Waziri.” 25 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 83. 26 Ibid., 89. 27 Ibid., 129. 28 Ibid., 194–95.

Local historiography and the Great Game 65 29 Christine Noelle-Karimi, The Pearl in Its Midst: Herat and the Mapping of Khurasan (15th – 19th Centuries) (Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2014), 294. 30 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 181. A special thank you to Seema Golestaneh for bringing this work to my attention. 31 On sanctifying space in Islamic societies, see esp. Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006); Josef W. Meri, The Cult of Saints among Muslims and Jews in Medieval Syria (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 32 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991). 33 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 74–77. 34 Ibid., 21–25. 35 Ibid., 22. See also a note on lands now “administered as part of Yazd,” 177, 184. 36 James C. Scott, Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 1. 37 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 111–12, 30, 36, 44, 79. 38 In the district of Jiruft, “one Afshar tribe which they call Vali Ashaqi reside there. But their taxes are not part of Jiruft’s.” Ibid., 118. 39 Derek J. Mancini-Lander, “Memory on the Boundaries of Empire: Narrating Place in the Early Modern Local Historiography of Yazd” (dissertation, University of Michigan, 2012), 9. 40 Ibid., 46–48. 41 I would like to acknowledge Christine Noelle-Karimi for making this point during my stay at the Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna, July– August 2013. 42 Setrag Manoukian, City of Knowledge in Twentieth Century Iran: Shiraz, History and Poetry (New York: Routledge, 2012), 170–71. 43 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 27. Translation from the Arabic by Catherine Bronson, University of Notre Dame. 44 Wynn, Persia in the Great Game. 45 Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles. 46 Sykes, A History of Persia. 47 Sykes’ diaries from Kirman are located in the FO 248 series. 48 “Sykes to W.A.C.” (2 Feb 1895) in United Kingdom National Archives FO 60/562, 184v. 49 “Report on Persian Baluchistan” (1892–94) in UK National Archives FO 60/580, 222– 29. FO 60/588, “Intelligence Report, 1894–7,” in UK National Archives FO 60/588, 31–109. India‒Persian Boundary Commission et al., Eastern Persia, 24–72. 50 Sheikholeslami, Structure of Central Authority, 13. 51 Ahmadi, Tarikh-i Yahya, 321, 25. 52 Abrahamian, “Oriental Despotism,” 9. 53 Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles, 66, 67 n. 2, 70. 54 This was a common practice among Western Orientalists. See, for example, the commentary on William Jones in Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, 23–31. 55 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 11. 56 Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 27. 57 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 17. 58 See Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani-Parizi’s introduction to Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 11. 59 Ibid., 10. 60 Ibid., 123. 61 Tarikh-i Yahya. 62 Richard W. Cottam, Nationalism in Iran (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1964), 91.

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63 Afshin Marashi, Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870–1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008), 10–11, 36, 47. Marashi comes to the same conclusion, that the Qajars were by no means active promulgators of nationalism, but he argues that they nonetheless set the basis for the sorts of national integration necessary for the formation of an Iranian national identity. From the perspective of Kirman, it would appear to be the reverse. It was not top-down reforms that led the way to integrative institutions, but the actions of local notables themselves that created this momentum, which was only later manifested in a national polity deep into the Pahlavi period.

Part II

A regional political economy

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3

Household networks and rural integration

In 1859, the newly appointed deputy governor of the southern Qajar province of Kirman, Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan Vakil al-Mulk (d. 1868), began investing his personal wealth in a series of building projects. Between 1859 and 1878, he and his son, Vakil al-Mulk II, used money made through mercantile activities and surplus taxes to construct the Vakili Mosque, two new caravanserais, and a pair of public bathhouses; to make repairs to the citadel complex; and to add a new administrative office (divankhana) in the capital, Kirman City.1 Elsewhere in the province, they expanded a system of caravanserais along Kirman’s two major trade routes connecting the province to the Persian Gulf port of Bandar ʿAbbas: one through Yazd and Rafsanjan, and the other somewhat further east from Khurasan via Bam.2 In villages closer to the city, Vakil al-Mulk built bathhouses, mosques, water reservoirs, bazars, and gardens.3 In 1872, when Captain Euan Smith toured the province as part of the Perso-Afghan Boundary Commission, he noted that “the greater part of the caravanserais and tanks contained within the provincial limits were directly or indirectly constructed [by Vakil al-Mulk I].”4 Many of these projects would come to bear the name of Vakil al-Mulk and his family, known as the Vakil al-Mulkis, serving as lasting monuments to their piety and prestige and helping to cement their place among the provincial elite. The governorships of Vakil al-Mulk and Vakil al-Mulk II in Kirman from 1859 to 1878 represent the beginning of a period of significant social and economic change related to the increase of global trade through the province and to the growth of commercial agriculture. The development of Kirman’s rural infrastructure, along with policies of subordinating pastoral nomadic tribes and increasing patrols along major trade routes, immediately contributed to the intensification of international trade through Kirman by way of the Persian Gulf. While helping to establish the prestige and local roots of the governor’s household, Vakil al-Mulk’s investments also supported his family’s own mercantile interests and promoted trade, a taxable activity. Vakil al-Mulk held a personal monopoly over Kirman’s lucrative trade in kurk, a type of fine goat’s wool particular to the province’s arid climate, which was the basis of his family wealth.5 Much of Vakil al-Mulk’s building campaign was financed through profits from his kurk monopoly in the interests of expanding this trade further and enriching his estate. Once the infrastructure was in place, it benefited elite families throughout Kirman involved in the production and sale of cash crops on the global market.

70 A regional political economy Economic historians have tended to view Qajar Iran’s greater integration into the global economy at a macro, systemic level and have largely restricted the debate to whether this process created the preconditions for Iran’s industrialization and development or contributed to a general economic decline that placed Iran in a position of dependency on Russia and Great Britain.6 Unfortunately there are few studies on Qajar provincial history to add perspective or depth to these structural theories by relating them to local and regional developments.7 Recent scholarship has turned toward recognizing the agency of non-Europeans in the growth of global capitalism more generally. Claude Markovits, for example, has detailed the thriving commercial networks of Hyderabadi and Shikarpuri merchants through the Indian Ocean region as they carved out niches in the developing world system.8 Economic historians have noted a similar role for Iran’s high profile “big merchants” in international commerce,9 drawing on earlier scholarship that posited the emergence of a “dual-class system” with the absorption of Iran into the global industrial economy and the projection of a new capitalist economy over existing productive relations.10 However, the overriding trend in Qajar economic history remains tied to exploring the “opening” of Iran by foreign imperialists and global economic forces without appreciating the significance of Iranian participation in the process or the intensely local and contingent nature of social and economic change in Qajar Iran.11 In particular, the legacy of local traditions of social power on these transformations has been left out of this discussion almost entirely. A remarkable element of the social and economic history of Iranian provincial communities in the 19th century is, in fact, the thriving of established and locally rooted elite households through their skillful adaptation to and active participation in changes in their economic environment. In moving beyond the limitations of broad structural approaches that evaluate processes of economic change through development or dependency frameworks or that theorize how closely changing economic conditions in Iran approached capitalism as an ideal type, it is vital to explore more thoroughly the role Iranians themselves played in mediating the effects of global economic forces and reshaping their own social, political, and economic institutions.12 This chapter addresses the issue of local agency by exploring the activities of the elite households of Kirman in the late 19th century. Kirman is a particularly interesting case study through which to view the dynamics of social historical change connected to global trade. Its proximity to the Persian Gulf – the main channel for much of Iran’s growing maritime trade with India, China, and western Europe – placed it on the frontline of political and economic transformations. At the same time, the vast central salt desert on the Iranian plateau dividing Kirman from the center of Qajar power in Tehran provided local elites with a substantial degree of autonomy from the court in day-to-day matters as they navigated these new challenges. A pivotal development in the mid- to late 19th century was the greater integration of the province into a regional political economy through networks of wealth and prestige centered on a small group of urban households. These household networks played numerous social roles, with clerical, mercantile, administrative,

Household networks and rural integration 71 landholding, and other activities all part of the standing of the family as a collective. As Kirman’s urban elite households invested heavily in land, they not only contributed to the commercialization of agriculture but also extended their influence over rural areas as landowners, tax collectors, and administrators. Regional integration was a direct result of the strategies pursued by Kirmani elites to manage their estates while negotiating new economic opportunities and mediating social and economic change in the province at large. A similar approach has been applied fruitfully to Ottoman provincial social and economic histories. Beshara Doumani’s groundbreaking work on the political economy of Ottoman Palestine notes the thriving mercantile networks in Nablus that established the backbone of a regional economy and identity in the 18th and 19th centuries.13 Michael Meeker, too, has argued convincingly that the activities of local aqayan dating back to the Ottoman period were a significant factor in the creation of “Turkish modernity” in Anatolia.14 In the case of Iran, Rudi Matthee has demonstrated the utility of an approach focused on analyzing networks of power, similar to that used in Michael Mann’s theoretical model, to understand Safavid-era political as well as economic relationships.15 This chapter will apply elements of each of these approaches, with an eye toward explaining the strategies Kirmani elites employed in managing their estates, and the influence these activities had on reshaping the regional economy. Although historians have long decried a scarcity of appropriate sources to produce a detailed social and economic history of Qajar Iran, and the difficulty of accessing state archives, family papers, and other such materials, there are numerous sources available for exploring the activities of provincial elite communities. In Kirman, contemporary geographical and historical writings by local elites provide significant information on their activities and those of their peers. Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri-Kirmani’s Jughrafiya-yi Kirman [Geography of Kirman], written between 1872 and 1874, along with the annotation and update of the text by Vaziri’s son in 1907, is by far the most important source for the social and economic history of Qajar Kirman but has yet to be utilized systematically by scholars.16 Farmandihan-i Kirman, a local history of Kirman by Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi written in 1911 that is, in part, a critical commentary on important sections of Vaziri’s writings, provides the perspective of another member of Kirman’s elite.17 A number of travel accounts on Kirman written by Iranians also provide useful insight into agricultural production and patterns of landownership.18 British Foreign Office archives and the writings of European travelers and diplomats active in the province in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, although significantly less reliable, offer detail on areas not addressed in the local geographical and historiographical tradition, especially concerning the status of peasants, laborers, and women. While the sources do not provide detailed bibliographical information on the individuals and families discussed here, they do allow for some exploration of the social and economic strategies used by Kirmani elites to adapt their household estates to the challenges and opportunities presented by the flourishing trade through the Persian Gulf and to assess these households’ broader significance to the social and economic history of Qajar Kirman.

72 A regional political economy

Patterns of landownership in Qajar Kirman Kirman, like other provinces in Qajar Iran, was dominated not by the state, but by a small group of elites residing in its urban center, Kirman City, and in several of its larger villages. The status of belonging to the aʿyan, or local elite, was based on control over three key areas of social, political, and cultural life: (a) landholdings, which accumulated in the hands of a small number of urban households connected to Kirman City and Bam over the course of the 19th century; (b) religious institutions, including extensive vaqf (religious endowment) revenues, religious ceremonies, the provision of various social services, and opportunities for patronage; and (c) access to stipendiary administrative posts. Each set of resources was valuable not only for access to wealth but also as symbols of social and cultural standing.19 This was a continuation of a long-standing system prevalent in the medieval Islamic world, the “aʿyan-amir system of social power,” as defined by Hodgson, wherein locally rooted aʿyan regulated social and political life in provincial cities “with minimal interference from large scale political institutions,” providing a certain stability to the patterns of provincial life through the dizzying rise and fall of dynastic states.20 The aʿyan thus not only formed the backbone of provincial elite society but were also uniquely positioned to act as intermediaries between local communities and the wider world. At the time of the Vakil al-Mulks’ building campaigns between 1859 and 1878, the two most powerful landholding households in Kirman were the Ibrahimis and Vaziris. Both had successfully maintained their estates intact and reproduced their social power for several generations. According to Ahmad ʿAli Khan VaziriKirmani, a member of the Vaziri household, his family members were descendants of Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi, a wealthy Zand-era merchant and landlord from the agricultural center of Sirjan. During the brief period of Zand rule in Kirman (1758–94), Aqa ʿAli was granted administrative control over the entire western portion of the province – including Shahrbabak, Sirjan, Iqtaʾ, Arzuya, Kushk, and Sughan – where he already likely possessed significant landed properties.21 After the Zand prince Lutf ʿAli Khan arrived in Kirman in a final attempt to restore the Zand state, he confiscated property from Aqa ʿAli. In response, Aqa ʿAli appealed directly to Aqa Muhammad Khan Qajar to encourage, and assist in, removing the Zand prince from the city. He thus became one of the few members of the Zand-era elite to survive the subsequent Qajar massacre in the city with his life and property intact. For his service to the Qajar Shah, his eldest son was installed to govern the remnants of the city for the next several years, while another son, Mirza Husayn, was appointed first sanduqdar and then the vazir of Kirman (from which the family became known as the Vaziris) and quickly emerged as one of the leading landholders in the province.22 In 1805, Fath ʿAli Shah Qajar attempted to rebuild Kirman City, which had been largely destroyed during the Qajar conquest. He allocated a sizable share of the city’s tax revenues to the new Qajar prince-governor, his uncle Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla, for a building campaign in the city. Ibrahim Khan, the ancestor of the Ibrahimi family, ruled the province until his death in 1826 and accumulated

Household networks and rural integration 73 extensive landholdings there through development, purchase, confiscation, and intermarriage with established landholding families.23 The descendants of these two lines, the Vaziri and Ibrahimi households, became the core of Kirman’s urbanbased landholding elites, passing control of their landholdings through several generations into the late 19th century. Landownership was a major preoccupation for urban households for a variety of reasons. In terms of economic benefit, owners of what are termed arbabi lands – those held by an absentee landlord (arbab) as private property (milk) – controlled the flow of agricultural wealth from the province’s hinterland into its larger villages and urban centers. Cultivation of these lands was accomplished with input from both the absentee landlord and the peasant laborers. The landowner normally provided all capital and material factors (land, water resources, and most or all of the seed), with the peasants providing the labor. At harvest, the produce was divided according to either a customary agreement or an annual contract drawn up or agreed upon orally between the landlord and the peasant laborers, in which the landowner, according to the input factors they contributed, would take roughly 70 to 80 percent of the crop.24 In addition, the landlords held prerogatives over what to plant, whether the rent was to be collected in cash or kind, and the appointment of local agents to represent their interests in rural districts. Given that Kirman’s local economy was essentially agrarian, supplemented by tribal and handicraft production, possession of land and water resources was the primary basis of wealth. It is important, however, to expand our view of an “estate” beyond money and material goods to look at the entirety of the social and cultural resources at the disposal of the elite household and its extended familial network, which constituted the basic building block of provincial elite society in Qajar Kirman. Vaziri’s description of the local aʿyan in Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, despite his attempts to categorize individuals by social or political functions (ʿulamaʾ, landowners, administrators, etc.), makes it clear that the entire group was drawn almost exclusively from a small number of elite families in the province, each bearing the name of a prestigious eponym. Max Weber, in his studies of social power in Italian citystates, described a system that operated very similarly. Weber was among the first to recognize that kinship relations were not simply “natural,” beyond perhaps the bond between a mother and a child, but rather operate within economic relationships and reinforce collectivities that are in essence self-help groups.25 In the case of Qajar Iran, the influence of elite households was not based solely on their wealth or on their position as members of a distinct economic class. They formed a sociocultural status group in which the cultural prestige afforded by owning land, maintaining relationships with local religious institutions, and securing access to administrative posts was as important to their social power as was the wealth that these activities afforded them. Each household carved out a sphere of proprietary interests in the rural hinterland, which provided important resources in elite household competition both as independent sources of revenue and for the prestige associated with landholding. These networks also extended into the realm of administration. Tax collectors, or ʿummal (singular: ʿamil ), were charged with collecting the taxes levied on a

74 A regional political economy particular community by the provincial government. For administrative and taxation purposes, the province (ustan or vilayat) was broken down into a number of districts (buluk), each consisting of one or more large villages (qasba) as well as smaller villages (dih) and the agricultural settlements (mazraʿa) connected to them as dependencies. Just as the central government maintained control over major cities and provincial centers through the cooperation of elite local households, provincial governors were able to collect taxes and maintain order in their domains only with the aid of those households with the prestige and local knowhow to make administration possible, even within the modestly proscribed limits of collecting taxes and maintaining basic order. There was no salary for tax collection as such. It was expected that in the course of their duties, the ʿamil would collect a surplus as compensation. Though this surplus was often quite large, and certainly added to the pressures on the peasantry, it was not considered an impropriety from an administrative standpoint. Rather, within certain limits, it was an extension of the right of members of elite society to acquire the surplus of peasant labor, and leveraging their positions within the government was one of several means to do so. Despite the relatively clear function of the ʿummal from the perspective of the provincial government, their ultimate authority over a rural community lacked clear delineation. The office and title amounted to an endorsement by the provincial government for an individual to exercise power as a proxy of the governor’s person. A key aspect of the totality of landholding families’ control over village communities was the fact that administration and tax collection heavily overlapped with landownership in Qajar Kirman.26 This connection has been overlooked in most studies of Qajar administrative history due to the fact that the centrality of household estates and their networks are likewise overlooked. Ervand Abrahamian famously described the Qajar Shahs as “despots without the instruments of despotism” and posited that the fragmentation of Iranian society created an atmosphere of loosely organized chaos with no particular administrative body or social group able to assert its authority over provincial populations.27 Yet, in practice, to administer villages and rural areas, the governor would rely on the intermediacy of a household with the proper connections and local knowledge to carry out tax collection properly and thoroughly. These tasks, in turn, would be delegated through the broader household networks. This system granted recognition and sanction to the power of household leaders as landlords and as intermediaries with urban society, while at the same time augmenting their income by allowing them to collect an additional percentage of the crop from the peasant laborers as taxes. Included among the ranks of these households were the ʿulamaʾ, whose connections to prestigious institutions of Islamic learning and recognized sociocultural status among the local population afforded them significant influence. Such household networks were more capable than any other social group of legitimizing or delegitimizing the actions of the governor and his entourage. Despite the success of a handful of elite families in Kirman City, the overall pattern of landholdings and rural administration prior to the intensification of commercial agriculture was dominated by rurally based elite households residing

Household networks and rural integration 75 in outlying districts where they held property. These rural households, by extension, enjoyed hereditary control over tax collection and administration as part of their functional role as intermediaries between the state and village populations. The reason this system of patrimonial authority in rural areas was so persistent is perhaps best demonstrated by the example of Nur al-Din Rudbari and his relationship with the provincial government. Nur al-Din Rudbari was the head of a landholding family in Rudbar that came to the area from Khurasan early in the 18th century and held a position of authority there for the next 150 years. Nur al-Din’s father, Amir Saʿid Khan, had developed enormous wealth through land investments in Rudbar and Jiruft by early in the 19th century.28 Captain Euan Smith of the Perso-Kalat Boundary Commission, who traveled through Kirman in 1872, visited Nur al-Din at Khanu and offered some insightful commentary on his relationship with the governor of Kirman: The governorship [of Khanu] has descended from father to son, in an unbroken line for more than four centuries [sic], and is in fact a small hereditary kingdom. The Governor of Karman, it is true, is the acknowledged superior, and receives tribute from the Governor of Khanu, but he would never dream of appointing any Governor, other than the acknowledged heir of the reigning family; and indeed were he to do so, his nominee would not be received.29

Rural development and the commercialization of agriculture As early as the 17th and 18th centuries, Kirman supported a thriving international trade in kurk wool, carried by the East India Company to supply Indian weavers.30 After the disruptions caused by the long post-Safavid interregnum and the brutal Qajar conquest of Kirman, exports of grain and other foodstuffs to India picked up again by the 1840s. Merchants realized quickly the enormous potential for wealth in connection with international markets by selling other goods like dyes and opium in India, China, and western Europe, particularly after access to these markets was made quicker and less expensive with the introduction of steamship service on the Persian Gulf and with the opening of the Suez Canal in the 1860s.31 The rising price of raw materials on the international market encouraged landowners to intensify production of these goods.32 Iranian merchants made small fortunes in the Indian trade as the commercial sector of the agricultural economy surged. As a result, landowners too became gradually more sensitive to global economic forces. As Kirmani merchants found lucrative markets overseas for agricultural goods, the commodities commanding the highest profit margin began to supplant traditional staple crops such as wheat and barley. Gad Gilbar has argued that cash cropping was driven primarily by importers seeking to offset the growing imbalance in foreign trade, paying cash to merchants and cultivators for agricultural goods to sell on their return trips to India and China.33 However, the local impetus of this shift in production patterns is clear once the activities of Kirmani landowners are explored. While our Kirmani sources note that producers continued to send

76 A regional political economy a considerable quantity of cereals and dried fruits overseas in the 1870s, it was rather the shipments of cotton and dyes bound for India that made the elite landowning households of Kirman wealthy. Vaziri’s comments in the mid-1870s paint a vivid picture of the rise in fortunes of Kirmani landowners. Thanks be to God at this time all of the landlords of Kirman’s villages became powerful and wealthy – because of the high prices for cotton and madder [a type of red dye] in India for several years, and shortages of corn in Yazd, Kirman, and most of the regions of Iran. People who had 1,000 tumans worth of property in Kirman thirty years ago now have 20,000 tumans in produce. A village [mazraʿa] that they would once trade for 100 dinars in cash and a prayer now they won’t sell for 3,000 or 4,000 tumans, especially in Sirjan, Rafsanjan, and Arzuya, whose cotton, madder, and wheat are mostly taken to Bandar ʿAbbas and Yazd.34 While working to augment their own household’s wealth and prestige, the Vakil al-Mulks’ building program set the basic groundwork for the participation of wealthy elites throughout the province in the growing overseas trade through the Persian Gulf. The widespread commercialization of agriculture began in Kirman in the 1840s, when trade relations with India were revitalized. Kirman quickly became an exporter of raw materials such as cotton, opium, and henna alongside food staples such as wheat, barley, dried fruit, and nuts. Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan Vakil al-Mulk (d. 1868) and his son Murtaza Quli Khan Vakil al-Mulk II (d. 1878) controlled the governorship of Kirman during the pivotal years between 1859 and 1878. Unlike many Qajar governors, the Vakil al-Mulkis were not connected by blood or marriage to the Qajar royal family. Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan was the son of Fath ʿAli Khan Nuri, who, incidentally, served Sir John Malcolm during his travels in the early 19th century.35 In the late 1850s, Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan was falsely accused of participating in some form of conspiracy with Prince Qahraman Mirza (d. 1841); he was taken before Nasir al-Din Shah in Tehran and quickly absolved of any wrongdoing. Qahraman Mirza’s son, Kiyamurs Mirza ʿUmid al-Dawla, was subsequently granted the governorship of Kirman in 1859 with Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan as his pishkar (deputy).36 Such appointments were common in the patrimonial Qajar government as a means of allocating a salary to a member of the royal household or others in positions of favor with the court.37 Vaziri noted in the 1870s that the governorship was Kiyamurs Mirza’s only in name, with the actual tasks of governing delegated to the more capable Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan.38 By 1867, he was granted the royal title of Vakil al-Mulk in recognition of his administrative abilities and received a full appointment to govern the province.39 Among Vakil al-Mulk’s first accomplishments in Kirman was a successful campaign in Baluchistan in 1862 to subjugate the tribal khans; he then shrewdly cemented peaceful relations with leading khans through intermarriage and alliance.40 Normalizing the relationship with the Baluchi khans had an immediate impact on Kirman’s local economy. By limiting the threat of tribal raids, Kirman’s

Household networks and rural integration 77 major caravan routes linking Yazd, Rafsanjan, Bam, and Kirman City to the port of Bandar ʿAbbas began once again to flourish, enabling local landowners and merchants to find markets overseas for agricultural surplus. This was aided by Vakil al-Mulk’s construction of a series of caravanserais on these major trade routes and improvements to the basic infrastructure of major villages in the province. As Rudi Matthee notes in his study of the Safavid silk trade, such economic policies were normally designed to advance commerce as a taxable activity, and had nothing to do with sophisticated mercantilist or capitalist economic theories.41 This series of building projects, along with the subjugation of pastoral nomadic tribes and increased patrols on major trade routes, helped improve the security of transportation throughout the province and accelerated Kirman’s transformation into a producer of raw materials on the global market. The turn to commercial agriculture has been well documented by historians, but the far-reaching effects it had on the structure of provincial communities has not.42 The political economy of Kirman was centered on the networks of socially and economically powerful elite households based in the urban center of Kirman City, not on the activities of the Qajar state or the provincial government, except as the latter were pursued by provincial governors on behalf of their own private estates, as in the case of Vakil al-Mulk. As the cotton market dried up after the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865, many landowners began growing and processing poppies (khashkhash). British observers noted in 1869 that “near Tehran for instance and in many other districts where [opium] was formerly almost unknown, large fields are at present under cultivation.”43 By the 1870s, poppies were produced alongside cereals throughout Kirman, and are mentioned by Vaziri among other local crops in Narmashir, Jupar, Baghayn, Sirjan, Zarand, and Mahan.44 The last of these, a village just east of Kirman City where the Shah Niʿmat Allah Vali shrine is located, was touted by Kirmanis as the producer of the finest opium in the world. The crop was said to never hit the market and was rather collected by agents of the shrine and khalisa (or crown) properties in Mahan and “sent as gifts and as a curiosity.”45 By the 1880s, however, the opium trade was fundamentally transformed by local landowners responding to global economic forces. In 1879–80, Kirman produced some 4,500 mans (58,500 lb) of opium.46 This figure more than doubled by 1896, when the British consulate noted the export of 9,500 mans of opium valued at 16,400 pounds sterling, from Kirman.47 This corresponded to a dramatic increase in opium production throughout southern Iran, with Isfahan and Yazd the two chief centers of processing and packing for export.48 Kirman’s exports departed primarily from the port at Bandar ʿAbbas, for which, unfortunately, there is less reliable information on the mid-19th century than for other ports along the Gulf. The British legation’s figures for net tonnage from Bushihr and Basra, however, are telling of the overall trends in the Persian Gulf trade. The volume of trade passing through the Persian Gulf ports began a meteoric rise in the early 1870s. From 1872 to 1873, the overall trade between the Persian Gulf and London more than doubled, from 2,591 tons to 6,516 tons, and more than doubled again the next year to 13,146 tons. Over the following decade,

78 A regional political economy British administrators estimated that Bushihr’s exports doubled, while those of Bandar ʿAbbas nearly tripled.49 The volume of trade continued to increase sporadically up to the eve of World War I in 1913, by which time it had reached 319,000 tons.50 The evidence is compelling that structural changes in local economies throughout Iran, in particular the transition to cash cropping, were driven by the activities of local merchants and producers, and not simply “uninvited, and partially harmful, intervention by European countries in the Iranian political economy,” as Homa Katouzian and others have argued.51 The booming export trade through southern Iran was overwhelmingly in the hands of native Iranian merchants, not Europeans.52 About forty merchants in Kirman in the mid-1870s were engaged in international trade, the most successful of whom established their own permanent agents overseas, particularly in Bombay.53 Improved communication technologies such as the telegraph lines connecting Tehran to the outside world and the introduction of steam service at Persian Gulf ports improved the flow of information and security for merchants engaged in long-distance trade.54 It is true that much of the transport was in the hands of the Indian community, mainly immigrants from Shikarpur who enjoyed British protection and the concessionary 5 percent tariff on exports.55 International merchants, however, were only one economic group to participate in, and benefit from, commercialized agriculture.

The Vakil al-Mulki estate Contemporary European observers tended to attribute the economic expansion in late 19th century Kirman entirely to Vakil al-Mulk, whom they saw as an enlightened ruler whose measures achieved exceptional progress in a hopelessly lost backwater of the world. St. John was of the opinion that Vakil al-Mulk’s measures “raised Karman from the desolation it had been plunged in, since the siege, to its present position of the most orderly and one of the most prosperous divisions of the kingdom.”56 A. Houtum-Schindler, who visited Kirman in 1879 and was particularly keen on documenting the city’s architecture, noted that most of the new buildings in town were built by either Vakil al-Mulk I or Vakil al-Mulk II, who had also funded substantial repairs and the addition of a large mihrab in the Friday Mosque.57 These projects not only contributed to Kirman City’s development but also evoked Islamic legitimacy and prestige, tying the Vakil al-Mulki name to the geography and history of the city. It was, in short, a method of demonstrating a commitment to elite culture and the practice of legitimate authority. Vakil al-Mulk’s son, Murtaza Quli Khan Vakil al-Mulk II, was able to inherit his position and title upon his death in 1284/1867–68; this was exceptional for someone who was not a member of the royal household and had little experience in administration. The son continued his father’s policies and finished a number of his major works, including the commercially important Vakili Caravanserai in Kirman City.58 Vaziri noted that Vakil al-Mulk, “in addition to governing, was first among merchants and landowners in the trade with Calcutta and India, and in landholding

Household networks and rural integration 79 and agriculture,” and financed much of his development projects through private means.59 He quickly became one of Kirman’s principal landowners, primarily through securing control over water resources. He built or repaired qanats throughout the province and claimed rights to the lands they irrigated.60 Among the qanats and irrigation works whose creation or upkeep are credited to Vakil al-Mulk and his son are those of the villages of Vakilabad, Kuruk, Kalanzahu, Abariq, and Nusratabad.61 The Vakil al-Mulkis also purchased villages in some of the most profitable agricultural districts of the province, especially Rafsanjan. The elder Vakil al-Mulk acquired three important villages there from previous owners, Shafiʿabad, Khalilabad, and Saqi (renamed Vakilabad). In addition to these, he acquired the lucrative village of Nasiriyya by reviving its qanat, which ultimately fed khalisa lands downstream.62 Much like Zahir al-Dawla had done a half century earlier, the Vakil al-Mulkis used landownership to enhance their family’s wealth and prestige and enter into Kirman’s elite circles with a locally rooted estate, rather than simply remaining outsider appointees from the distant Qajar capital. With multiple members of the family owning land as absentee landlords and holding a monopoly over the sale of kurk wool, the Vakil al-Mulk household controlled the flow of significant resources from rural areas into the urban center. At the same time, they established themselves as one of the leading administrative households, drawing on their newly established connections in rural society and the sociocultural prestige of the Vakil al-Mulk name. Kirmani historians note the Vakil al-Mulkis as one of the most powerful administrative and landholding families of Kirman into the 20th century.63

The Kalantari estate in Sirjan Much like the Vakil al-Mulki family, the Kalantari household established its control over an economically important agricultural district in Kirman through landownership. The Kalantaris founded the city of Saʿidabad (modern Sirjan) along the Yazd–Bandar ʿAbbas road in the early 1790s. Saʿidabad quickly became a flourishing center of agriculture and trade in the early period of commercial agriculture in Kirman. The Sirjan district surrounding Saʿidabad produced roughly 250,000 mans of cotton and 600,000 mans of grain, much of which made its way overseas via Bombay.64 A significant portion of the produce from Rafsanjan and Yazd bound for export via Bandar ʿAbbas also ran through this town, as did goods passing between Fars and Kirman.65 Saʿidabad became a flourishing trade depot, with a population of about 9,000 by 1904, and had a customs outpost and post office.66 The proximity of Sirjan to the Persian Gulf ports and its abundance of arable land made it well suited for cash cropping. During the cotton boom, Sirjan was among the leading producers of cotton bound for India. Likewise, with the expansion of opium production for the Chinese market, poppies were grown in large quantities alongside fields of wheat and barley. Vaziri tells us that the price of Sirjani-produced raw materials on the foreign market was such that “the power

80 A regional political economy and wealth of the farmers now is more than that of the former owners of the hamlets, and the shepherds too have become wealthy because of the nirkh [fixed price] on kurk and wool.”67 By 1894, the British consul in Kirman, Percy Sykes, compared the conditions of peasants throughout Kirman favorably with their counterparts in India.68 Members of the Kalantari household reinforced their control over the agriculturally rich district of Sirjan through securing posts in administration and tax collection, passing down the office of ʿamil starting in the 1840s.69 By doing so, they also profited from surplus tax collection from the peasant population, as was the norm, and expanded their landholdings in that district. Vaziri describes their role in Sirjan both as ʿamili (administration and tax collection) and riyasat (headmanship), reflecting what Sheikholeslami has called a lack of functional differentiation in the Qajar bureaucracy, mirrored here at the provincial and district levels.70 Offices and titles were often vague and inconsistent, reflecting the authority of the officeholder rather than the power or responsibilities of the office itself.71 Just as landholdings were valuable as both sociocultural and financial resources, administrative positions held a similar dual importance to household estates. The Kalantari household was a major player in provincial affairs, based not so much on its wealth or landholdings, but on the cultural prestige associated with its hereditary control over the position of kalantar, or chief magistrate, of Kirman City. Vaziri relates a widely circulated story according to which the Kalantaris’ lofty role in Kirmani politics originated in a complaint sent to Shah ʿAbbas I in 1015/1606–07, that the kalantar of Kirman City was abusing his position and oppressing the local population. The Shah came to investigate. He and a companion rode two mules in disguise 130 farsakhs from Isfahan to Kirman City in five days and stayed in the home of Aqa Taqi, the ancestor of the [Kalantari] line. Although that man was not aware he was the Shah, he tried to treat the guests with respect and hospitality as much as he was able. The Shah was pleased by the acts and morals of the host and offered him money, but he did not accept it. He said, “I never ask for anything from guests.” After it became clear to the Shah that the ill words that had been spoken of the Governor of Kirman were a lie, save for the killing of several Magis . . . the just sultan requested his presence and in his blessed writing issued a diploma for the office of kalantar of Kirman City in the name of his host and cursed the removal of the post from this line.72 This narrative was no doubt utilized by the Kalantari household to stress a traditional right, supported by no less an authority than the legendary Shah ʿAbbas, to maintain its high status in Kirman’s politics through hereditary control over a lucrative and prestigious post. The household’s ability to maintain its place among Kirman’s aʿyan relied not only on its members’ ability to reproduce their cultural prestige from generation to generation but also on their ability to maintain their usefulness to Qajar appointees and the local population alike. For Kirman’s governors, they provided indispensable knowledge of local administrative affairs,

Household networks and rural integration 81 substantial and long-standing ties with other members of elite society, and credibility and prestige with the local population. In Gavk and Khabis, to the east of Kirman City, the Kalantaris had carved out a similar enclave with extensive landholdings coupled with administrative control since early in the 19th century.73 In this case, it appears they used their influence as administrators and urban notables to accumulate land, rather than, as in Sirjan, using their position as landholders to take hold of administrative functions. There was a noticeable absence of powerful rural notables in Khabis, which no doubt allowed the Kalantaris an opening to profit as tax collectors and administrators. Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri-Kirmani’s grandson, Pasha Viziri, comments in his annotation to the Jughrafiya-yi Kirman that another member of the Kalantari household, Mirza Mihdi Khan Kalantar, held the administration of Khabis for most of his life. Between the 1880s and 1900s, he acquired some of the most desirable properties in the district and extended the landed estates of the Kalantari household into eastern Kirman.74

Rafsanjan: land investment and Shaykhi–mutasharʿi factionalism Although Sirjan was certainly thriving, it was Rafsanjan that became the center of commercial agricultural production in the 1870s. Rafsanjan was farther than Sirjan from Kirman City and the Persian Gulf, but it was located along the Yazd– Bandar ʿAbbas trade route, which was favored by many merchants as a way to avoid Kirman City, where 5 percent in customs was often assessed in addition to the regular duties at Bandar ʿAbbas.75 According to Vaziri, not only landowners but even peasants saw an improvement in their standard of living; as he puts it, “this district’s farmers mostly became hajjis.”76 The economic significance of Rafsanjan also made it a battleground in a growing factional conflict between two blocs of household networks in Kirman connected to the Vakil al-Mulkis and the Ibrahimis. During their respective tenures as governor, the eponyms of these two households bought substantial tracts of land and founded a number of new villages in Rafsanjan, where several members of each household resided on large landed estates into the late 19th century. The families coexisted here in tense and uneasy circumstances, fueled especially by the fact that the Ibrahimis had long assumed the leadership of the local Kirmani branch of Shaykhism (a religious movement based on the metaphysical teachings of the late Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsaʾi, from whom the Babis and Bahaʾi also trace their prophetic heritage), while the Vakil al-Mulkis were central players among the local mutasharʿi (or so-called orthodox) Shiʿi community. With the expansion of commercial cotton and opium production, several Rafsanjani merchants emerged whose household estates were subjected to the growing confrontation between the Ibrahimis and Vakil al-Mulkis in the guise of Shaykhi– mutasharʿi factionalism. The Ahmadi household’s eponymous founder, Hajj Aqa Ahmad, was the son of one of Kirman’s most successful early 19th century international merchants, Aqa ʿAli, who passed down to him considerable landed estates in Rafsanjan. Hajj Aqa Ahmad, however, did not take up his father’s profession as

82 A regional political economy a merchant and instead pursued an education in religious sciences. He studied first with the mutasharʿi ʿulamaʾ in Kirman and Yazd before making his way to the shrine towns of Karbala and Najaf, acquiring ijazas from some of the most prominent scholars of the day.77 Upon his return to Kirman, he acquired a stipendiary post at Kirman City’s Maʿsum Bik Madrasa, one of the city’s leading institutions of religious education, and became recognized as Kirman’s leading mujtahid (Shiʿi jurisprudent).78 In one generation, the Ahmadi line had been transformed from part of a rural mercantile elite to a leading urban household with ties to one of the great institutions of sociocultural prestige in the city. The Ahmadi landholdings, centered in Rafsanjan, were extensive and enormously profitable. The village of Husayniyya was perhaps the most lucrative piece of agricultural land in Kirman, said to be worth over 50,000 tumans in the 1870s.79 When Hajj Aqa Ahmad died in 1878, his sons inherited considerable wealth and prestige.80 His son and leading student, Abu Jaʿfar, replaced him as Kirman’s leading mujtahid and lived comfortably from his inheritance, such that he even declined to administer vaqf properties.81 A younger son, Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi, lived on the revenues of his landholdings and spent his time writing numerous treatises, including Farmandihan-i Kirman and Tarikh-i Yahya and later represented Kirman in the first national Majlis (parliament). The Ibrahimi household had a long-established presence in Rafsanjan, reaching back far before the boom in commercial agriculture in the 1860s and 1870s began attracting the attention of other urban households. The Ibrahimis were the descendants of Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla (d. 1826), the Qajar prince-governor of Kirman charged with reconstructing the province following the 1794 Qajar siege of the city and its subsequent destruction along with the massacre, blinding, or enslavement of much of its population. During his years as governor from 1803 to 1826, Ibrahim Khan reconstructed Kirman City around a cluster of institutions known as the Ibrahimiyyah Complex, with the Ibrahimiyyah Madrasa at its center.82 In addition, Ibrahim Khan and his twenty-two sons, as well as an unknown number of daughters, became major landholders throughout the province through purchase, the revival of qanats, which gave them rights to newly cultivated lands, and intermarriage with elite landholding families. Their landholdings were extensive throughout the province but were concentrated in Isfandiqa and Jiruft to the south of Kirman City, and especially in the flourishing agricultural center to the west in Rafsanjan.83 Ibrahim Khan’s eldest son, Muhammad Karim Khan, not only became the head of the Ibrahimi household after his father’s death in 1826 but was also the originator of the Kirmani Shaykhi movement after his return to the city in 1830, having spent much of his early life studying with the Shaykhi leader Kazim Rashti.84 Muhammad Karim Khan transformed the Ibrahimiyyah Madrasa into the chief center of the Shaykhi community that grew under the spiritual leadership, patronage, and familial networks of the Ibrahimis. The Ibrahimiyyah Complex in Kirman City was supported throughout the 19th century by a series of vaqf endowments originating with the Ibrahimi family, which bequeathed portions of its extensive landholdings in the province.85

Household networks and rural integration 83 Economic competition was fierce between two blocs of households in Rafsanjan, the Ibrahimi-Shaykhi community on one hand and the mutasharʿi or balasari Shiʿi faction connected to the Vakil al-Mulkis and Ahmadis on the other, each built around the sociocultural and economic resources of Kirman’s religious institutions and their endowments, and, increasingly, the profits from land investments. Following a series of droughts resulting in food shortages in the 1870s, this economic competition devolved into factional violence. In 1878, the first in a series of violent incidents took place, which were recalled by a member of the Ahmadi family as sectarian riots in the tradition of the Haydari–Niʿmati luti factionalism, now under the guise of Shaykhi–mutasharʿi sectarianism.86 Underlying these conflicts was a competition over resources, both economic and sociocultural, between two expanding networks of elite Kirmani households. The tense atmosphere in Rafsanjan is perhaps best expressed through the story of another major merchant from this district who, like Aqa Ahmad’s father, appears in sources under the generic name of Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani. This Aqa ʿAli began as a peddler and worked his way to becoming Kirman’s wealthiest merchant in the 1870s. He made his money through the boom in commercial agriculture in Rafsanjan, purchasing goods in his home district and transporting them to market in Kirman City, a pattern which over time he expanded into a vast trade network on an international scale. With his profits from international trade, Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani invested heavily in landed properties in Rafsanjan and came to own a collection of villages estimated to be worth 100,000 tumans.87 Unlike the Ahmadis, Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani associated himself with the Shaykhi community, and founded the leading Shaykhi mosque in Kirman City, the Chihil Sutun. He was primarily a merchant and, despite his wealth, appears to have failed to establish himself among the sociocultural elite of Kirman City. His investments in Shaykhi institutions, most notably the Chihil Sutun mosque, did little to endear him to the mutasharʿielite. His inheritance scheme, which favored his Shaykhi son, from a Shaykhi mother, over an older mutasharʿi son, from a mutasharʿi mother, resulted in an intrafamily conflict and was challenged in the local sharʿia courts. After the Shaykhi branch of his family appealed to the provincial government, the mutasharʿi son approached the Qajar court with an enormous bribe, which resulted in Aqa ʿAli’s estate being dismantled and partially sold off.88 This demonstrates yet again that even with the appearance of merchants with great monetary wealth, sociocultural prestige was crucial in reproducing and transmitting elite status from generation to generation. The failure of Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani to navigate Kirman’s sociocultural politics left his estate effectively dismantled after his death.

The sale of crown lands By the late 1880s, the Qajar state was burdened with debt from its attempts to keep pace with militarily and technologically advanced European states. The need for cash to pay foreign loans led the state to look for new ways to raise capital, including the sale of offices and the granting of concessions to foreign nationals.

84 A regional political economy Nasir al-Din Shah’s courtiers and advisers urged him to privatize the state’s notoriously unproductive khalisa crown lands as another means of raising capital.89 This resulted in a farman issued in 1889–90 by Nasir al-Din Shah that ordered the sale of khalisa lands in the provinces to private individuals. Peasants on khalisa lands normally produced grains such as wheat and barley to pay their dues to the government in kind. This was then held in government granaries and sold at market to pay salaries and stipends to state and military officials. The former khalisa lands, once in private hands, were in many cases utilized instead for commercial agricultural production destined for international trade. Khalisa lands were quite extensive in Kirman, and as elsewhere in the Qajar domains, they were bought up by urban elites, being the only group with the capital to afford them.90 This further accelerated the accumulation of rural properties in the hands of elite urban households. Mirza Riza Muhandis, traveling with Gleadowe-Neucomen’s 1904 commercial mission to southeastern Iran, noted that the conversion of these lands to private property had the effect of raising prices on grain, which government granaries often sold at a discounted rate to hold down food prices.91 This suggests that the transfer of khalisa lands to private ownership was a widespread phenomenon. Among the notable properties sold were Kabutar Khan and Baghayn, the latter then becoming a major producer of opium.92 The distortion of the local agricultural market with the gradual, but significant, rise in prices internationally of opium, cotton, and henna seriously altered the relationship between urban and rural communities, to the benefit of the former. The production of these high-value cash crops required large inputs of land. The realization of enormous profits from agriculture thus drove up the price of land over a very short period of time beginning in the 1840s. During the governorship of Vakil al-Mulk I – who improved both transportation and irrigation works throughout the province and cleared the way for the revival of the Indian trade through the Persian Gulf – land values are said to have increased tenfold in some parts of the province.93 This peaked during the enormously profitable opium and henna booms of the 1880s and 1890s. The meteoric rise in land prices accompanying the cotton and henna export trade, and accelerated by the opium boom, was nothing less than catastrophic for rural elites, who were subjected to greater competition than ever before from wealthier and better connected urban elites. Landed properties, the basis of the social and economic resources of elite culture, became concentrated in the hands of a small core of relatively wealthier and better connected urban elite households.

Rural integration and the fate of the Aqayan and tribal elites As urban elites began accumulating more and more land in Kirman’s rural agricultural districts, they gradually pushed out and usurped the social and political roles of rural households. As John Foran has pointed out, much of the scholarship on the economic history of late 19th century Iran has attempted to characterize the period as either the first stage of modernization and development or an era of abject economic decline.94 It is clear from a closer look at the experience of

Household networks and rural integration 85 the elite households of Kirman that this transformation of the regional economy produced both winners and losers. Those households that were able to invest capital in land during the early expansion of commercial agriculture benefited enormously from the production of cotton, dyes, and opium. On the other hand, with the growth of urban estates and their unprecedented spread into the countryside, there is also evidence of the displacement of rural elites. Some of these rural households had held land and administrative posts, and the financial and sociocultural resources associated with them, for many generations but were unable to compete with relatively wealthier and better connected urban notables as land prices began to rise markedly and control of administrative posts such as tax collection became more and more lucrative. Once the norm, rural landlords based in the larger villages and administrative centers of the districts had declined by the end of the 19th century in favor of their urban counterparts. One notable example is the case of Anar, a district northwest of Kirman City along the route between Bahramabad and Yazd. Anar was once dominated by a household known as the Aqayan-i Anar, reputed to have held control of administrative posts in the district since the time of Timur. By the 1870s, however, the Aqayan-i Anar were “less than one hundred individuals ruined and living in poverty.”95 Vakil al-Mulk established his influence in Anar by appointing a new administrator, a local kadkhuda named Abu al-Hasan Khan Anari. The connection between Vakil al-Mulk and Abu al-Hasan Khan can be characterized as a clientele relationship, utilized by the Vakil al-Mulk household to expand its interests in the northern districts of Kirman. Abu al-Hasan Khan was then granted the lucrative office of ʿamil of Rafsanjan, a position which was open to some contestation.96 Like Anar, Rafsanjan had recently been governed by a rural household with landholdings in the district. According to Vaziri, this household, known as the Aqayan-i Rafsanjan, had declined severely over the previous generations, and by the 1870s, “the number of men in that line [had] fallen below five hundred and both the rich and poor [were] abundant.”97 As one of the more profitable agricultural districts, Rafsanjan had been carved up by urban elites like the Ibrahimis and Vaziris early in the 19th century, then further by the Vakil al-Mulkis as well as by two local mercantile households, the Ahmadis and the household of Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani, during the cotton boom. By granting the position of ʿamil to Abu al-Hasan Khan, the reach of the Vakil al-Mulkis was extended and the position was withheld from powerful rivals. Only a handful of tribal military households, in particular the Rudbaris and Liks, remained important players in the elite in the tribal lands south and east of Kirman City throughout the late 19th century. These did so through their ability to command and mobilize large military followings and by cultivating connections to landownership and administration. In districts of marginal agricultural value such as Jiruft and Rudbar, where there was little competition from urban elites, tribal elites like the Rudbaris and Liks remained the dominant social force. The Rudbari khans owned extensive property in these areas, and the headman Nur al-Din was among the wealthiest men in the province in the 1870s.98 Members of the Lik tribe, who also resided in Jiruft and Rudbar, worked under the Vakil

86 A regional political economy al-Mulki governors as commanders and secretaries in the provincial military forces.99 But most other tribal groups were on the decline. According to Vaziri, the once powerful Mihni tribe was under “constant pressure from the central government” and saw their population drop severely. By the mid-19th century, they had intermarried with the Vakil al-Mulk household, which then came into possession of much of their property.100 Another significant exception is the Bihzadi household of Bam. In Bam, the famed mud brick citadel garrisoned a provincial army responsible for patrolling its eastern tribal frontiers. In the politics of the Great Game in Central Asia, the Qajar state was compelled to maintain a presence along its ill-defined boundaries with the Khanate of Kalat to obviate any British encroachments in these territories. After several unsuccessful attempts by Qajar notables to subjugate the Baluchi tribes, the head of the local Bihzadi household, Ibrahim Khan Saʿd al-Dawla (d. 1884), who had previously served as deputy governor of Bam under Vakil al-Mulk’s brother, was charged with the task. Ibrahim Khan succeeded quickly in organizing much of Bam’s military elite through intermarriage and alliance and in establishing his military authority over the Baluchi tribes, extending Qajar military control (and taxation) deep into Baluchistan.101 In the process, the Bihzadis managed to wrest control over most high administrative as well as military posts in Bam from the long-standing “civilian” elites, particularly an administrative family known as the Mirzaʾi household.102 For his success in reestablishing Qajar control over Baluchistan, Ibrahim Khan was granted the courtly title of Saʿd al-Dawla, extensive tax-free land grants, and the rights to a portion of the taxes in Baluchistan. By the time of Qajar prince-governor Husayn ʿAli Mirza Farman Farma’s travels through Bam in 1894, for which he compiled a detailed report on Bam’s elites, members of the Bihzadi household dominated landholdings in the nearby district of Narmashir, which yielded the most lucrative henna crop in the province, while maintaining their military preeminence in Baluchistan under Qajar directives.103 Through the skillful manipulation of external forces, in this case political rather than economic in origin, the Bihzadis integrated a vast tribal territory through its household networks into Kirman’s newly emerging regional political economy.

Conclusion The greater social, political, and economic integration of Kirman’s agricultural districts was ultimately a product of the province’s own integration into the global economy as a producer of raw materials. Global economic forces, however, were but one aspect of the overall context in which this occurred. Members of Kirman’s urban elite responded to new opportunities for wealth and prestige by investing heavily in landed properties and commercial agricultural production as global demand sent the prices for these commodities soaring. This did not produce a new elite class that owed its wealth, prestige, and power to foreign trade104; the major investors were elements of existing urban landholders, adapting to changing circumstances while acting on behalf of their household estates. As in the example of Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani, merchants who did not manage to establish a stable household with the proper sociocultural credentials through investments in

Household networks and rural integration 87 landed estates, the right sorts of charitable activities, and administrative functions failed to enter into the circles of the provincial elite and reproduce or pass down their estate and good name to future generations. A curious result of Kirman’s greater integration into the global capitalist economy was that rather than undermining the position of Kirman’s elite, members of the elite acted upon new opportunities and greatly reinforced their status while leading the integration of the province within a regional political economy. A dramatic expansion of elite household networks through land investment was the key development tying rural villages to urban centers during the boom in international trade and cash cropping. The result of their direct control of the rural hinterland through land ownership and, by extension, administration was an intensification of the flow of wealth from rural agricultural districts to the urban center through the networks of Kirman’s elite households. By usurping the role of the rural landed elite, whose remnants were still evident in the 1870s, urban elite households such as the Kalantaris, Vaziris, Ibrahimis, and Bihzadis extended the long-standing model of Qajar political rule, through the intermediacy of urban elite households, into nearly every corner of the province. This process of regional integration was an important precursor to the more assertive state-sponsored centralization and modernization programs of the Pahlavi era.

Notes A version of this chapter was published previously as James M. Gustafson, “Household Networks and Rural Integration in Qajar Kirman,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46, no. 1 (2014). 1 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 27, 29, 31, 32, 37. Schindler and Kiepert, Reisen im Südlichen Persien 1879, 830. The historian Edward Browne remarked that these new additions remained among the finest buildings in the city when he visited in 1888. See Browne, Year Amongst the Persians, 469. 2 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 111, 35, 82, 85, 87. 3 Ibid., 86, 94–95, 111, 17, 23–24, 88. 4 Euan Smith, “Perso-Afghan Mission,” 179. 5 St. John, “Narrative of a Journey,” 100. 6 For the former argument, see Gad G. Gilbar, “The Opening up of Qajar Iran: Some Economic and Social Aspects,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 49, no. 1 (1986). For the dependency approach, see esp. John Foran, “The Concept of Dependent Development as a Key to the Political Economy of Qajar Iran (1800–1925),” Iranian Studies 22, no. 2/3 (1989). 7 There are three notable exceptions of detailed provincial histories on Qajar Iran. Walcher, Shadow of the King, is a history of Isfahan under the Qajars, heavily focused on the relationship between Zill al-Sultan and various British administrators and missionaries. There is a stronger focus on provincial society itself in Werner, An Iranian Town in Transition, although this deals only with the Zand and early Qajar periods. Mohammad Ali Kazembeyki has written a thematic study of the social and economic structure of Qajar Mazandaran: Mohammad Ali Kazembeyki, Society, Politics and Economics in Mazandaran, Iran, 1848–1914 (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2003). A special edition of Iranian Studies in 2000 was devoted to provincial histories and includes a study of a local history of Tabriz from the Qajar period, Christoph Werner, “The Amazon, the Sources of the Nile, and Tabriz: Nadir Mirza’s Tarikh va Jughrafiyi

88 A regional political economy

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9 10 11

12 13

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Dar al-Saltana-yi Tabriz and the Local Historiography of Tabriz and Azerbaijan,” Iranian Studies 33, no. 1–2 (2000). See also in the same volume, Charles Melville, “Persian Local Histories: Views from the Wings,” ibid. Markovits, Global World of Indian Merchants. From the same author, see also “Structure and Agency in the World of Asian Commerce during the Era of European Colonial Domination (c. 1750–1950),” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50, no. 2/3 (2007). Gilbar, “The Muslim Big Merchant-Entrepreneurs.” Ashraf, “Dual Class Structure.” See, for example, Shahbaz Shahnavaz, Britain and the Opening up of South-West Persia 1880–1914: A Study in Imperialism and Economic Eependence (New York: Routledge Curzon, 2005), and Hooshang Amirahmadi, The Political Economy of Iran under the Qajars: Society, Politics and Foreign Relations, 1796–1926 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2012). See, for example, the discussion of Iran’s transition from “pseudo-feudalism” to “proto-capitalism” in Political Economy. Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine. Manu Goswami makes a similar observation in relation to the Indian Ocean region, writing that “the first sustained articulations of nationalism in colonial South Asia crystallized around the notion of a territorially delimited economic collective, a national economy during the 1870s and 1880s.” Manu Goswami, “From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, Territory in Colonial South Asia, 1870 to 1907,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 40, no. 4 (1998): 611. Meeker, A Nation of Empire. Matthee, Politics of Trade; Mann, The Sources of Social Power. Vaziri, Jughrafiya. A brief summary is available in German in Busse, “Kerman im 19. Jahrhundert nach der Geographie des Waziri.” Ahmadi, Farmandihan. See also Ahmadi’s timeline of Kirman’s history placed alongside broader Iranian and global historical developments in Tarikh-i Yahya. Farmanfarma and Afshar, Musfaratnama-yi Kirman va Baluchistan. Farmanfarma and Ittihadiyya, Safarnama-yi Kirman wa Balucistan. Farmanfarma et al., Mallahan-i Khak. The financial activities of prominent merchants are telling in this regard. Those who achieved wealth and power through activities that lay beyond land, religious learning, and administration – such as international trade – were commonly excluded from the ranks of the aʿyan notables. Many of the most successful Qajar-era merchants, such as Amin al-Zarb and Hajj Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani, invested heavily in land, which could hardly have returned profits equivalent to their investments in international trade. This can best be explained as an attempt to acquire sociocultural resources and a level of prestige that would help secure and reproduce their social standing. Hodgson, Venture of Islam, 2: 64–69. A similar model for Ottoman elites is presented in Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables.” Hourani’s “politics of notables” model was noted as a “structural, long-term feature of the political domain in the Middle East, as well as other Islamic regions,” in Shoshan, “The ‘Politics of Notables’ in Medieval Islam.” Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 58, 68. Vaziri notes that these districts remained under his family’s ownership in the 1870s. Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 47; Vaziri, Tarikh, 369, 88. Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 50–52. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 68–69. Ibrahim Khan’s sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons married a who’s who of Kirman’s elite and are mostly listed as absentee landlords or administrators over their personal landholdings. Ibid., 55–58. Precise information on crop-sharing agreements from the Qajar era is not available. In his fieldwork in Kirman in the 1960s, Paul Ward English reports that a long-standing 70% share for the landowner remained standard at that time, though it is unclear whether this extended back to the Qajar period. English, City and Village. Willem

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25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

40

41 42 43 44

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Floor estimates an 80% share for landlords in the Qajar period, in Floor, Agriculture in Qajar Iran. The consensus is that the peasants received only a small share of the produce from the land they worked, with the majority making its way into the hands of elite households in larger villages and urban centers. Weber, Roth, and Wittich, Economy and Society, 357–59. Joanna deGroot also noted the correlation of land rights and administration in her study of “regionalism” in Kirman; see Joanna De Groot, “Kerman in the Late Nineteenth Century: a Regional Study of Society and Social Change” (1977). Abrahamian, “Oriental Despotism,” 13–17. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 126. Euan Smith, “Perso-Afghan Mission,” 234–35. Rudolph Matthee, “The East India Company Trade in Kerman Wool, 1658–1730,” in Études Safavides, ed. Jean Calmard (Paris-Tehran: Institut Français de Recherche en Iran, 1993). On the commercialization of agriculture in Qajar Iran, see esp. the works of Ahmad Seyf, “Commercialization of Agriculture: Production and Trade of Opium in Persia, 1850–1906,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 16, no. 2 (1984); “Foreign Firms and Local Merchants in Nineteenth-Century Iran,” Middle Eastern Studies 36, no. 4 (2000); and “Obstacles to the Development of Capitalism: Iran in the Nineteenth Century,” Middle Eastern Studies 34, no. 3 (1998). See also Floor, Agriculture in Qajar Iran. Gilbar, “The Muslim Big Merchant-Entrepreneurs.” Gilbar, “The Opening up of Qajar Iran,” 78. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 158. John Malcolm, Sketches of Persia: From the Journals of a Traveller in the East (London: Murray, 1828). Vaziri, Tarikh, 803–804. A. Reza Sheikholeslami, The Structure of Central Authority in Qajar Iran, 1871– 1896 (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1997). Vaziri, Tarikh, 806. Muhammad Hasan Khan and Muhammad Ismaʿil Rizvani, Tarikh-i Muntazam-i Nasiri (Tehran: Dunya-yi Kitab, 1984), 3:1826. Ahmadi gives 1282/1866 as the date of Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan’s formal appointment, but also mentions that “if you ask 100 different people . . . you will get 100 different answers.” That he was de facto governor since 1859 is more significant. Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 108. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 43. Vaziri notes that in establishing alliances with the tribal khans, Vakil al-Mulk “gave a daughter and took a daughter for his sons.” A brief account of his military campaign in Baluchistan is contained in “Translation of Extract from Tehran Gazette of 29th May 1862,” United Kingdom, The National Archives at Kew, Foreign Office archives (hereafter FO) 248/203. Matthee, Politics of Trade, 69–74. See, for example, Ahmad Seyf, “Commercialization of Agriculture: Production and Trade of Opium in Persia, 1850–1906,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 16 (1984): 233–50; and Gilbar, “The Opening up of Qajar Iran.” R. Thomson, “Memorandum on Opium Trade of Persia,” 6 March 1869, FO 60/322, reprinted in Charles Issawi, The Economic History of Iran, 1800–1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 240–41. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 83, 86, 87, 104, 152, 178. Fine opium is listed among Kirman’s agricultural produce by numerous other travelers and diplomats prior to the 1860s. See, for example, Keith Abbott et al., Cities & Trade: Consul Abbott on the Economy and Society of Iran, 1847–1866 (London: Ithaca Press, 1983); and Nicolas de Khanikoff, Memoire sur la Partie Meridionale de l’Asie Centrale: Par Nicolas De Khanikoff (Paris: L. Martinet, 1861), 198. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 83.

90 A regional political economy 46 Walter Baring, “Report by Mr. Baring on Trade and Cultivation of Opium in Persia,” 23 September 1881, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports by Her Majesty’s Secretaries of Embassy and Legation on the Manufactures, Commerce, &c., of the Countries in which they Reside. Part I [C.3103] (1882). 47 Percy Sykes, “Report on the Trade and Commerce of the Consular Districts of Kerman and Persian Beluchistan from March, 1894 to March, 1895,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [c.7919] (1896). 48 G. Lucas, “Memorandum on the Cultivation and Exportation of Opium in Persia,” in “Report on the Trade of the Persian Gulf and Muscat for the Years 1874–75” (23 Jan 1875), House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from Her Majesty’s Consuls on the Manufactures, Commerce, &c., of their Consular Districts. Part II [c.2529] (1880), 66; Baring, “Report,” 50. 49 Consul-General Ross, “Bushire, Report by Consul-General Ross on the Trade of the Persian Gulf for the Year 1884,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Commercial. No. 20 (1885). (Trade Reports.) Reports from Her Majesty’s Consuls on the Manufactures, Commerce, &c., of their Consular Districts. Part VII [c.4524] (1884– 85), 1146. 50 Lewis Pelly, “Report by Colonel Pelly to the Indian Government,” in Issawi, Economic History, 166–67. 51 Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of Modern Iran: 1926–1979 (New York: New York University Press, 1981), 27. 52 Even European observers, who tended to overlook the activities of native merchants in favor of their own, consistently note the predominance of Iranian merchants in the Perso-Indian trade prior to the 1890s. See, for example, Baring, “Report,” 52. 53 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 78–79, 100, 172. 54 Although Iran’s first telegraph lines were operative in 1865, according to Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi the first telegraph line did not reach Kirman until 1879. Ahmadi, Tarikh-i Yahya, 321, 325. 55 A. H. Gleadowe-Neucomen, “Report on the Commercial Mission to South-Eastern Persia During 1904–1905,” FO 368/38; Sykes, “Report on Trade and Commerce.” 56 St. John, “Narrative of a Journey,” 100. 57 Schindler and Kiepert, Reisen, 830. 58 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 32; Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 115. 59 Vaziri, Tarikh, 808. 60 One instance cited in Vaziri is of multiple branches added to the qanat at Nusratabad. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 105. 61 Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 106, n. 1. 62 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 170–71. 63 See, for example, the discussion of politics in Kirman leading up to the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, in Nazim al-Islam Kirmani and Saʿidi Sirjani, Tarikh-i Bidari-i Iraniyan (Tehran: Muʾassasih-yi Intisharat-i Agah, 1983), 1:309. 64 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 152. 65 Farmanfarma, Mallahan-i Khak, 88–89. 66 Gleadowe-Neucomen, “Report on the Commercial Mission,” 46–47. 67 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 158. 68 Sykes, “Report on Trade and Commerce.” 69 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 157. 70 Sheikholeslami, The Structure of Central Authority. 71 Perhaps the best demonstration of this appears in Werner, An Iranian Town in Transition. 72 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 63–64. 73 Ibid., 64–65, 91. 74 Ibid., 65. 75 Sykes, “Report on Trade and Commerce.”

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90

91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104

Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 169. Ibid., 44–45. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 45. Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 126. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 45. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 54–58. Muhammad Karim Khan’s return to Kirman City took place in the context of a struggle for control over the Ibrahimi estate after a certain Sayyid Javad married into the Ibrahimi family and attempted to assert his control over the madrasa and its endowments. See Niʿmat Allah Rizvi, Tadhkirat al-Awliya fi Sharh Ahwal . . . Muhammad Karim Khan al-Kirmani (Bombay: n.p., 1895), 72–73. Several Shaykhi vaqfnamas from Kirman are reprinted in Denis Hermann and Omid Rezai, “Le Rôle du Vaqf dans la Formation de la Communauté Shaykhi Kermani à l’Époque Qajar (1259–1324/1843–1906),” Studia Iranica 36, no. 1 (2007): 87–131. Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 123. On Haydari-Niʿmati factionalism, see Willem Floor, “The Political Role of the Lutis in Iran,” in Modern Iran: The Dialectics of Continuity and Change, ed. M. E. Bonine and N. R. Keddie (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981), 83–95; and John R. Perry, “Toward a Theory of Iranian Urban Moieties: The Haydariyyah and Niʿmatiyyah Revisited,” Iranian Studies 32 (1999): 51–70. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 169. See Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani-Parizi’s annotations in Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 140–41. Muzaffar Shahidi, “Amlak-i Khalisa va Siyasat-i Furush-i An dar Dawra-yi Nasiri,” in Tarikh-i Muʿasir-i Iran 1, no. 3 (1976): 65. Shahidi suggests that the advice of these courtiers was ultimately self-serving, as Nasir al-Din Shah’s advisers themselves were among those who profited most from the policy, buying up enormous tracts of khalisa land throughout the country. A notice in the Qajar state paper on Vakil al-Mulk I notes that even the core agricultural districts like Sirjan and Rafsanjan contained substantial khalisa lands. Entry for 14 Jumadi II 1280, in Saniʿ al-Mulk Ghaffari and Mirza Abu al-Hasan Khan, Ruznama-yi Dawlat-i ʿAliyya-yi Iran, 1 (1861), 622. ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farmanfarma commented repeatedly on khalisa lands during his 1894 journey through Bam and Narmashir, at which time they still made up a large portion of the overall landholdings in the eastern portions of the province. Farmanfarma, Musafaratnama. Farmanfarma et al., Mallahan-i Khak, 140. Ibid., 137; Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 87. Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 107. Foran, “The Concept of Dependent Development,” 5. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 183. Ibid., 184. Ibid., 173. Ibid., 62, 125. Ibid., 73–74. Ibid., 113, 120. Gazetteer of Persia: Compiled for Political and Military Reference . . . in the Intelligence Branch, Quarter Master General’s Dept. in India. Simla; Calcutta: 1885, 4:36; Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 98–99. Farmanfarma, Musafaratnama, 54–59. Ibid., 62–101. For an alternate view, see Ahmad Ashraf, “The Roots of Emerging Dual Class Structure in Nineteenth-Century Iran,” Iranian Studies 14 (1981): 5–27.

4

From cotton to carpets Consolidating a regional economy

The last decades of the 19th century were a transitional period in the economic history of Iran, the Ottoman Empire, and the Indian Ocean region. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 initiated a period of increased trade between Asia and western Europe, supplying emerging industrial economies with raw materials and opening markets for processed goods. As discussed in the previous chapter, the transformations of local economies through cash cropping and international trade were largely carried out by powerful elements within local communities who were not only responding to, but also shaping, changes in the global economy. In Kirman, local merchants and landowners expanded the province’s connections to global trade and integrated rural districts into a regional economy with the commercialization of agriculture. This intense factional competition between urban elite families shaped the effects of this transformation in the broader Kirman region. Through the skillful management of their estates, Kirman’s landowning, administrative, and religious scholarly elites thrived in this environment and maintained a central position for themselves in their community. Looking for new opportunities to expand their local networks of social power and their global networks of trade, Kirmani elites transformed local handicraft production in much the same way that they changed agricultural production earlier in the 19th century. The carpet trade soon brought Kirmani products to the global market in force. The Kirmani carpet boom followed a period of transition in which a new generation of local elites came into control of their families’ networks and estates. The heads of three of Kirman’s most powerful and well-connected urban households died over the course of the 1870s. In 1871, Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan died and his son Muhammad Rahim Khan quickly asserted himself as the spiritual leader of the Kirmani Shaykhi community and head of the Ibrahimi household, controlling the family’s estate and the complex of Shaykhi institutions in the center of Kirman City. The leading Shiʿi mujtahid in Kirman, Hajj Aqa Ahmad, passed away a few years later in 1878 and was similarly succeeded by his son Abu Jaʿfar Ahmadi in both his role as a Shiʿi jurisprudent and in his place at the head of the Ahmadi family.1 The Vakil al-Mulkis’ governorships also came to an end in 1878 when Vakil al-Mulk II was unable to prevent the onset of famine during a serious drought accompanied by severe dust storms, which escalated into shortages and high food prices. Although Vakil al-Mulk II was recalled to Tehran in the spring of

From cotton to carpets 93 1878, where he died the following year, several of his sons remained entrenched in the provincial administration. By the end of the 1870s, a new generation of Kirmani elites had come to the foreground in Kirman and had begun exploring new methods to expand the wealth, power, and prestige of their household networks. Factionalism continued to play an important part in driving the competition between households and became increasingly severe as the transition to commercial agriculture altered economic conditions and contributed to shortages. In the midst of the 1877 famine, rioting and looting broke out in Kirman City, and a large crowd destroyed the house of Vakil al-Mulk II’s son, the lieutenant governor Muhammad Husayn Khan. The mob then broke into government granaries, which held the grains paid to the divan as taxes in kind, and carted off the contents.2 Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi likened this factional violence to the Haydari–Niʿmati riots of earlier periods, rebranded and “sometimes called Shaykhi and Balasari (mutasharʿi),” demonstrating the depth of the divisions among the urban elite and their success at building their networks of social power across social strata.3 In an attempt to quell this violence, Husayn ʿAli Khan Sartip, who headed a cavalry force in Zarin, was brought in to Rafsanjan to restore order. His solution was to summon the new heads of Kirman’s leading families, Muhammad Rahim Khan (Ibrahimi), Shaykh Abu Jaʿfar Ahmadi, and Mirza Mihdi Khan Kalantar, and send them away from the province for a time in an attempt to ease tensions.4 However the violence continued to escalate, punctuated by a mob attacking and killing the kalantar of Kirman City, Yahya Khan.5 The Qajar court intervened and appointed the Minister of War, Firuz Mirza Nusrat al-Dawla Farman Farma, to govern Kirman.6 Firuz Mirza quickly succeeded in putting down the riot by publicly executing five men for the murder of Yahya Khan and fixed prices on basic commodities to combat speculation while importing grain to further ensure the food supply.7 Firuz Mirza’s appointment was a transition moment in its own right, as he was the first in a line of Farman Farma prince-governors of Kirman that extended through World War I. Kirman’s urban elite not only survived the upheavals surrounding the 1878 famine and the factional violence associated with it, the new generation of elites emerged from this episode with lucrative new ventures to pursue. In the decades that followed, their rivalries intensified and expanded into investments in new commercial enterprises. When international demand for Persian carpets developed, encouraged by the British consulate that opened in 1894, they invested profits from these cash cropping ventures into opening carpet manufactories in the city. The booms and busts in the trade in export commodities not only drove Kirman’s absorption into the global economy, but the elites organizing the investments consolidated their control over a regional political economy in Kirman extending through their household networks. The difference between the urban‒rural integration emerging in the 1840s‒1870s and the situation current in the 1890s and 1900s was not simply a matter of scale, but of type. With the carpet boom, the overall scope of the economic, political, and social power of Kirmani elites not only was substantially enlarged spatially, but also enveloped a larger number of actors and penetrated nearly every sector

94 A regional political economy of production and trade. The procurement of wool from local tribes and the institution of wage labor in the city involved wider swaths of the population, while the growing import sector, organized along lines of mass production of woven goods, decimated local handicraft production, drove the monetization of the local economy, and created pressures for urbanization and migration with new wage labor opportunities in Kirman City. A strong perception persists in the historiography of Qajar trade that the transformation of communities was driven by foreign commercial interest and investment, with little to no practical impact by Iranian elites. When local participants are introduced, they are generally regarded as significant players only because they represented some sort of newly emerging social group. Beshara Doumani, for instance, notes the impact of local merchants in consolidating a regional economic zone in 19th century Palestine, detailing the transformation of the local elite into a mercantile community: a “new social group and new type of local notable.”8 Ahmed Ashraf, writing on 19th century Iran, similarly describes global capitalism creating a “dual class structure” marked by the creation of a new social grouping connected to international commerce rather than local power structures.9 As noted in previous chapters, in Kirman it was primarily the small core of local landowning, administrative, and religious scholarly families that led the way in reshaping patterns of interconnectivity and exchange with the wider world. By World War I, Kirman’s urban household networks were the arteries of a well-consolidated regional economy plugged in to these wider global networks of exchange. It is clear in the process of consolidating a regional political economy in the case of Kirman that local elites actively upheld the normative character of the local social structure in the context of intense elite factionalism while building their estates. A legacy of exploring Iranian economic history through an exaggerated concentration on European mercantile activity has also resulted in overlooking connections to the Indian Ocean world in favor of trade relations with the west. Claude Markovits has noted the importance of recognizing local agency in reshaping trade networks throughout the greater Indian Ocean region for some time now, and Kirman was clearly within the sphere of Indian merchants’ activities.10 Indeed, a Shikarpuri merchant community in Kirman City carried on a considerable international trade, and the British consulate continually attempted to expand trade with British India in part by trying to revive overland caravan routes through Quetta. Despite the growing international interest in expanding trade with markets like Kirman, the overall impact of these enterprises on reshaping Kirman’s economy, society, and politics was minimal compared with the impact of the activities of Kirman’s own local agents. In the pivotal years between 1878 and 1905, when elites consolidated Kirman’s regional political economy, the active upholding of sociocultural norms underlay the social structure in which their households were situated. The analysis of this process in Kirman will, it is hoped, add to this conversation on the transformation of the Indian Ocean region with an eye to the intensely local, contingent nature of change at the level of communities while interacting with a changing global economy.

From cotton to carpets 95

Figure 4.1 Sketch showing caravan routes

Structure and agency: global forces and local transformations There is a long-standing debate in the social sciences and humanities over the relative importance of local agency and the global economic structures local agents operated within in the process of modern economic change. Since the 1970s and 1980s, Immanuel Wallerstein’s monumental four-volume work The Modern World-System has served as the dominant structural paradigm for analyzing modern global economic history. In World-Systems Theory, the rise of global capitalist structures involved the absorption of “peripheral” regions like the Middle East and greater Indian Ocean regions into a position of systemic dependency around a European “core.” Demand for raw materials and labor for European industry created conditions in peripheral regions like Iran in which the cash cropping of cotton or opium was a predictable outcome, shaped more by global capitalist structures than the free will of local agents. To Wallerstein, “incorporation into the capitalist world-economy was never at the initiative of those being incorporated. The process derived rather from the need of the world-economy to expand its boundaries, a need which was itself the outcome of pressures internal to the world-economy.”11 John Foran described this dynamic in Qajar economic history as “dependent development,” in which Iran experienced economic development but of a type that transformed it into a functional component of a world economic system in which Iran was a dependent, peripheral player.12

96 A regional political economy More recent scholarship on the rise of modern capitalism in the Middle East and greater Indian Ocean regions has stressed a dialectical relationship between global structures and local agency. In the Ottoman Empire, scholars have noted that local merchants extended their trade networks over the late 19th century and helped reshape local productive patterns in response to changes in demand in the global economy. Claude Markovits noted that in the Indian Ocean region, native merchants from Sind found ways to create their own niches in transforming production and trade.13 Indian merchants created their commercial enterprises extending into the Middle East, Central Asia, throughout the Indian Ocean region, and into China in the context of booming global trade, not simply as agents of the periphery, but as businessmen shrewdly seeking means to benefit from the shifting dynamics of the world around them. Global demand created the structural backdrop for the decisions made by local actors but did not dictate the shape and form of the changes in regional productive and trade patterns at will. These insights have demonstrated that it is not satisfactory to view the reshaping of nonWestern economies purely through a core‒periphery relationship given the complex web of regional interconnectivity and exchange that developed alongside the reshaping of local economies. Given the long-standing focus in the social sciences on the core‒periphery relationship between Iran and Europe, the activities of European agents have been greatly amplified and exaggerated in the historiography of the Qajar period. Economic historians of Iran have tended to view the expansion of international trade as almost entirely driven by British merchants as agents of change connected to global capitalism and describe the periods and stages of economic development according to the status of trade relations with the West. Homa Katouzian states that the doubling of international trade between 1868 and 1900, for instance, was “unlikely to have been due to any significant domestic economic development – on the contrary, it must have been the result of the growth of European demand for primary products and the pressure of European powers . . . to sell their manufactured products.”14 Indeed, the story of Iran’s integration into the global economy is often described through the dynamics of an “opening” of Iran’s market by foreign agents.15 Amirahmadi’s study of the political economy of Qajar Iran likewise traces its transition from “quasi-feudalism” to “pseudo-capitalism” over the course of the 19th century, driven by expanded contact with European markets and yet somehow getting both feudalism and capitalism wrong along the way.16 The neglect of local agency and regional dynamics has contributed to scholarly analysis focusing almost universally on “Iran” as a whole, at a time when there was clearly nothing like an integrated national economy in the Qajar Empire that might serve as a suitable object of analysis. That global structures and European agents contributed to reshaping Kirman’s local economy is not contested here. Rather, the overall shape and impact of European firms, merchants, and administrators’ participation in reshaping and restructuring regional economies does bear some critical reassessment. By the late 19th century, the British were certainly the predominant force in the Persian Gulf trade which linked the Qajars’ southern provinces with the

From cotton to carpets 97 markets of India, China, and Europe. This position was reinforced in the 1890s in response to a perception of increasing Russian and French competition. With Russia expanding ever deeper south in Central Asia toward India and given the fragile communication lines of the British through Iran, Kirman, though desolate, poor, and in their view “backward,” became an important geopolitical space to the British. Expanding British influence first required an extension of British commerce. In the words of Lord Curzon: [In the Persian Gulf] our position is still supreme; but on the commercial side it is being stoutly attacked; and commercial interests are the familiar precursor to political claims. On the other hand, if the expenditure of money and men, the introduction of peace and order and good government, the creation of a great trade, and the secure policing of the seas constitute a preponderating interest, ours is one which cannot be questioned.17 British diplomats attempted to utilize the carpet trade to strengthen the British strategic position in southern Iran in the context of their political rivalry with Russia in the Great Game. In November 1893, the British consul at Isfahan, J. R. Preece, paid a brief visit to Kirman City as part of a tour in the region designed to assess the potential for British economic and political expansion in southern Iran. He was impressed immediately by the potential of the burgeoning shawl and carpet weaving industries in the city. Kirman’s fine carpets were famed in Iran and India for their exceptional quality and durability. The local fine wool, known as kurk, taken from the undercoat of Kirman’s goats was considered among the finest in the world and even supplied many of the master weavers of Kashmir. With antique Persian rugs much in vogue in Europe, Preece saw the potential for British commercial expansion. There is but little trade at present in any of the Kerman carpets; some few are taken to India and sold to the chief people in Bombay and the Punjab. The main trade is done in Kerman itself, where the better sorts only are made. They are taken by the Governor and are sent as presents to the Shah, the Sadrazam, and other notables and friends. Some are bought by Turks for export to Constantinople. None are made on speculation. A carpet is never taken in hand until an advance is received. I am quite sure that it would not be difficult to develop this trade in Kerman in the same way as has been done in Irak. A little quiet persistence and patience would overcome all obstacles. Everything is ripe for it, a kind and friendly Governor anxious to see things progress, a poor district waiting to be helped. I imagine that an honest trial to improve this trade in Kerman would have a very cordial welcome from all classes.18 Kirman’s international trade was largely in the hands of a small community of British Indians from Shikarpur, which indeed gave the British the upper hand in establishing a strong commercial presence. The improvement of Kirman’s trade,

98 A regional political economy through the promotion of local industries, and in turn the stimulation of British imports through the Gulf ports were of clear strategic interest to Great Britain. The presence of a British consulate in Kirman after 1894 had an immediate and marked impact on the province. Already a powerful player at the Qajar court in Tehran, a more direct system of patronage established through the consular service meant an even deeper involvement in Iranian social and political issues. In Kirman, the British attempted to build mutually beneficial relationships between the consulate and ethno-linguistic or religious minority groups. The goal of the British, in the context of competition with Russia over territories in Iran and Central Asia, was to bring southeastern Iran into their sphere of political and commercial influence through the sponsorship and protection of two minority religious and ethnic groups there with ties to India: the Zoroastrian, or Parsi, community in Kirman and Yazd, and a small but active group of Shikarpuri Indian merchants in Kirman City. The southern provinces of the Qajar Empire remained a safe haven for many ethno-linguistic and religious minority groups like the small but well-organized Zoroastrian community. With less than 10,000 Zoroastrians thought to remain in Iran in the late 19th century, nearly 7,000 were estimated to reside in Yazd and a further 2,000 to 3,000 in the Zoroastrian quarter just outside the city walls of Kirman.19 Travelers throughout the Qajar period commented on the poor condition of Kirman’s Zoroastrian community in relation to their counterparts in Yazd, leading Paul Ward English to describe them as a “closed, introverted, and static society.”20 The longevity of the Zoroastrian community shows they found ways to coexist, though certainly not on equal terms. The Zoroastrian communities at Yazd and Kirman organized local anjumans, consisting of leading members of their respective communities (28 in Yazd and 12 in Kirman). As with the other city quarters, they also possessed their own kalantar to represent themselves to the provincial government. Both in Yazd and Kirman, Zoroastrian schools for boys and girls were established with the aid of the Society for the Amelioration of the Condition of Zoroastrians in Persia, founded by the Parsis of Bombay.21 With the recent appointment of a Russian agent in Yazd, the British India Office also appointed a native agent in 1889 “for the purpose of reporting what is going on in that part of Persia, and for the protection of the trade with India, nearly the whole of which is in the hands of Parsee merchants.”22 The protection and promotion of the Zoroastrian community became a matter of concern to the British strategy in Iran and Central Asia and contributed to the decision some five years later to appoint a representative in Kirman. British relations with these councils were strong. Prior to the establishment of the Yazd consulate, the heads of the Dutch firm Hotz and Sons dealt primarily with the Zoroastrian merchants and the anjuman, and when the proposition of establishing representation there was first put forward, the first candidate for a native agent was the leading Zoroastrian merchant and head of the Yazd anjuman, Ardashir Mihriban.23 Though the impropriety of putting a Zoroastrian in a position of authority over Muslims, and the question of his salary, ultimately led to the appointment of a British officer to serve as consul in Yazd, the relationship between the British and the Zoroastrian anjumans there and in Kirman remained strong.24

From cotton to carpets 99 While international trade in Yazd was largely in the hands of the Zoroastrian community, in Kirman a group of Indian merchants from Shikarpur, a predominantly Hindu settlement in Sind, dominated the Persian Gulf trade through Kirman. This group was part of a large regional network of Shikarpuri merchants stretching throughout the Arab world, Iran, Central Asia, Chinese Turkistan, and South Asia.25 They numbered perhaps twenty or thirty individuals in Kirman City, and 300 throughout the entire province, mostly spending three or four years engaged in imports and exports before returning to their homeland.26 Their networks extended primarily to the Punjab, Sind, and Bombay, where through their agents they conducted much of Kirman’s international trade through the Gulf.27 According to Sykes’ first report on the trade and commerce as consul at Kirman, about 60% of imports and 30% of exports were handled by the Shikarpuri Indian community, along with an additional twelve Muslim agents acting on behalf of British firms.28 They were a fairly wealthy minority in Kirman’s mercantile circles, and, as such, were also involved in money lending.29 The Shikarpuris, as British Indian subjects, provided an opportunity for the British to enhance their mercantile, and by extension political, influence. One of the first tasks seen to by Sykes in his capacity as British consul was to see that the Hindu traders, as British subjects, received the capitulatory rate of 5% on their exports; instead, many had been subjected to a 5% fee in Kirman City and an additional customs fee at Bandar ʿAbbas, with little means for recourse.30 Now with the promotion and protection of the British consulate, these Indian traders provided another pretext for extending British influence in the province besides protection of the Zoroastrian community. They are very urgent that a Consular Officer should be appointed to Kerman, who would be able to support them in their just demands and help them against unjust attacks, and such petty persecutions as an alien race is always subjected to in an Oriental country, where he has no official representative.31 Promoting an expansion of the Persian Gulf trade through the hands of these nominal British subjects served to enhance British influence. The consulate participated in improving Kirman’s trade, communication, and transportation infrastructure, including the improvement of the telegraph service to the city and revisions to the postal service. Sykes even suggested organizing Neucomen’s commercial mission to southeastern Persia in 1904, which made numerous recommendations on improving Kirman’s international trade and advertising opportunities for further British commercial penetration. These were highly successful enterprises. When a Russian consul was finally appointed late in 1903, the consul found himself isolated and unpopular and could count only one Russian subject among the local population. The British attempted to position themselves to benefit most from the carpet trade by supporting dependent Zoroastrian and Indian traders. In 1900, Percy Sykes sent a consignment of some eighty local woolen carpets and samples of various other local products overland to India through Quetta in an attempt to divert

100 A regional political economy some of the trade east in the hands of the Zoroastrian community.32 Although this first caravan turned a profit, the Quetta route was soon abandoned owing to the difficulties of the route and the relatively high cost of Kirmani carpets compared with the numerous inexpensive products already on the Indian market.33 The trade thus remained nearly exclusively in the hands of Tabrizi merchants through Istanbul to Europe. However, despite the failure of the Quetta route, the burgeoning carpet trade did benefit the Shikarpuri Indian and Zoroastrian merchants by generating demand for the imports they carried through the Gulf. Although fluctuating greatly, trade with India remained high. Peaking at £419,553 in 1895, it fell off to as low as £283,778 in 1897 before recovering to £338,415 in 1898.34 In 1900, however, a sudden collapse occurred owing to a combination of drought, insecurity on the major transport routes, high rates for shipping, and the new Belgian customs administration under Naus. The total of imports and exports through the Gulf was cut nearly in half.35 The percentage of this trade reaching Kirman is uncertain. The comments of Percy Sykes suggest that despite the overall decline in the Gulf trade, the Shikarpuri Indian and Zoroastrian merchants were prospering. In 1903, he cites a “growing demand for European furniture, plates, crockery, etc.,” supplied through India along with a durable trade in various “necessities in Persian households [that] cannot be replaced locally.”36 The protection of the Zoroastrian and Shikarpuri Indian communities provided a core of well-connected native merchants to carry British imports in the near total absence of British traders. Likewise, the consulate worked to better the position of these traders by expanding the export trade. This not only would theoretically stimulate the import trade, but also prevented the accumulation of unwanted Iranian currency once the import stock was disposed of. The storied Kirmani weaving industry caught the attention of British diplomats seeking local products to sell overseas. Antique carpets were in high demand in Europe in the 1890s, and now with much of the stock in local bazars depleted, British firms began investing in carpet manufacturing. Most notable were the Ziegler weaving factories in Sultanabad, which proved an enormously profitable venture.37 Among the non-Kirmanis involved in Kirman’s economic transformation were merchants and investors from elsewhere within the Qajar Empire. Most notably, the famous Amin al-Zarb, perhaps the wealthiest merchant in 19th century Iran.38 According to his published papers, Amin al-Zarb was drawn to Kirman by the boom in commercial agriculture and purchased land, produced opium, and developed trade networks within Kirman through his associates.39 Azeri merchants from Tabriz were also active alongside the Shikarpuri and Zoroastrian merchants in Kirman City. By the time of the carpet trade in the 1890s, it was largely these Azeri Turks carrying the international trade in Kirmani carpets overland to Istanbul, whence they made their way into the hands of the European middle and upper classes.40 In exploring the activities of British-aligned Zoroastrian and Shikarpuri Indian merchants, as well as non-Kirmani Iranian merchants, it is clear that they were mainly involved in buying and selling products like shawls and carpets, rather than organizing their production. The carriage of trade does not explain the

From cotton to carpets 101 transformation of productive relations, integration of the regional economy, or other sociopolitical changes that accompanied the expansion of the carpet trade. While Tabrizi merchants and British-sponsored Zoroastrian and Shikarpuri Indian merchants carried much of the international trade of carpets, contracted with weavers, and advanced capital for their production, local elites led the way in opening carpet manufactories and converting shawl factories to carpet weaving in Kirman City. At the same time, local elites competed with Tabrizi merchants by investing capital in the production of carpets for foreign demand, contracting with rural weavers, and retaining control of the local trade in wool, the major material input for carpet weaving. Thus after having strengthened their hold on the agricultural economy in the preceding decades, urban elites grasped the opportunity to assert control over industrial weaving, an extension of what was once the major local handicraft industry in Kirman. It is worth noting, however, that the growing British presence in Kirman played a big part in the international expansion of that trade and in marketing Persian carpets to Europe’s growing middle and upper classes.

Weaving and craft production in Kirman Much as the 18th century trade in Kirmani kurk wool opened global networks that were utilized for the expansion of cash cropping more broadly, this growing international trade in cotton, henna, and opium also created opportunities for the commercialization and trade of woven craft goods like shawls and carpets. Commercial carpet weaving developed from the local handicraft weaving industry, practiced by a small core of master weavers in Kirman City and Ravar, and in rural settings as a supplement to the agricultural economy. Weaving was a prominent craft among tribal and rural populations as a means of supplementing the meager incomes of pastoral and agricultural households. Kirmani weavers were highly skilled in their craft, producing patterns row by row recited from long descriptive manuscripts composed akin to poetry.41 The finest shawls measured up to three yards long and could take up to a year to produce, but fetched enormous profits.42 These fine Kirmani shawls were exported all over the Iranian plateau, Europe, and the Ottoman Empire by the 1870s.43 A single shawl or carpet could take a weaver several months to complete and required large inputs of material, capital, and labor. Production was organized in an agreement between the contractor and client, with the client normally advancing most or all of the money for the finished product. The reputation of Kirmani shawls and carpets was to a large degree based on the quality of the materials used in their production. Kurk, the fine wool shorn from the undercoat of Kirmani goats, was considered among the finest materials in the world, akin to their rival Kashmiri products. The quality of Kirmani kurk was attributed to a combination of the particular breed of goats found among the local tribes, and the extreme aridity of the climate. According to Pottinger, traveling in Kirman in 1810, Fath ʿAli Shah attempted to expand its production by introducing Kirmani goats to pastoral groups outside of Kirman, but they failed to

102 A regional political economy produce a similar product.44 As early as the 18th century, the East India Company developed an overseas trade in Kirmani kurk to supply British Indian weavers.45 This continued through the Qajar period in the hands of Indian and Iranian merchants through the Persian Gulf to India and north to Yazd and Khurasan.46 In the 1860s and 1870s, the Vakil al-Mulk household used their positions as Qajar appointees to establish a monopoly on its export, to which they owed the wealth of their estate.47 Most kurk, however, found its way to local weavers, where it supported Kirman’s thriving shawl and carpet weaving industry. Kurk wool was a major economic link between urban centers and tribal communities, providing the latter with much needed capital to purchase necessities from the bazar. Kurk wool was produced by Kirman’s pastoral tribes and in small villages like Zarand to supplement local agricultural production.48 It was shorn from the animals and either woven locally by women in tribal and village communities or transported to Kirman City by cart. It was then put up for sale at the city’s popular Saturday bazar and purchased by local weavers for use in urban workshops.49 As Georg Stöber reminds us from his fieldwork amongst the nomads of Kirman in the 1980s: Even though the nomads produce a major part of their food and equipment themselves, Iranian nomadism is not a subsistence economy. The tribesmen are more or less obliged to purchase sugar, tea, cloth, consumer goods, and at least part of their grain. In return they have to sell their own products, principally livestock and to a lesser extent milk products (clarified butter and kashk), wool and carpets.50 Shawl and carpet weaving also required skilled and unskilled labor. In the cities of the Iranian plateau, master weavers, organized in guilds, practiced their craft in larger workshops with perhaps 20 or 30 looms, with three weavers to each loom. Kirman’s weavers produced numerous textiles to meet local needs, ranging from head scarves and overcoats to bedding and colored spreads.51 In the 1870s, Vaziri estimated that the province as a whole contained as many as 12,000 small workshops, each typically employing two weavers, devoted to shawl production.52 In 1850, Keith Abbott estimated that in Kirman City alone there were 2,450 looms employing some 4,500 men and boys, with an additional 325 looms scattered about in nine nearby villages.53 Included in this number was a small but renowned community of carpet weavers, active both in Kirman City and in the northern district of Ravar.54 Kirmani shawls were considered by locals and European travelers alike to rival those of Kashmir in terms of their workmanship, patterns, texture, and form. In fact, many of the workshops in Mashhad were operated by Kirmani weavers using wool from Kirmani goats.55 Fine shawls were much in vogue in Europe in the 19th century. Kirman’s weavers benefited greatly from the international trade in shawls. An estimated 90% of the workshops in the city were devoted to shawl production in the mid19th century.56 By the late 1880s, however, the international market for shawls was on the decline, owing in part to changing fashions and the inexpensive and

From cotton to carpets 103 high quality Manchester textiles that flooded European markets. Edward Browne noted in 1888 that Kirmani shawls were fetching less than one-third their former price, and the suffering associated with the collapse of that industry was offset only by the booming opium trade.57 By the time the British consulate was established in 1894, Sykes notes, “they find no market in Europe, where even the Kashmiri shawl is now but rarely seen.”58 Carpet weaving, like shawl weaving, was a craft of some antiquity in Kirman and a common craft among rural and nomadic populations, as well as with artisans in towns and villages. In the northern district of Ravar, there was a well-known community of weavers who produced fine carpets on commission, much of their business apparently coming from Qajar appointees to the province. According to Vaziri, “the carpet weavers there receive orders and wages from the Governor of Kirman and complete carpets for him, which he sends to Tehran and elsewhere as gifts.”59 Pieces typically took a year or more to complete and cost as much as £75, so production on speculation was extraordinarily risky.60 Also notable were the products of the Afshari tribesmen, renowned for their fine floral designs and the quality of their craftsmanship.61 These were used as flooring and decorative wall hangings by tribesmen, sometimes incorporating intricate landscapes or other pictorial elements. When these tribal carpets reached markets in towns and cities, they fetched high prices. Besides a source of extra income, shawls and other woven goods were also a reliable form of savings for tribal groups, which could be liquidated easily in times of financial need or after a bad harvest.62 Kirman City also boasted a small core of handicraft carpet weavers. Just prior to the commercialization of carpet weaving, Kirman City had approximately 100 workshops devoted to carpet weaving, half of which were operated by just six master weavers.63 Their works were prohibitively expensive for the general population, however, and were produced strictly on commission, finding their way mainly into the hands of the local elites, the governor’s household, and the Qajar court. Notable commissions from the workshops in Ravar and Kirman City in the late 19th century include a large carpet made to cover the interior of the Shrine of Niʿmat Allah Vali in Mahan, commissioned by Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan Vakil al-Mulk for about 400 tumans during the building’s renovations,64 and two fine pieces for the Imam Riza Shrine in Mashhad – one commissioned by Vakil al-Mulk in 1280/1863–64 from the revenues of that shrine’s vaqf properties in the province65 and another by his son Vakil al-Mulk II in 1872 for about 500 tumans.66 These commissions were a conspicuous form of charity that added not only to the prestige of the governor, but to Kirman’s carpet weaving industry as well, whose products soon had “even a higher name than the shawls.”67

Cotton to carpets: Kirmani elites and the carpet boom Between 1894 and 1905, Kirmani elites guided a major transformation in productive relations in response to booming foreign demand for Oriental carpets. Local elites, artisans, and merchants used capital made through landholdings and commercial agriculture to open dozens of new carpet weaving manufactories and

104 A regional political economy workshops in Kirman City, further accelerating the concentration of resources in the hands of urban elites and transforming urban society. These manufactories attracted skilled weavers from throughout the province who had suffered from the recent decline in Kirman’s textile industries, particularly shawl weaving, due to competition from inexpensive British imports. The commercial weaving industry in Kirman City thus also contributed to a steep and sudden rise in the urban population. Although estimates vary widely, the urban population grew from 30,000–40,000 to roughly 50,000–60,000 after the initial carpet boom, including thousands of young men and boys employed as wage laborers in the city’s carpet manufactories.68 The entire industry was dependent on foreign demand, leaving a large sector of the economy precariously dependent on the whims of consumers in overseas markets. As with the agricultural sector before it, Kirman’s urban elites led the way in reshaping patterns of production and labor necessary for large-scale carpet manufacturing. Growing international demand for carpets, on the heels of the decline of the Kirmani shawl trade, brought opportunities for urban elites to profit by converting shawl manufactories into carpet weaving workshops. The carpet boom also coincided with the opening of the British consulate in Kirman City in 1894. In attempting to expand British influence in southern Iran, the British consul attempted to place this trade in the hands of British protected minorities and divert some of the traffic east to British India. Although this project ultimately failed, the Zoroastrian and Shikarpuri Indian merchant communities became major players in the Persian Gulf trade with British assistance. In fact, many of the locally produced carpets were transported by Turkic merchants from Tabriz overland through Istanbul to western Europe rather than through the Persian Gulf routes. Even as the foreign trade and much of the profits from the carpet boom were lost to local merchants, Kirman’s urban elite households played a major role in reshaping production by opening urban manufactories and investing capital in production on speculation. Kirman’s international carpet trade was dominated from the very beginning by Azeri merchants from Tabriz.69 Tabrizi merchants had been active in Kirman throughout the 19th century, carrying on a small-scale import trade in Russian goods and small handicraft items, and exporting Kirman’s woolen products through Tabriz to Istanbul.70 As Persian carpets came into vogue in Europe, Tabrizi merchants scoured bazars in major cities, exporting large numbers of antique and tribal carpets along these established routes to their agents in Istanbul. The demand for Persian carpets soon surpassed the stock of antique and tribal carpets in the bazars, and merchants began commissioning carpets on speculation for international trade. Whereas in 1894 Preece had noted that there was almost no trade in Kirmani carpets, native chroniclers report that around 1895–96, weaving in Kirman began to flourish again almost overnight from commissions to meet the demand in Europe for fine Oriental carpets.71 Sykes estimated that some 1,000 carpet manufactories were active in Kirman City by the early 20th century, some ten times the estimate given by Preece as late as 1894.72 The equipment and techniques

From cotton to carpets 105 for shawl and carpet weaving were similar enough that most of the province’s shawl weaving manufactories, numbering some 12,000 in the 1870s, were simply converted to carpet weaving to keep up with demand.73 According to the British trade figures from the Kirman consulate, carpet exports increased from a mere £3,000 in 1894–95, to an estimated £120,000 by 1902.74 Even as the international demand quickly outpaced the supply, and new carpets were produced in large numbers in workshops in Kirman, their export remained largely in the hands of this small core of Tabrizi merchants, even as British operations like Ziegler had established their own manufactories in Sultanabad and elsewhere.75 The chief Tabrizi merchant in Kirman, Aqa Mihdi Tajir-i Tabrizi handled a considerable amount of the trade himself, exporting carpets through Tabriz to Istanbul, where again Tabrizis dominated the transit trade into Europe. He organized and headed the Shirkat-i ʿUmumi Kirman (The Public Company of Kirman) to carry out his dealings and those of his associates locally.76 The British consul attempted to divert some of this trade to British India by testing a difficult land route through Baluchistan to Quetta in the hands of Parsi merchants. He also offered specimens of Kirmani carpets to Hotz and Sons, who were already involved in large-scale carpet manufacturing in Sultanabad.77 At the same time, he encouraged the use of classic Persian designs to fit European tastes, and pleaded that new “hideous designs” incorporating Western themes be abandoned.78 Despite British efforts to shape and control the carpet industry, the reshaping of Kirman’s local productive relations from handicraft weaving to commercial production for foreign markets was largely accomplished by Kirman’s urban elites. As Annette Ittig has argued in her study of the Kirmani carpet boom, outside elements like the Tabrizi merchants did little to change productive relations, as the Tabrizi did not own looms but simply advanced money and carried on the trade internationally. She notes that “each phase of carpet production required capital investment, and this was the prerogative of an inter-related elite of provincial officeholders and landowners.”79 Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi dates this tremendous flourishing of carpet manufacturing in the city to 1313/1895–96,80 when a group of what he calls the elites or “grandees” (buzurgan) of Kirman City began investing heavily in opening carpet manufactories in the city to meet the growing foreign demand.81 Investments in carpet manufacturing quickly became a widespread phenomenon among Kirman’s urban elite households. Pasha Vaziri commented in 1907 that “every capable person here with 10 tumans, from the [elite classes] (aʿyan, khans, and buzurgan) to the most average people and the lower classes, etc., opened a weaving shop or acted to benefit from it.”82 In adapting their estates to economic opportunities and bringing production under their control, this core of urban elites mediated the transition from smallscale handicraft weaving to commercial production for foreign trade on a near industrial scale. Carpet production was both capital and labor intensive, organized through contractual relationships between weavers and merchant-financiers. Kirman City’s urban elite and the Tabrizi merchants, who together possessed the bulk of the capital resources, forwarded the necessary inputs to weavers, both in rural

106 A regional political economy household settings and in urban manufactories, to produce pieces on speculation. The report from Neucomen’s 1904 commercial mission to southeastern Persia describes the system in some detail. The ‘manufacturer’ supplies the weaver with the design, and the quantities of wool of various colours required for the work in hand, so as to ensure the same shades of colours being used throughout. He also makes advances on account of the price arranged, so that the price of the carpet is often nearly all paid for whilst it is still on the loom. . . . As often as not he will sell the finished work, against which he has drawn advances, and set up a new piece which is delivered long after the contract time has expired.83 Among the leading investors in carpet manufacturing in Kirman’s urban elite was Hajji Muhammad ʿAli Amin al-Raʿiya. Amin al-Raʿiya was an absentee landlord who possessed a large inheritance of properties on the outskirts of Kirman City and in Khabis and Mahan. His grandfather, Hajji Allah Virdi, in the pattern of 19th century landed elites, invested heavily in religious and charitable institutions, including a mosque, caravanserai, water reservoirs, and bathhouses in and around Kirman City, as well as facilities for pilgrims passing through Anar.84 With his inheritance, Amin al-Raʿiya turned to trade and became one of Kirman’s most successful merchants by investing heavily in the burgeoning carpet trade. He owned and operated a large carpet manufactory in the city to benefit from the export trade.85 His efforts were apparently quite successful. His standing was such that he was elected to represent the interests of Kirman’s merchant community prior to the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 as head of the merchants’ anjuman (council), one of a number of consultative bodies drawn from the city’s local elites to represent their interests to the provincial government.86 The governor’s household was also an active participant in reshaping carpet manufacturing in Kirman. Since the removal of Murtaza Quli Khan Vakil al-Mulk II in 1878 following the Shaykhi‒mutasharʿi riots of that year, the governorship of Kirman had been passed among several members of the Farman Farma household, a line of Qajar notables descended from Farman Farma Firuz Mirza Nusrat al-Dawla. Firuz Mirza governed Kirman in 1837–39 following the Aqa Khan Mahallati revolt, then returned for a short period in 1878 to restore order after the Shaykhi‒mutasharʿi riots. He was succeeded by his sons ʿAbd al-Hamid Mirza Nasir al-Dawla Farman Farma (governor of Kirman, 1881–91) and ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farman Farma (governor of Kirman, 1891–93, 1894–95, and 1905), who was in power during the initial boom in the carpet trade. Despite a presence in Kirman as Qajar appointees spanning more than two decades, the Farman Farma household never bought substantial land in the province, save a few palaces and gardens on the outskirts of Kirman City, and never established themselves as “local” elites in the eyes of local chroniclers as the Ibrahimis and Vakil al-Mulkis had done before them. As governor of Kirman, he too had commissioned individual works from the weavers of Ravar and Kirman City. By 1894 he had begun commissioning works that explicitly incorporated themes to appeal

From cotton to carpets 107 to European markets, including a Frankish warrior87 and series of images from the ruins of the ancient Persian capital of Persepolis.88 ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza bought and sold at a profit some of the carpets he commissioned, according to Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi, to augment his income as governor of Kirman, while making suggestions to local weavers on patterns and production methods to expand the reach of Kirmani carpets in the European market.89 The new hybrid European designs, which have been studied in some detail by Charles Kurzman and Leonard Helfgott, were quickly discontinued, however, on the advice of the British consul Percy Sykes, who advised that the “ugly European patterns” should be given up in favor of more traditional themes.90 The primary material factors too were in the hands of urban elites, including, most notably, the trade in kurk. The Vakil al-Mulk household’s monopoly on the wool trade involved only exports, not the domestic trade, and had, in any case, expired by the time of the carpet boom.91 This trade in wool was long dominated by Kirman’s major landowners, including the Vakil al-Mulkis, who owned large herds of goats.92 Once they received their initial advance for a commissioned work, weavers procured unprocessed wool on the local market.93 The weavers would then dye the wool themselves in their workshops with locally produced materials.94 The trade in dyes, too, was dominated by major landowners centered in Kirman City who, following the rise of commercial agriculture, dominated rural landownership in the province. A well-established system of procuring the inputs for the carpet trade predated the commercialization of weaving, as these were essentially the same material factors used in the once thriving shawl workshops in Kirman City. Shawl production had declined in competition with inexpensive British textiles prior to the 1890s but left behind a pattern of productive relations already in the hands of the urban elites. As Paul Ward English, who studied Kirman’s carpet weaving industry firsthand in the 1960s, describes: Each carpet is subsidized through several processes – washing, sorting, dyeing, carding, spinning, weaving, and clipping – by these urbanites. Craftsmen are paid a subsistence wage for their labor; the profits are accumulated by the entrepreneurs and merchants.95 Much as the boom in commercial agriculture helped integrate rural village communities into a regional socioeconomic system dominated by urban elites, the carpet trade helped intensify the relations of tribal communities with the regional economy. Tribal communities were affected by the carpet boom, as another major source of the province’s kurk, primarily by the dramatic rise in the price of this commodity. Vaziri, writing in the 1870s, commented that the establishment of a fixed price on kurk under the government of Vakil al-Mulk had made the owners of herds enormously wealthy.96 A similar rise in price occurred corresponding to the carpet boom. Neucomen, writing in 1904, noted the price of kurk “more than doubled within the last ten years.”97 This gave tribal producers a greater stake than ever in the regional economy and surely increased the volume of their trade with Kirman City.

108 A regional political economy

Conclusion Most works on the Persian or Oriental carpet trade have echoed a perspective deeply embedded in British sources, which see the sudden and striking expansion of this industry as an example of European capitalism’s intrusion into Iran. In this narrative, European merchants, entrepreneurs, and political agents are the active historical agents, shaping the carpet trade to their own ends in the context of expanding European commerce. In the case of Kirman, contemporary local chroniclers clearly viewed this process as one of regional transformation, with local roots and local players at the center. Kirmani landowners and merchants applied wealth from commercial agricultural enterprises like cash cropping cotton, opium, and henna to invest in carpet manufacturing once antique carpets became fashionable in the middle- and upper-class households of industrial Europe. These local players were not simply a new class of capitalists beholden to the West, but well-established local players in Kirmani society. In scouring again the British sources for signs of European agency, it is striking to note a near total absence of British merchants and entrepreneurs participating in the trade, beyond the support of the consulate in raising the profile of Kirmani wares abroad. Inputs like kurk wool and dyes were procured from tribal groups and rural agriculturalists; workshops were organized by master weavers, many of whom were recently displaced by the recent decline in Kirman’s famous shawl weaving industry; the labor was performed by young Kirmani men and women, many of whom had only recently arrived in the city to work in these new carpet manufactories; and Azeri merchants carried most of the trade overland to Europe despite the best efforts of Great Britain to place this trade in the hands of Zoroastrian and Shikarpuri Indian merchants under their protection. A striking outcome of the Kirmani carpet boom which remains to be explored is the impact this had on reshaping local social, cultural, and political life. The carpet industry played a critical role in consolidating a regional economic unity in Kirman through the networks of powerful elite families centered in the urban hub of Kirman City. These networks tied rural areas to the city through landownership, administrative control, and sociocultural influence. The expansion of the carpet trade extended this pattern of urban‒rural integration deeper into the hinterland by strengthening ties to tribal communities through procurement of critical inputs for the carpet industry, while also diversifying those connections further by drawing labor into urban-centric enterprises more than ever before. The consolidation of a regional economy around Kirman City through the networks of elite households had a profound influence on reshaping Kirmani society in the years leading up to the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–11 and the World War that followed, strengthening both a local political identity and local ties to developments in the wider world.

Notes 1 Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 127–28; Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 45. 2 Tarikh, 812; Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 123. 3 Farmandihan, 123. The Haydaris and Niʿmatis were two urban luti gangs that participated in widespread, ritualized violence in Safavid-era cities in Iran. See Willem Floor, “The Political Role of the Lutis in Iran,” in Modern Iran: The Dialectics of Continuity

From cotton to carpets 109

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24

25 26

and Change, ed. Michael E. Bonine and Nikki R. Keddie (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1981). Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 123–26. Vaziri, Tarikh, 813; Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 129. Vakil al-Mulk II had married a daughter of Firuz Mirza, so a connection already existed between the two men. Farmandihan, 407. Vaziri, Tarikh, 813–14. Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine, 51. Ashraf, “Dual Class Structure.” Markovits, Global World of Indian Merchants. Wallerstein, Modern World-System III, 129. John Foran, “Dependent Development as the Key to the Political Economy of Qajar Iran,” Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants. Katouzian, Political Economy of Modern Iran, 37. Gilbar, “The Opening up of Qajar Iran.” Amirahmadi, Political Economy. FO 881/7067, “Memorandum by Lord Curzon respecting Persian Affairs” (26 Nov 1898). Preece, “Report of a Journey,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.7293] (1894), 32. Estimates of the population of Kirman City’s Zoroastrian quarter, located outside the city walls through the Darvaza-yi Gabri (the Zoroastrian Gate), vary from 1,700 to 3,000 in the 1890s. See Preece, “Report of a Journey,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.7293] (1894), 14, 34; Sykes, “Report on the Trade and Commerce of the Consular Districts of Kerman and Persian Beluchistan from March, 1894 to March, 1895,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [c.7919] (1896). Kennedy figured Iran’s Zoroastrian community in 1889 to be about 8,000 people, with 6,737 residing in Yazd. See FO 60/539, Kennedy to Salisbury (9 July 1889); contemporary Persian sources do not give detailed information on the Zoroastrian community. Paul Ward English, “The Zoroastrians of Kirman,” in Issawi, The Economic History of Iran, 1800–1914, 65. Preece, “Report of a Journey,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.7293] (1894), 14–15, 34. FO 60/539, Foreign Office to India Office, (14 Sept. 1889); FO 60/539, Walpole to Foreign Office (27 Sept 1889). FO 60/539, T. E. Gordon, “Appointment of Mr. Ardashir Mahrban as British Agent at Yazd” (30 June 1892). See, for instance, the text of a speech given by the Society for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Zoroastrians in Persia to the British consul at Kirman, Percy Sykes, recognizing his contributions to the betterment of the Zoroastrian community of Kirman during his tenure as consul. FO 248/788, “Text of Address by the Duishaw Merwan Irani of the Parsis of Bombay to Sykes in 1902.” Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 57. Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles, 198; Preece, “Report of a Journey,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.7293] (1894); Sykes, “Report on the Trade and Commerce of the Consular Districts of Kerman and Persian Beluchistan from March, 1894 to March, 1895,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [c.7919] (1896); Vaziri, writing in the 1870s, counts only 10 Hindu merchants. Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 79.

110 A regional political economy 27 Preece, “Report of a Journey.” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.7293] (1894). 28 Sykes, “Report on the Trade and Commerce of the Consular Districts of Kerman and Persian Beluchistan from March, 1894 to March, 1895,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [c.7919] (1896). 29 Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles in Persia; Or, Eight Years in Irán, 198. 30 FO 248/617, “Sykes to Durand” (5 Aug 1895). 31 Preece, “Report of a Journey.” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.7293] (1894). 32 FO 60/621, Sykes to Salisbury (12 June 1900). 33 FO 248/763, Phillot, “Precis of Report by Hadi, Carpet Merchant.” 34 Lieut.-Colonel Meade, “Report for the Year 1897 on the Trade and Commerce of Bushire and District,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.9044] [C.9496] (1899); C. A. Kemball, “Report for the Year 1900 on the Trade and Commerce of the Persian Gulf,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Diplomatic and Consular Reports [Cd.429] (1901). 35 Kemball, “Report for the Year 1900 on the Trade and Commerce of the Persian Gulf.” 36 Sykes, “Report for the Year 1902–03 on the Trade of the Kerman Consular District,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Diplomatic and Consular Reports [Cd. 1386] (1903). 37 Ittig, “Ziegler’s Sultanabad Carpet Enterprise.” For a survey of the Persian carpet industry in this period, see Edwards, The Persian Carpet. 38 For a biography of Amin al-Zarb, see Shireen Mahdavi, For God, Mammon, and Country: A Nineteenth-Century Persian Merchant, Haj Muhammad Hassan Amin al-Zarb, 1834–1898 (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999). 39 Amin al-Zarb et al., Kirman dar Asnad-i Amin al-Zarb: Salha-yi 1289–1351 Qamari (Tehran: Intisharat-i Surayya, 2005). 40 Preece, “Report of a Journey” (27 Feb 1894), 32. 41 Euan Smith, “The Perso-Afghan Mission.” Persian Boundary Commission et al., Eastern Persia: An Account of the Journeys of the Persian Boundary Commission, 1870– 71–72, 186–87. 42 Euan Smith, “The Perso-Afghan Mission” in ibid., 187. 43 Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 33. 44 Pottinger, Travels in Beloochistan and Sinde; Accompanied by a Geographical and Historical Account of those Countries . . . , 225. 45 R. Matthee, “The East India Company Trade in Kerman Wool, 1658–1730” (1993), 343–383. 46 FO 248/225 , Dickson to Alison, “1865 Report on Persia”; Abbott, Amanat and Great Britain. Foreign Office, Cities & Trade: Consul Abbott on the Economy and Society of Iran, 1847–1866, 83; Sykes, “Report on the Trade and Commerce of the Consular Districts of Kerman and Persian Beluchistan from March, 1894 to March, 1895,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [c.7919] (1896).” 47 Euan-Smith, “The Perso-Afghan Mission.” in India. Persian boundary commission. et al., Eastern Persia: An Account of the Journeys of the Persian Boundary Commission, 1870–71–72. 48 See, for example, the merchant Sayyid Jaʿfar, who made a small fortune importing kurk from Zarand into Kirman City. Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 73; Vaziri also includes numerous references to tribal production of kurk. 49 Ibid., 81–82; Edward Browne mentions visiting Kirman City’s “especially lively” Saturday market in 1888. Browne, A Year Amongst the Persians: Impressions as to the Life, Character, and Thought of the Persian People, 482. 50 Stöber, “The Nomads of Kerman: On the Economy of Nomadism,” 257.

From cotton to carpets 111 51 Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 37. 52 Ibid., 33. 53 Abbott, Amanat and Great Britain. Foreign Office, Cities & Trade: Consul Abbott on the Economy and Society of Iran, 1847–1866, 84. 54 Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 189. 55 Ibid., 33. 56 Abbott, Amanat and Great Britain. Foreign Office, Cities & Trade: Consul Abbott on the Economy and Society of Iran, 1847–1866, 84. 57 Browne, A Year Amongst the Persians: Impressions as to the Life, Character, and Thought of the Persian People, 459. 58 Sykes, “Report on the Trade and Commerce of the Consular Districts of Kerman and Persian Beluchistan from March, 1894 to March, 1895.” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [c.7919] (1896). 59 Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 189. 60 Preece, “Report of a Journey,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.7293] (1894), 31. 61 Georg Stöber noted in the 1980s that the quality of Afshari products remained so renowned that “many rugs are called ‘Afsharis’ whether or not they are woven by real Afshar women. Even pieces made by settled villagers with patterns influenced by the carpets of Kerman are included in this category.” Stöber, “The Nomads of Kerman: On the Economy of Nomadism,” 256. 62 A. Cecil Edwards, The Persian Carpet: A Survey of the Carpet-Weaving Industry of Persia. (London: Duckworth, 1967), 55. 63 Preece, “Report of a Journey,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.7293] (1894), 30. 64 Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 83. 65 Ibid., 189. 66 Euan Smith, “The Perso-Afghan Mission,” in India. Persian boundary commission. et al., Eastern Persia: An Account of the Journeys of the Persian Boundary Commission, 1870–71–72, 188. 67 Preece, “Report of a Journey,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.7293] (1894),” 30. 68 Vaziri cites a figure of 40,227 for the population of Kirman City. In 1907, his grandson, Pasha Vaziri, amended this to 59,150 citing more recent census figures. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 40–41. British consuls consistently cite 30,000 as a rough population of the city, while Neucomen sharply increases the estimate to 90,000 to 100,000 in 1904. GleadoweNeucomen, “Report on the Commercial Mission to South-Eastern Persia During 1904–1905,” 49.The overall trend in these Iranian and British estimates is towards a perception of a sudden boom in Kirman City’s population at the end of the 19th century. 69 Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 34; Sykes, “Report on the Trade and Commerce of the Consular Districts of Kerman and Persian Beluchistan from March, 1894 to March, 1895,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [c.7919] (1896). 70 Pottinger; Abbott, Amanat and Great Britain. Foreign Office, Cities & Trade: Consul Abbott on the Economy and Society of Iran, 1847–1866; Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 33–34; Sykes, “Report on the Trade and Commerce of the Consular Districts of Kerman and Persian Beluchistan from March, 1894 to March, 1895,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [c.7919] (1896). 71 Preece, “Report of a Journey,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.7293] (1894); Ahmadi, Tarikh-i Yahya, 330.

112 A regional political economy 72 Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles in Persia; Or, Eight Years in Irán, 199; Preece, “Report of a Journey,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.7293] (1894); St. John counted only six carpet manufactories in Kirman in 1870–72. “Narrative of a Journey,” in India. Persian boundary commission et al., Eastern Persia: An Account of the Journeys of the Persian Boundary Commission, 1870–71–72. 73 Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 34. 74 Sykes, “Report on the Trade and Commerce of the Consular Districts of Kerman and Persian Beluchistan from March, 1894 to March, 1895,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [c.7919] (1896); Sykes, “Report for the Year 1902–03 on the Trade of the Kerman Consular District,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Diplomatic and Consular Reports, [Cd. 1386] (1903). 75 A. Ittig, “Ziegler’s Sultanabad Carpet Enterprise,” Iranian Studies, 25 (1993), 103–35. 76 Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 34. 77 FO 60/621, “Sykes to Salisbury” (12 June 1900). 78 Ibid.; Sykes, “Report on the Trade and Commerce of the Consular Districts of Kerman and Persian Beluchistan from March, 1894 to March, 1895,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [c.7919] (1896). 79 A. Ittig, “The Kirmani Boom – a Study in Carpet Entrepreneurship,” Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies, 1 (1985), 118–20. 80 Ahmadi, Tarikh-i Yahya, 330. 81 Ahmadi, Farmandihan-i Kirman, 156–58. 82 Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 33–34. 83 FO 368/38, A. H. Gleadowe-Neucomen, “Report on the Commercial Mission to SouthEastern Persia During 1904–1905,” 93. 84 Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 30, 78, 182. 85 FO 248/820, Sykes, “Extracts from Kerman Diary for the last week in July 1904.” 86 Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 78. 87 Sykes, “Report on the Trade and Commerce of the Consular Districts of Kerman and Persian Beluchistan from March, 1894 to March, 1895,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [c.7919] (1896), 5. 88 Preece, “Report of a Journey,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.7293] (1894), 31. 89 Ahmadi, Farmandihan-i Kirman, 158. 90 Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles in Persia; Or, Eight Years in Irán, 199. 91 This wool export monopoly had probably ceased at the end of Vakil al-Mulk II’s governorship in 1878. The first explicit statement on this appears in 1895 when Sykes reports their control of wool exports as a “former monopoly.” FO 248/617, Sykes to Duran, Kerman, 5 Aug 1895. 92 St. John, “Narrative of a Journey,” in India. Persian boundary commission et al., Eastern Persia: An Account of the Journeys of the Persian Boundary Commission, 1870– 71–72, 99. 93 Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 81. 94 Preece, “Report of a Journey,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.7293] (1894), 31. 95 English, City and Village in Iran: Settlement and Economy in the Kirman Basin. 96 Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, 158. 97 FO 368/38, A. H. Gleadowe-Neucomen, “Report on the Commercial Mission to SouthEastern Persia During 1904–1905,” 92.

Part III

Patrimonialism and social change

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5

Contesting urban patrimonialism

The two previous sections detailed the central place of locally rooted elite households in mediating political and economic change in Qajar Kirman. The model of Qajar imperial control in Kirman relied on local intermediaries who used their local knowledge and connections to exercise political control as well as to mediate between their communities and the wider world. A small handful of these prominent households centered in Kirman City dominated political and economic life in the province through the expansion of a complex of landownership and administrative control, alongside leadership over important normative religious institutions that formed the backbone of intense factionalism between Shaykhi and mutasharʿi families and their supporters. The estate-building projects pursued by these families in the context of changing international economic patterns were fundamental to reshaping Kirman’s regional economy with the expansion of international trade, the commercialization of agricultural production, the integration of rural districts and tribal communities, and the opening of urban carpet and shawl manufactories. Families of wealth and prestige continued to dominate provincial politics, organized around urban-centric household networks, organized into factions, and serving the provincial administration as an extension of Qajar imperial rule. These local transformations in Kirman were accompanied by significant social change associated with the expansion of urban patrimonialism, and the system of norms and institutions associated with it. Patrimonialism, here, refers to the system of social power connected to urban household networks like those of the Vaziris, Vakil al-Mulkis, Ahmadis, Kalantaris, and Ibrahimis. These household networks controlled a wide array of local activities, from the flow of economic resources, to the exercise of administrative authority, to control over prestigious religious institutions while serving as a major conduit for interaction between the local community and the wider world. This expansion of urban household networks did not determine the shape of social change in the province, but rather served as the backdrop to wider societal struggles taking place throughout the province. These will be addressed here as an array of challenges to urban patrimonialism, from negotiating the status of rural communities, tribal groups, and urban wage laborers to elaborating norms surrounding the ideal social order, gender relations, and even the place of patrimonial households in regional society.

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Since the 1980s and 1990s, when the field of Qajar studies came into its own, social scientists have framed social change around the dual challenges of the rise of capitalism and a growing encounter with powerful European empires.1 Broad structural theories and class analysis continue to dominate the study of Qajar economic history.2 While World-Systems and Dependency theorists like John Foran grant some degree of local agency to Iranians in the process of developing capitalist relations, they are nonetheless seen as operating within the structural limitations imposed globally by market forces and locally by class relationships.3 More recent works on Qajar social history have turned to new theoretical approaches to social change, analyzing the cultural production of urban, cosmopolitan, and transnational groups, seeking out the origins of “modern” discourses on nationalism, gender, and identity, and the experiences of diverse groups of religious minorities, tribal groups, and men and women in urban and rural settings. These works have established a strong foundation for investigating a wide variety of developments in Qajar social history. However, much of the social historical literature has still focused strongly on developments in Tehran and among the transnational community of modernists and intellectual radicals, whose attitudes and world views have been allowed to stand in for those of “Iranians” as a whole by default.4 Focusing on a limited and defined community, set in the context of the wider Middle East, Central Asia, and greater Indian Ocean worlds, provides not only a view of these changes from a decentered perspective, it also lends insight into the interrelation of these structural and discursive changes. This work has defined this complex of interdependent changes as a mediated modernity. They were local and contingent developments, not set along a determined trajectory toward modernity based on Europe’s own peculiar historical situation, but a process molded by local families as they participated in reshaping their communities. By extension, in exploring the social historical dimension of a mediated modernity in Kirman, it is useful not only to look at the expansion of urban patrimonialism as a “structure,” but also how this system was articulated and contested. Indeed, some of the most striking developments associated with Kirman’s mediated modernity are the strong continuities that persisted in norms surrounding social power and the elite household estate. As this system of urban patrimonialism expanded and consolidated control over the province in the hands of urban families, it acted as the structural backdrop for a series of interrelated struggles in reshaping and redefining Kirman’s social order in which a wide array of local actors were active participants.

Estate building and the normative foundations of social power Prominent local families participated in the competing imperial projects of the Qajars and the British, supplied vital local knowledge of Kirmani society and geography as the Great Game emerged on Kirman’s eastern frontiers, reshaped local productive practices with their investments in commercial agriculture and carpet manufacturing, and through their household networks established the

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backbone of an integrated regional economy. The changing political and economic situation in the province was not shaped by structural forces alone, but mediated by the activities of local families’ estate-building programs as they participated in these projects. These estate-building activities involved everything from managing wealth and material resources like landholdings and crops to providing social and cultural resources, which helped families maintain and reproduce their social power from generation to generation. These activities were patterned on the norms and expectations surrounding what it meant to be part of elite society. One of the most remarkable aspects of the political, economic, and social changes mediated by elite provincial households that marked the history of the 19th century in Kirman was the great continuity in the normative foundations of social power in this community. Norms surrounding being “elite” or “notable” or, as Asghar Fathi put it, in the realm of “traditional leadership” show remarkable continuity through the late 19th century.5 In part, the investments and other activities pursued by Kirman’s leading families in response to opportunities presented by the growth of global capitalism overlapped with elite norms. Investments in land, in particular, were important to families like the Vakil al-Mulkis, Ahmadis, and Ibrahimis not only for the wealth they provided, but also for the sociocultural prestige associated with landownership. Much of the wealth acquired by merchants like Hajj Aqa ʿAli and the governors Vakil al-Mulk and Vakil al-Mulk II, who made a fortune on the wool trade, invested resources into other, more prestigious activities as a way to maintain and reproduce the power of their families. The Ahmadi family, descendants of Hajj Aqa ʿAli, invested their commercial wealth in landed properties and subsequently produced a line of prominent mujtahids in Kirman.6 The Vakil al-Mulkis remained Kirman’s leading administrative family in the early 20th century. Even the former wool monopoly is mentioned only by European sources, as this was never an important element of their prestige, even as those resources were invested in prestigious activities like the famous building campaign conducted by Vakil al-Mulk and Vakil al-Mulk II. Commerce ensured wealth, but wealth alone could not ensure the ability to produce and reproduce the social power of one’s household as effectively as landownership, religious scholarly activities, and control over administrative posts. The reach of urban estates into rural areas represented not just the strengthening of an economic zone in the province, but also the extension of urban household networks’ power over the countryside as landowners, administrators, and cultural elites, under the diffused imperial structure of the Qajar state. As urban households consolidated their power in the province and maintained certain continuities in the norms surrounding elite society, there was also a noticeable transformation of the structure of household networks and factional blocs. The factionalism that was noted earlier in the 19th century became much more intense over time and hardened into mutually hostile blocs of mutasharʿi and Shaykhi families led by the Ahmadis and Vakil al-Mulkis on one hand, and the Ibrahimis on the other. A more vertical hierarchy, with more well-defined functions among families, developed among the Ahmadis and Vakil al-Mulkis. The Ahmadis became closely identified with religious thought and practice in

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producing three generations of leading mujtahids as spiritual leaders of the local mutasharʿi community. The Vakil al-Mulkis, by contrast, are frequently referenced as an administrative family. Despite the striking continuities in the normative foundations of the elite household and its estate, the structure of household networks clearly developed toward greater patrimonial control from the top and more intense factional divisions between families. The Qajar court attempted to quell the factional violence of 1877–78 by removing just four men from the city: the heads of the Ibrahimi, Ahmadi, and Kalantari households were summoned to Tehran, while Murtaza Quli Khan Vakil al-Mulk II, the head of the Vakil al-Mulk household, had previously been removed from his post as governor for failing to maintain order.7 The factional solidarity between these families is again seen in the 1905 “ShaykhiBalasari War” as Gianroberto Scarcia called it, where the Ahmadi mujtahid Mirza Muhammad Riza led a mob assault on Shaykhi interests after several Vakil al-Mulkis were removed from administrative posts and replaced by Shaykhis.8 Shaykhi vaqfnama from this period also demonstrate a definite strengthening of patrimonial authority within the Ibrahimi family with “the diversification of the activities of the head and the reinforcement of communal sentiments.”9

Kirman’s rural transformation Imperial rivalries between the Qajars and the British Empire extended this pattern of urban patrimonial control in the 1880s and 1890s to the eastern frontiers of the province along the Baluchi tribal territories through the activities of a military household in Bam known as the Bihzadis. The frontiers with Baluchistan had become an important concern for the Qajar Empire and its provincial governors since the time that Aqa Khan Mahallati found support there during his revolt in 1844. The British consul Percy Sykes credited this event with effectively ending Baluchi independence.10 By the 1880s and 1890s, however, a more serious concern along the frontier had caught the Qajars’ attention: the so-called Great Game, marked by a growing Anglo-Russian contest for empire in the neighboring Central Asian khanates, in which the Qajars were also actively projecting their power and seeking to expand their imperial holdings.11 Patrolling the frontier and maintaining a Qajar presence in Baluchistan became such an important concern for the Qajar state that the provincial army garrisoned at Bam was reconceived in the 1860s as a permanent frontier force, charged with maintaining Qajar authority in the tribal border regions. As outposts were established in Bampur and Sarhad, deep in the tribal hinterland, they were staffed and supplied by the garrison at Bam. Contrary to the pattern in core agricultural districts, the military elite came to supplant the locally rooted landholding households as “the pillar of the aʿyan, ashraf and mullak [elites and notables] of Bam.”12 The Bihzadi military household, built around the legacy of a prominent local military officer named Ibrahim Khan Saʿd al-Dawla, quickly came to dominate the frontier forces at Bam. His father, ʿAli Khan Bami, worked for the local divan, served as ʿamil of Qanat Ghasan and Langar, and administered lucrative khalisa properties

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in the henna-producing lands in Narmashir. ʿAli Khan was eventually murdered by rivals from the local administrative household, the Mirzaʾis. Ibrahim Khan, though just a child when his father was murdered, rose to prominence through Kirman’s Third Army and, as the head of the most effective military force along the frontier, was promoted to govern Baluchistan under Vakil al-Mulk II.13 Ibrahim Khan’s legacy grew with his leadership in expanding Qajar rule in eastern Baluchistan by subjugating local tribal khans and seizing a line of settlements on the southeastern frontier, including Jalk, Kalavan, and the fortress of Kuhak.14 At a time when the Qajar state was seeing portions of its northern and eastern provinces falling progressively into the hands of European powers, this was a rare, albeit slight, territorial expansion.15 He was granted the title Saʿd al-Dawla by the Qajar court for his accomplishments, an honor reserved for members of the Qajar household and high political appointees. In the process, Ibrahim Khan cemented relationships with other prominent families through marriage to a granddaughter of Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla (the founder of the Shaykhi Ibrahimi household), who was fathered by the head of another major military family in Bam, the Arab Bastamis.16 Thus his military prominence at a time of increased attention to frontier concerns, along with consolidating the Bihzadi, Ibrahimi, and Arab Bastami lines, all factored in to the dominant position Ibrahim Khan Saʿd al-Dawla’s heirs would enjoy long after his death in 1884. Kirman’s governor ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farman Farma made a lengthy voyage through Baluchistan ten years after Ibrahim Khan’s death, during which he compiled information on geography, transportation, local administration, landownership, tax assessment, and the local elites among the settled and tribal populations. The product, his 1894 Musafaratnama-yi Kirman va Baluchistan, is undoubtedly the most important single work on the social history of 19th century Baluchistan. It also contains an abundance of information on Bam’s local military elite, their responsibilities in maintaining order in Baluchistan, and their local proprietary interests. From the overall picture presented by the Farman Farma, it is clear how fully the provincial military was dominated by the Bihzadi household by 1894 and how successful they were up to this time in maintaining Qajar power in a region where their authority was often tenuous at best. Farman Farma was quick to criticize and remove ineffective agents; it attests to the effectiveness of the Bihzadis that he noted “no one of the elite or common classes of the tribes and peoples of Baluchistan has any sort of complaint or injustice to report.”17 What this document demonstrates above all else is a certain consistency that ties the story of the military elite of Bam to the civilian elite of Kirman City. The mediating influence of the Bihzadi household was leveraged to gain control over a vast regional hinterland. One source of the Bihzadis’ wealth was surplus taxes collected in Baluchistan.18 It was only under the Bihzadis, it seems, that any regular income from Baluchistan made its way to the provincial divan, the region remaining until the 1850s an autonomous tribal region only nominally under Qajar rule. Much like the ʿamils in the core agricultural districts, the Bihzadis took a share of these revenues before dispatching the remainder to the provincial divan. However, Ibrahim Khan Saʿd al-Dawla also came into possession of extensive tracts of very lucrative henna-producing lands in nearby Narmashir. Already by the 1870s, Vaziri

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counted Ibrahim Khan among Kirman’s four leading landholders, controlling some of the province’s most precious lands for commercial agricultural production.19 As with the urban households of Kirman City, Ibrahim Khan Saʿd al-Dawla’s descendants were able to reproduce and extend the social power of their household. By 1894, according to Farman Farma, the current rulers of Bam and Baluchistan, Zayn al-ʿAbidin Khan and his brother Ibrahim Khan, along with their immediate relatives, owned ten villages between Bam and Bampur, which accounted for a huge sum, roughly 1,260 kharvar, of Narmashir’s agricultural production.20 The Bihzadi family’s networks extended this control yet further. Suliman Khan Sartip, who was now connected to the Bihzadi family by marriage, appears as the largest landowner in the area in the 1894 report. His personal milki properties included fourteen documented villages producing over 3,000 kharvar of produce in the summer, and an additional 160 kharvar of winter crops, chief among them the valuable henna cash crop. The provincial lashkar nivis, or paymaster general, Mirza Ghulam Riza, was himself another of this small core of large landholders, with seven villages producing some 1,140 kharvar annually. Perhaps not incidentally, two of these villages were held jointly with figures connected to Saʿd al-Dawla’s heirs: one with Suliman Khan’s son Muhammad Qasim Khan Sarhang, and the other with the daughter of Ibrahim Khan himself. The state khalisa lands, too, which accounted for more than 10% of the land and agricultural produce in Narmashir, were also in the hands of the military elites through the nazim and mutasadi, both hereditary offices under the control of this household. This small core of Bam’s military elite detailed above, along with their immediate relatives, was now in control of close to 40% of the privately held (milki) properties between Bam and Bampur according to the records of the provincial governor.21 While this account is certainly not a complete, exhaustive record, and many of the figures on population and agricultural yield are necessarily estimations, it does demonstrate a rather remarkable level of control over the agricultural economy in the hands of Bam’s military elite in the most lucrative lands outside of the city. The extension of urban patrimonial control over the rural hinterland brought with it significant changes in patterns of production and exchange. Urban landowners combined their prerogatives as landlords with their administrative control as tax agents, accelerating the extraction of resources from rural districts in response to global demand for commercial agricultural products and fine woolen goods. The British consul in Kirman, Percy Sykes, noted the severity of this system and its effects on the countryside, as “the Persian grandees, who are the governing class, are not only merciless in their exactions but care little for the welfare of the country.”22 In reference to Kirman in particular, he says that by the 1890s, cheap bread (which as a staple food is a fair indicator of more general trends) was “almost out of the question,” although he attributes this more to land quality and climate.23 Sykes noted earlier in the same travelogue that food shortages seemed to be most severe in areas where opium cash cropping was most prevalent.24 This same view was taken by Mirza Riza Muhandis, the Persian translator and guide for the 1904 Neucomen mission. As a merchant with some experience in the economic situation of Kirman, he noted that scarcities and the rise in food prices were recent

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innovations that appeared alongside the sale of khalisa lands to urban families who then converted the lands from food production to cash cropping. Prices in Kirman quickly rose to nearly the same level as Tehran.25 Shoko Okazaki, who disagreed that cash cropping led directly to food shortages, noted that the prevalence of hoarding and price gouging by landowners was an additional factor that should be considered, particularly in the 1870–71 famine that struck in the midst of the transition to large-scale cash cropping throughout the Qajar Empire.26 The handicraft sector of the rural economy also declined toward the end of the 19th century, but not in an even or uniform way. As with other Qajar provinces, the import of industrial textiles from Manchester’s Ziegler and Co., followed by a host of other European trading houses, certainly had an impact on rural textile producers.27 Shawl weaving in particular declined in competition with inexpensive, highquality imports to the point of near extinction.28 Carpet weaving, however, which experienced a commercial boom in Kirman City and Ravar, persisted to some degree in rural and tribal settings. This was due in part to the fact that many of the carpets were produced for one’s own consumption, while the commercial manufactures of urban weavers were crafted and designed specifically for European markets, with “Oriental” motifs and higher prices.29 Thus while formal employment in rural areas was generally regarded as low, there was a steady production of agricultural goods and woven handicrafts for local consumption that were not overtaken by the new market forces that urban producers were working within.30 The consolidation of urban landowners’ control over rural districts accelerated and intensified the extraction of resources from the peasantry. An 1868 British Trade Report assessed the situation as follows: The burden of taxation falls upon the agricultural and poorer classes, who are systematically oppressed on account of the revenues and illegal taxes, whilst not a fraction of the sums extorted from them is expended on public works, likely hereafter to benefit the nation at large, and private individuals alone profit by the present unjust system of financial administration.31 Despite these growing pressures, social scientists have noted for decades in Iran a “conspicuous absence of any large-scale peasant rebellions in the modern era.”32 The British consul Percy Sykes compared the situation of Kirmani peasants favorably with those of British India in the 1890s, so it is possible that the quality of life remained somewhat stable, even if poor, up to this time.33 However, this should be taken more as indicative of the challenges of organizing political action across a sparse and largely impoverished rural population, rather than a lack of participation in contesting the activities of landowners and administrators or a passive acceptance of these new conditions.

The question of “tribalism” Pastoral-nomadic tribal groups were better able to organize resistance to the encroachment of urban political and economic control over the hinterland than

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were peasants in the sparse patchwork of village communities around Kirman. This was due to differences in the structure and orientation of tribal groups as patrimonial networks. As scholars of tribalism have long noted, a “tribe” is a very fluid type of institution, appearing in a variety of forms over time and in different historical contexts. In southern Qajar provinces, tribes typically included not only pastoral-nomadic communities, but also settled agricultural groups, linked through a common tribal leadership that participated in urban politics. Tribal groups around Kirman like the Buchaqchi, the Lik, and the Afshars were organized as patrimonial networks of power, with kalantars acting as liaisons between the provincial government and their members. As networks of power, there is little to distinguish “tribes” and other forms of household networks beyond the tendencies toward integrating pastoral-nomadic groups and military functions. In fact, Vaziri even uses the same term, tayifa, in reference to pastoral-nomadic tribes and urban-centric household networks alike. Tribal groups were exposed to increasing pressures for political integration in the late 19th century. Lois Beck, in her study of the Qashqaʿi confederation, noted that state building from the 18th century onward was the impulse behind efforts to concentrate power in the hands of tribal leaders. As intermediaries between central authorities and revenue-producing populations (pastoral-nomads), there was a built-in incentive for tribal leaders to attempt to expand their bases of power and integrate larger swaths of the population.34 In contrast to James Scott’s famous line that “the state always seems to be the enemy of ‘people who move around,’ ” in Kirman there was a clear reciprocity in tribe‒state relations.35 As the provincial government functioned as a sort of interpersonal network involving the negotiation of power, control and taxation of pastoral-nomads through kalantars functioned much as it did with other rural communities. As Arash Khazeni has argued, “bargaining was a key feature of tribe and state interactions in Qajar Iran.”36 In Vaziri’s local geography, tribal groups are grouped in with the administration of rural districts through tribal kalantars, despite the fact that seasonal migrations often carried them across the vaguely defined frontiers among districts, provinces, and empires. This system offered tribal leaders sanction to extract resources from both pastoral-nomadic and settled agricultural communities integrated into their networks of power, and simplified taxing and administering tribal populations for provincial leaders. It seems that the political relationship between tribes and provincial governments came to function very much like the negotiation of power between urban notables and provincial governments. By the late 19th century, this political relationship between tribal groups and the state was also set within a rapidly changing socioeconomic context. Khazeni, in his study of the Bakhtiyari tribes, while arguing that “nineteenth-century imperial projects and the expansion of the world economy contributed to the dissolution and waning of the pastoral economy of Qajar Iran,” also notes how pastoral nomadic groups found ways to take advantage of expanded opportunities for wealth and political power in the process.37 The commercialization of carpet weaving in Kirman enhanced the market for kurk wool, once held as a monopoly by the Vakil al-Mulk household.

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Participation in supplying inputs for the carpet industry was also matched by increasing brigandage and attacks on caravan routes, not only as a form of exerting political and military influence, but also as a seemingly contradictory means of partaking in the wealth provided by lucrative international commerce running through the province. Attacks on caravans and settled populations and demands for tolls on trade routes are often dismissed by historians as acts not of bargaining or resistance, but as opportunistic strikes, conducted as a necessary part of a tribal economy. This is due in large part to the long-standing Marxist tradition of viewing tribalism as a natural outgrowth of a pastoralnomadic mode of production.38 There were great similarities not only in how tribal groups and urban household networks were organized, but in how they engaged in politics with central authorities through the careful negotiation of power. The revolt of Isfandiyar Khan, the head of the Buchaqchi tribe, known to the British as the “Robin Hood of Persia,” perfectly exemplifies the sociopolitical element in tribal movements.39 Percy Sykes, in his travel memoirs, relates the tale of Isfandiyar Khan’s 1897 theft of treasury funds from Saʿidabad, the capital of the thriving agricultural district of Sirjan, as a cunning act of heroism: His latest feat had been the sudden seizure of Saiidabád and imprisonment of its Governor, on the pretext that such were his orders from the Sháh. He collected taxes, and when a rising took place he sent for his secretary and solemnly composed a telegram in which he reported to Tehrán that he was being hindered in the execution of his duties by the disloyal citizens! This quite convinced the townspeople, and ‘Robin Hood’ was allowed to make off with several bags of money.40 In stark contrast to the British narrative, Kirman’s local historians Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri and Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi both contextualized Isfandiyar Khan’s actions as a response to a political and economic crisis in Sirjan. In fall 1897, Kirman was in the midst of a dry spell that produced a shortage of grain.41 Yahya Ahmadi noted in Farmandihan-i Kirman severe windstorms that year that not only destroyed several buildings in Kirman, but also damaged many qanats by clogging them with soil, adding to the effects of the drought and driving grain prices upward.42 According to Vaziri, the ʿamil of Sirjan, Hajji ʿAli ʿAskar Khan, took advantage of the situation by hoarding grain and even selling some in Fars, where prices were higher, leading to widespread unrest. The people of Sirjan cried out for justice against this tyranny and complained to Asaf al-Dawla, the governor of Kirman, but were not met favorably. A group of notables from Sirjan went to Tehran, asked for justice at the royal court, and complained about the poor conduct of the government of Sirjan. At the same time, thieves from among the tribes and the wicked took to plundering villages in Kirman and sacking travelers and caravans, causing great disorder around Sirjan.43

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It was in this context that Isfandiyar Khan appeared in Saʿidabad in November 1897 with forged appointment papers. This was a political challenge to the practice of urban patrimonialism in the name of a marginalized tribal group during a time of crisis. Isfandiyar Khan was certainly opportunistic in challenging the unpopular ʿAli Askar Khan, but this was not simply a pastoral-nomadic tribe waging war on urban populations to augment their wealth. This was part of the long, subtle dance of negotiating power between a tribal group and the representatives of urban patrimonial control. For groups on the frontiers like the Bihzadis, there were political and economic opportunities in seeking out connections to urban political powers as a military force. For Isfandiyar Khan in Sirjan, occupying the administrative capital for eight days, arresting corrupt officials, emptying the treasury, and seizing their ill-gotten gains in the name of a marginalized group, the “Robin Hood of Persia” was instead asserting a challenge to the strengthening of urban control over rural politics.

Carpet capitalism, class, and labor In the decade leading up to the Constitutional Revolution (1906–11), the extension of urban patrimonial control over the regional economy was manifested again in a rapid and far-reaching change in productive patterns with the introduction of large-scale commercial carpet production. The urban center’s population increased rapidly as agricultural laborers, fleeing yet another instance of drought, flocked to the city to work in the newly established carpet manufactories and the former shawl workshops converted to carpet weaving, to benefit from the carpet boom. Large segments of the male population were now engaged in wage labor, producing luxury items for foreign markets. Commercial agricultural exports were now supplemented with valuable luxury items produced by urban artisans and laborers, which augmented the wealth of the urban elite and brought a greater share of the local economy under their control. At the same time, Kirman’s local economy had become highly dependent on international trade and thus at the mercy of global economic developments, which proved a volatile mixture with the sudden decline of the carpet trade in 1904. The greatest social impact of the carpet boom was felt in the urban center of Kirman City, where, by 1904, a drastic change had taken place in the economic organization of the city. Manufacturing of carpets had taken hold as the dominant industry in the city and required a substantial number of skilled and semi-skilled workers. Most of the shawl manufactories in the city had been converted to carpet manufacturing, and the former shawl weavers surely amounted to a large percentage of the workers in the carpet manufactories. Many of these were, however, small operations; with the large number of sizable carpet manufactories opening after 1894, this certainly could not account for the whole of the labor force needed to sustain the industry. Many of the former handicraft shawl weaving operations were located in rural villages, and even more often in the household as a supplementary economic activity. Urban manufactories were contracted for much of the export trade. The decline of the shawl trade

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would, then, have left a sizable pool of available semi-skilled labor in the countryside, who could conceivably have been utilized in the urban manufactories. It is notoriously difficult to gauge the population of the cities of the Iranian plateau in the Qajar period. Estimates often vary widely and come from poorly informed foreign observers working with little more than conjecture. There is evidence, however, that there was something of an explosion in the urban population of Kirman City at the end of the 19th century, roughly coinciding with the beginning of the carpet boom. In 1868, Thompson writes that based on “an official return lately furnished to the Persian Government by the local authorities there,” the population of Kirman City was said to be 30,000.44 This compares favorably with Abbott’s estimate of no more than 25,000 in 1850.45 There was an increase in the population from this point forward; Kirman City was, too, spared the brunt of the 1870–72 famine that devastated many of the cities of the Iranian plateau. Vaziri wrote in 1291/1874–75 that according to Kirman City’s kadkhudas, the known population was 40,227, and he estimated an additional 60,000 people resided in the outlying villages within three farsakhs (roughly nine miles) of the urban center.46 This number, he says, was very conservative, citing difficulties of access. His grandson, Pasha Vaziri, comments that a more complete census was completed by Nasir al-Dawla in the early 1880s, which showed the population of Kirman City and the dependent villages within two farsakhs (approximately six miles) to be 59,150.47 Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri-Kirman’s figures on the population of the surrounding villages from 1874–75 were thus likely a gross overestimate. Percy Sykes estimated the population of Kirman City to be roughly 50,000, taking into consideration several estimates he had seen.48 Neucomen, on his visit to Kirman with the commercial mission to southeastern Persia in 1904, noted the large discrepancy between “more or less untrustworthy Persian official accounts,” probably that of Vaziri, which cites a population of 90,000 to 100,000, and the British consulate’s number, which halves this total. Although Neucomen, perhaps wisely, declined to venture his own guess on the city’s population, he notes that the city was “growing in area and population.”49 Neucomen’s comment on the spatial growth of the city is significant when considering the comment by Vaziri some thirty years earlier that, owing to a major depopulation of the city in the 18th century, the rebuilt and relocated city remained underpopulated.50 For spatial growth of the city, meaning growth beyond the city’s defensive walls, this indicates growth first in the population of the interior quarters. Lands outside of the walls were considered undesirable, consisting primarily of the Zoroastrian quarter through much of the 19th century, and vulnerable to attack, as Kirman’s recent history had shown. A travelogue by the Iranian guide and translator for the Neucomen mission, Mirza Riza Muhandis, has recently surfaced which also provides some commentary on Kirman’s urban growth. Mirza Riza Muhandis, echoing the official Persian figures cited in the Neucomen report, stated 100,000 to be a reasonable estimate of Kirman’s urban population.51 Although this level of growth, nearly doubling in the course of ten years, is highly unlikely, it does support the view that a significant population growth in the city occurred over the course of the carpet

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boom. The decline of carpet manufacturing in 1903 and 1904, too, would have left a sizable population of displaced workers. His description of some “20,000 poor, unemployed and afflicted who are in the streets begging” suggests considerable urbanization attached to carpet weaving and suffering from its collapse.52 This, too, is supported by the description in Nazim al-Islam Kirmani’s Tarikh-i Bidari Iraniyan [History of the Awakening of the Iranians] of crowds of more than ten thousand in the streets of the city during the factional strife that gripped the city over the course of 1905.53 The carpet boom created a large population of poor urban youth in Kirman City performing wage labor in the newly founded carpet manufactories. Carpet weaving, as noted before, had long been carried out on home looms by women in village and tribal settings, as well as in workshops in Kirman City, several villages immediately surrounding Kirman City, and the district of Zarand to the north. Investments in wholesale contract carpet production for speculation and sale on the European market led to the opening of hundreds of new manufactories in Kirman City. Preece estimated that about fifty looms devoted to carpet weaving, owned by six master craftsmen, were present in Kirman in 1894, with another fifty or so scattered about in nearby villages54; by 1904, this number ballooned to nearly one thousand. In Ravar, another one hundred looms were in operation, plus thirty or so more in the villages near Kirman City.55 These manufactories were staffed by rural weavers displaced by yet another wave of drought and famine, seeking new opportunities in the city. Leonard Helfgott called these laborers the vanguard of a “new Iranian proletariat,” performing wage labor as part of a luxury craft industry precariously dependent on foreign demand.56 These laborers faced abysmal working conditions in the urban carpet manufactories. The conditions and operations of the carpet manufactories were very similar to those prevailing in the shawl manufactories in the city in previous years, many of which had now simply been converted to carpet weaving. The conditions in the urban shawl manufactories were, by all accounts, abysmal. Child labor, using boys as young as seven or eight, was the norm.57 The wages were very low even for Qajar Iran. Weavers earned about 1 shilling per day and children 2 to 4 pence. As this was far from a living wage, this suggests it was meant as a form of supplementary income for the greater household economic unit. Captain Euan Smith visited one of the shawl workshops in Kirman City while passing through the city as part of the 1872 Perso-Kalat Boundary Commission and left us a detailed account of its operation: We proceeded to the workshops, entering by a hole in the wall, just big enough to admit a man but certainly not large enough to pass a chair; and the first thing that struck us was the utter want of ventilation, there being absolutely no way of purifying the air, which was close and smelt most unwholesome. About sixty or seventy men and boys were seated in three rooms, working at looms placed horizontally before them. Each loom, worked by one man and two small boys, contained the fabric of one shawl. The man, always an experienced hand, sits in the middle, and the two boys on either side. They sit so

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close together that their arms actually interlace, but, nevertheless, their nimble fingers work away with great rapidity. . . . The boys and men sit in holes with their feet under the web, which position brings their arms on a level with the shawl. That the work is unhealthy in the extreme, the pale sallow faces of the men and boys sufficiently testified; but it has also a serious effect in damaging the eyes; few of those whom we saw but had bleared and weak eyes, and many wore spectacles. The emaciated bodies of the children were especially noticeable and very pitiable, and their arms seemed to be almost withered away, – but there is no ‘Factory Act’ in Persia. We were informed by the proprietor that the hours allotted to sheer work averaged fourteen a day!58 According to Sykes, the urban carpet manufactories in the 1890s too were staffed primarily, though not exclusively, by young men and boys.59 Each vertical loom, producing one carpet at a time, was manned by a director, called a khalifa, and two young boys.60 The older patterns were still produced from memory, recited as poetry, as in the past. With a plethora of new designs suggested by merchants to please foreign consumers, many were now referenced from a pattern drawn out in color on sectional paper.61 The carpets produced for export were standardized at 7′ × 4 ½′, which sold for £4 apiece, up to £75 or more for the finest varieties.62 Sykes, who was actively encouraging British investment in Kirman’s carpet industry, suggested that the detestable working conditions at the looms had improved greatly since Euan Smith’s visit in 1872.63 It seems unlikely, however, given the unfavorable impression of Edward Browne in 1888, that much had improved in this short interval with the increasing demand for greater and greater output. Browne, echoing the descriptions of Euan Smith, depicts the shawl manufactories as operating on child labor, using children as young as six (or four according to Preece64), working in cramped, dark rooms from dawn to dusk with poor ventilation and little more than bread and water for nourishment. The pay for workers was below a living wage, as little as 10 tumans per year.65 The growth of these manufactories, the conversion of shawl weaving operations to carpet weaving, and increasing demands for rapid output of high-quality product could have done little to ameliorate these working conditions. During this initial period of the booming carpet trade in Kirman, urban elite households led the way in reorganizing production among local weavers in a way that reshaped local social and economic relationships. The new urban carpet manufactories attracted skilled weavers from the declining handicraft production of shawls, along with many unskilled laborers and children seeking wage labor, which stimulated enormous demographic change in Kirman City around the turn of the 20th century. The urban population saw rapid growth in this decade, with a large segment of the work force employed in carpet production for foreign markets. The commercialization of weaving also brought its productive relations more fully under the control of Kirman City’s urban elites, who saw their wealth grow through their control of the productive relations involved in carpet manufacturing, including the opening and financing of manufactories, organization of labor, and control over the trade in kurk. At the same time, Kirman’s urban elites

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were faced with new competition from the Tabrizi merchants, who dominated the international trade in Kirmani carpets with Europe, and British-protected minorities, namely the Shikarpuri Indian and Zoroastrian merchants, who came to dominate the Persian Gulf trade. In the 1960s and 1970s, a debate arose between Paul Ward English and Robert Dillon over the social historical significance of Kirman’s carpet trade. Kirman was the setting for English’s study City and Village in Iran, which argued through an analysis of settlement patterns that urban domination over rural areas was a necessary fact that has shaped the interaction between interdependent urban, rural, and tribal groups in Kirman since remote antiquity. Harkening back to Wittfogel’s famous theory of hydraulic despotism, English argued that only urban elements could have commanded the sorts of resources necessary to organize the regional economy to support rural populations in the arid climate of southern Iran. He then outlined three “established mechanisms to maintain urban dominance” corresponding to three sectors of the regional economy that he suggests were long-standing features of an integrated regional economy: land tenure in agriculture, herding contracts in pastoralism, and weaving contracts in craft production.66 “In each sphere, the upper class of Kirman City retains ownership of the production factors,” with the profits and surplus maintaining the wealth and privilege of the urban elites.67 Carpet contractors, for instance, like the Tabrizi Turkish merchants, placed orders with the urban elites who owned the looms and manufactories. These urban elites then subsidized production at each stage: washing, sorting, and dyeing of wool, providing materials, and paying wages to the craftsmen. The weavers were paid a monthly salary which amounted to “a small fraction of the carpet’s market value,” the profits going to the contractors and the urban elites in possession of the production factors. The system was thoroughly controlled by urban elites and organized to work to their benefit.68 Robert Dillon wrote a lengthy critique of English’s work in 1976, focused entirely on the issue of the carpet industry as an example of “craft involution.”69 Dillon argued that the advent of commercial carpet weaving represents the introduction of a new economic system in Kirman through global capitalism, but in a way which upheld, and even reinforced, the urban-dominated social system. The carpet weaving industry, according to Dillon: is both capitalist and non-capitalist. From the point of view of the contractor it is a capitalist activity, but one with a difference. From the contractor’s point of view he does not hire labor, but farms out capital. Then he allows the processes of the family economy to motivate and organize that labor for him. From the peasant’s point of view, he (the peasant weaver) is not a wage laborer, but a family enterpriser, doing whatever he can to adjust his family’s level of economic activity to its needs.70 Carpet contracts, Dillon argued, fed capital into the family economies of rural households without disrupting socioeconomic relations between urban elites and rural peasants. With this process “in which capital essentially feeds off

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non-capitalist forms of accumulation, carpet weaving has not only not destroyed rural life in the Kirman region, it has given it a new lease on life.”71 Dillon’s criticisms of English relative to the carpet weaving industry in Kirman were focused on his larger arguments about urban‒rural relations and his challenge to English’s assertion that there was a lack of village communalism before the advent of capitalism and “modernization.” Dillon ultimately concluded that the landlord class, by successfully taking up the carpet business, has maintained its “traditional” hold on the economic, political and social life of the town. Thus capital which might otherwise be employed in new and progressive ways, promotes growth without development. . . . It would appear that carpet capitalism has retarded economic and social development in Kirman because it has depended upon and in a sense fostered the peasant family economy which itself is more compatable [sic] with traditional social and political structures than with more “modern“ socio-economic forms.72 For Dillon, then, the carpet weaving industry, from the view of a rural community in the 1970s, lacked the impulse for a certain type of capitalist development and the formation of “modern” social superstructures built on a capitalist economic mode. Given the structure of Dillon’s critique of English, in which he sought to describe the lack of development of a certain type of modern social relations, he misses what were, in fact, significant social transformations in Kirman related to the carpet trade. Both discuss the origins of the carpet trade without reference to its immediate social context, favoring foreign diplomatic and travel writings over the commentaries of native Kirmani elites. The carpet boom occurred during a period of commercialization of Kirman’s agriculture in which urban elites came into greater control of key aspects of the agricultural economy. The commercialization of the carpet trade likewise brought handicraft weaving under the control of urban elites who invested heavily in carpet production on speculation, opened hundreds of manufactories in the city, and guided the transformation of productive relations from handicraft production to near-industrial scale manufacturing. Much like the commercialization of agriculture, the transformation of the carpet trade aided in the process of urban‒rural integration, not only through greater control over production in the hands of urban elites, but also by intensifying relations with rural and tribal producers of key inputs like wool and dyes used in the production process. Social change associated with the carpet weaving industry was dramatic, particularly in the urban center of Kirman City, where the opening of carpet manufactories supported a significant increase in the urban population. According to the Iranian guide for Neucomen’s 1904 commercial mission to southeastern Persia, conducted during a period of stagnation in carpet production, an estimated onefifth of the urban population was left unemployed and in poverty.73 The production and international trade of carpets, a luxury item for Europe’s growing middle class, had become a major element of the local economy in the decade between

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1894 and 1904. This industry was precariously founded on foreign demand and the sometimes violent fluctuations of the global economy. In 1904, the consequences of this became all too evident when the carpet trade hit a sudden lull. This was due, it was said, to the decline in workmanship by local weavers, who began cutting corners to meet rising demand, including the use of imported aniline dyes, coupled with changing fashions among the European middle class. This opened the door to British firms that would reinvest and take over the industry after 1904 in Kirman. The rapid social and economic change in Kirman accompanying the carpet boom, and the dramatic downturn early in the 20th century, formed the immediate backdrop of the conflicts in Kirman leading up to Iran’s Constitutional Revolution in 1906, in which this new element of poor urban laborers would play a central role in local politics.

Gender and modernism While patterns of production, urban‒rural integration, and settled‒nomadic interaction were in flux in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women and gender became another important battleground for social change. It was largely within the same prominent urban families involved in the expansion of urban patrimonialism that the first direct discussions of patrimonialism as a modern political paradigm appeared in Kirman. Scholarly studies of Pahlavi-era feminist movements have noted that shifting discourses surrounding gender and the family significantly predated the “Women’s Awakening” of the interwar period. More recently, Camron Michael Amin, Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, and Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi have each noted the intense debates over the norms surrounding the ideal modern Iranian man and woman as components of a nation that preceded the Pahlavi period.74 These works have all eroded the “modern” and “traditional” dichotomy, and the sense that gender roles and discourses remained static and unchanged until Western intervention served as a catalyst from the outside. Yet it is still the emergence of modernist and nationalist discourses, in which reconfiguring gender norms and relationships were central, that remain the focus of much of the scholarly discussion over sociocultural change in late Qajar Iran. Women and gender became visible as symbols of differences in the context of a modern encounter in this line of scholarship. A strong emphasis has thus been placed on cultural production, especially from the imperial center of Tehran.75 This is based, in part, on the assumption that a growing interaction with European modernity was a driving force behind social and cultural change in 19th century Iran. High cultural production from the (relatively speaking) cosmopolitan center of Tehran is taken as representative of this modern cross-cultural dialogue, and the emergence of a distinctly Iranian modernity is identified in shifting textual and visual discourses. It is misleading to present the cultural currents of the Qajar court or Tehrani elites as “national” culture. Qajar Iran was not a nationstate in its infancy, but a collection of loosely integrated provincial communities united under a weak, ineffective empire. Not only were there numerous points of contact with the wider world, but even the interprovincial and center‒periphery

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relationships within the Qajar Empire were a type of foreign encounter of their own. When writing the history of Iranian modernity, historians must take into account the varied experiences of provincial communities whether in social scientific studies of social organization or in discursive studies of cultural change. Rather than viewing discursive shifts related to gender and sexuality as a component of a national culture in the absence of nationalism, bringing this question back to regional developments, marked by the expansion and consolidation of urban patrimonialism in regions beyond Tehran, is a critical starting point. The first difficulty one encounters when seeking out discussions over women and gender in provincial settings is that women are rarely mentioned directly in 19th century historical, geographical, or travel writings by local elites. In fact, this conspicuous silence is an important clue into how local elites defined masculine and feminine traits and social roles. The notable elements of society to these writers were participants in a strongly masculine narrative of great men and their great works and deeds. When women are mentioned directly in Vaziri’s geographical or historical works or in Ahmadi’s narrative on the rulers of Kirman and his timeline of local history, they appear through a strongly patriarchal discourse as wives, mothers, and daughters, and then only when serving as links between prominent families through marriage and exchange of property. Such statements should, of course, be taken as the norms and ideals of the authors of these texts, rather than an objective account of lived experience. Historians have noted that it was exceedingly common for women in Qajar Iran to own property, defend their personal and property rights in court, and participate in public and political life in a variety of ways.76 Instead, the marginalization of women in these texts, and the relegation of femininity to maternalism under male guardianship, represents a vital piece of the story of how Iranians adapted to changing circumstances and engaged in a cultural dialogue over social and cultural boundaries, particularly within the sphere of elite society from which local authors emerged. Modernist thinkers, like Kirman’s most influential and well-known intellectual, Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani (d. 1896), had their own complicated relationship with gender and women’s rights in their works on constitutionalism and reform. This is due in large part to the strong connections between Kirman’s patrimonial households and the intellectual circles from which modernist and constitutionalist thought emerged. Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani, the forefather of intellectual radicalism in Qajar Kirman, was the son of a local patriarch, Aqa ʿAbd al-Rahim Bardasiri, a major landowner in Bardasir and member of the Ahl-i Haqq movement and a maternal line that descended from Muzaffar ʿAli Shah, a critical player in systematizing the beliefs of the Niʿmat Allahi Sufi order in Mahan. This diversity in his family was matched by a similar diversity in his intellectual influences, as he studied a wide array of disciplines in his early life. While Mirza Aqa Khan worked briefly as a tax collector in Bardasir through his position in a prominent landowning family, a dispute over tax receipts led him to flee Kirman in the 1880s. He later converted to Babism and became a major force in early Iranian nationalist thought as an expatriate intellectual in Istanbul and a companion of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. After one of al-Afghani’s disciples with Kirmani connections, Mirza

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Riza Kirmani, assassinated the Shah in 1896, Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani was implicated as a co-conspirator, extradited to Iran, and executed. While a young man in Kirman, Mirza Aqa Khan had fostered a strong relationship with its local mujtahid, Hajj Aqa Ahmad, the patronym of the powerful Ahmadi family. Through the Ahmadis, Mirza Aqa Khan developed connections to other young radical thinkers, including Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, a founding member of the constitutionalist Anjuman-i Makhfi (“Secret Society”) and author of the Tarikh-i Bidari Iraniyan [History of the Awakening of the Iranians], a detailed chronicle of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. The next generation of Kirmani intellectuals, who were active in agitating for constitutionalism, continued to organize around the Ahmadi family under Hajj Aqa Ahmad’s son, the mujtahid Shaykh Abu Jaʿfar. Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi, a member of the Ahmadi family, in fact served as one of Kirman’s first representatives to the Majlis. In this way, a strong connection existed between the supposedly anti-patrimonial constitutionalist community and the local patrimonial establishment. It should, perhaps, be no surprise then that we find little in their works on patrimonialism, women’s rights, gender roles, or the like. Parvin Paidar called this a “patriarchal consensus,” in which male guardianship was actively maintained as a central component in blending “modern” and “traditional” values by Iranian nationalist intellectuals. “Upholding male domination” served as a bridge between a society built around an idealized Islamic family upheld by the sharʿia to one centered on an idealized modern Iranian family as a building block of a nation-building project.77 A similar process is described by Elizabeth Thompson in interwar Syria and Lebanon as a “patriarchal bargain,” in which the patrimonial roots of prominent political brokers surface through the subordination of the politics of gender to the interests of patriarchs in maintaining their “paternal privileges.”78 Although Paidar dates this patriarchal consensus in Iran to the 1930s, Camron Michael Amin singled out Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani and several of his 19th century contemporaries as the “true architects of the ‘patriarchal consensus.’ ”79 Amin’s lengthy discussion of Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani’s views on women and gender begins with the perhaps surprising point that he rarely explicitly discusses the roles, status, or rights of men and women explicitly in his works. When he does mention women apart from men, he uses a maternalistic discourse, describing women as mothers, daughters, and wives under male guardianship. He certainly viewed women as an oppressed group, but not because of male guardianship or gender inequality. He attributes their backwardness to the same sources as male backwardness: alien cultural influences brought in by Arabs and Islam.80 Rather than viewing gender as a site of a modern encounter, a subtle accommodation is made in presenting the gendered order of Iranian societies as a natural building block for a national community. Gender does, however, serve as a site of encounter of a different type in Vaziri’s writing: the encounter between urban society and, from his perspective, the uncivilized spaces of rural and tribal groups. Women appear at many points in his geographical survey of Kirman’s rural districts; he remarks on the natural beauty of women from a handful of particular villages, as exotic curiosities in a world

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near but beyond the immediate view of the urban elite.81 This is tempered with condemnation for improper observance of what he considered a proper, gendered order rooted in Islam. One particularly striking instance of this appears in his discussion of the Ahl-i Haqq, from which the as-yet-unknown Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani would soon emerge. He describes the scandalous habits of this sectarian group, known to urbanites as the ʿAli Allahi, who were rumored to conduct scandalous rituals up in the mountains of Bardasir, where gender segregation was not properly enforced. No shame is forbidden them. In their worship, some days and nights they cook sheep. Men and women are present in one group without concern for modesty. The headman plays a bad sounding sitar or ribick and sings some meaningless chants or poems and the rest move about ecstatically, some cry, some dance, and some suddenly faint.82

Conclusion The expansion of urban household networks in Kirman in the context of growing imperial competition and the intensification of the global carpet trade served as the structural backdrop to social change in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. New relationships emerged between urban and rural notables, pastoral-nomadic groups, and laborers that were deeply marked by the growing power of urban patrimonial families and their global imperial and commercial networks. The carpet trade, in the hands of Kirmani elites, created conditions for a fundamental restructuring of production and trade patterns within the region, accompanied by the rise of wage labor and increased urbanization. Kirman’s elite networks changed in the process as well, becoming more centralized around urban households with an unprecedented level of control over politics and economic resources in rural and tribal settings. Perhaps most notable about the social history of late 19th century Kirman, though, are the strong continuities that persisted, particularly in the realm of gender norms. Examining the “patriarchal consensus,” described as a discursive feature of Iranian modernism by Paidar and Amin, and placing it in the context of the regional contestations taking place in a community like Kirman reveal the social historical roots of upholding urban patrimonialism. Indeed, modernists themselves owed a great debt to the patrimonial elites of Kirman City. Modernity in Iran was crafted through these local contingencies, mediated by powerful local families and the norms they acted upon. This became especially apparent in the struggles over constitutionalism throughout Iran that escalated into a full-scale revolution with the active participation of Kirmani activists and elites in 1906.

Notes 1 Ashraf, “Dual Class Structure,” 14. Gilbar, “The Opening Up of Qajar Iran.” See also the sections on 19th century Iran in Homa Katouzian, The Political Economy of

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4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25

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Modern Iran: Despotism and Pseudo-Modernism, 1926–1979 (London: Macmillan, 1981), 27. An updated version of his theoretical approach appears in Katouzian’s “The Significance of Economic History, and the Fundamental Features of the Economic History of Iran,” Iranian Studies 38, no. 1 (2005): 160–62. See especially Amirahmadi, Political Economy, tracing the transition from “pseudofeudalism” to “proto-capitalism.” John Foran, Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993). The sections in this book on Qajar Iran are developed around the theoretical framework elaborated in Foran’s “The Concept of Dependent Development as a Key to the Political Economy of Qajar Iran (1800–1925).” See, for example, the “Iranian” response to modernity in Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran. and “Iranian” responses to Western discourses on gender and the family in Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. Asghar Fathi, “Role of the Traditional Leader in Modernization of Iran, 1890–1910,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 11, no. 1 (1980). Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 44–45. Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 123–26. Scarcia, “Kerman 1905.” Hermann and Rezai, “Le Rôle du Vaqf,” 108. The authors also note that Kirmani Shaykhism in this period came to appear more as a critique of Usuli Shiʿism as part of this growing factionalism. Ibid., 102. Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles, 105. Gustafson, “Qajar Ambitions in the Great Game: Notes on the Embassy of ʿAbbas Qoli Khan to the Amir of Bokhara, 1844.” Farman Farma, Musafaratnama-i Kirman va Balucistan, 56. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 98–99. Quarter Master General’s Department Intelligence Branch India, Gazetteer of Persia (Simla: Printed at the Government Central Print. Office, 1885), IV: 36. Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, “Fragile Frontiers: The Diminishing Domains of Qajar Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 29, no. 2 (1997). Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 55, 98. Farmanfarma and Afshar, Musfaratnama-yi Kirman va Baluchistan, 259. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 100. Ibid., 62. Farmanfarma and Afshar, Musfaratnama-yi Kirman va Baluchistan, 62–101. Thirty-eight of 98 milki villages, excluding 12 khalisa properties and 3 bequeathed as vaqf, were held by the individuals above. This figure does not include a number of individuals who were not fully identifiable in contemporary sources or were somewhat more distant members of these same households. Farman Farma, Musafaratnama-i Kirman va Balucistan. Sykes, A History of Persia, 383. Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles, 189. Ibid., 152. Mirza Riza Muhandis, “Safarnama-yi Mirza Riza Muhandis, Kirman, Yazd, Shiraz, Bushihr 1322 Hijri Qamari,” in Mallahan-i khak va sayyahan-i aflak: Safarnamah-yi Firuz Mirza Farmanfarma, Kirman 1289 Hijri Qamari; va, Safarnamah-i Mirza Riza Muhandis, Kirman, Yazd, Shiraz, Bushihr 1322 Hijri Qamari (Kirman: Markaz-i Kirmanshinasi, 2007), 137, 40. Shoko Okazaki, “The Great Persian Famine of 1870–71,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 49 (1986). Annette Ittig, “Ziegler’s Sultanabad Carpet Enterprise,” Iranian Studies 25, no. 1–2 (1992).

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28 Browne, Year Amongst the Persians, 459. Percy Molesworth Sykes, “Report on the Trade and Commerce of the Consular Districts of Kerman and Persian Beluchistan from March, 1894 to March, 1895,” in House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Reports from H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [c.7919] (1896). 29 Dillon, “Carpet Capitalism,” 299–300. See also Ittig, “The Kirmani Boom – a Study in Carpet Entrepreneurship,” Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies 1 (1985). 30 Mirza Riza Muhandis, with the 1904 Neucomen mission, noted that rural areas in Kirman were generally regarded as poor but maintained a steady production of agricultural goods and woven handicrafts. Mirza Riza Muhandis, “Safarnama,” 137. 31 Thomson, “Report” (20 April 1868), 253. 32 Ervand Abrahamian and Farhad Kazemi, “The Nonrevolutionary Peasantry of Modern Iran,” Iranian Studies 11, no. 1/4 (1978): 260. 33 Sykes, “Report (1896).” 34 Beck, The Qashqaʾi of Iran (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 6, 59. 35 Scott, Seeing Like a State, 1. 36 Arash Khazeni, Tribes & Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 45. 37 Ibid., 12. 38 See, for example, Leonard M. Helfgott, “Tribalism as a Socioeconomic Formation in Iranian History,” Iranian Studies 10, no. 1/2 (1977). 39 Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles, 435. 40 Ibid. 41 Vaziri, Tarikh, 419. 42 Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 162. 43 Vaziri, Tarikh, 419–20. 44 Thomson, “Report” (20 April 1868), 249. 45 Abbott, Amanat and Great Britain. Foreign Office, Cities & Trade: Consul Abbott on the Economy and Society of Iran, 1847–1866, 83. 46 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 40. 47 Ibid., 41. 48 Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles, 195. 49 Gleadowe-Neucomen, “Report on the Commercial Mission to South-Eastern Persia During 1904–1905,” 49. 50 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 40. 51 Mirza Riza Muhandis, “Safarnama,” 139. 52 Ibid., 140. 53 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 315. 54 Preece, “Report of a Journey” (27 Feb 1894), 31. 55 Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles, 199; Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 34. 56 Leonard Michael Helfgott, Ties that Bind: A Social History of the Iranian Carpet (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). 57 Edward Browne decried the condition of the children in Kirman’s shawl manufactories: “Poor little Kirmanis! They must toil thus, deprived of good air and sunlight, and debarred from the recreations and amusements which should brighten their childhood, that some grandee may bedeck himself with those sumptuous shawls, which, beautiful as they are, will evermore seem to me to be dyed with the blood of the innocents!” Browne, Year Amongst the Persians, 483. 58 Euan Smith, “Perso-Afghan Mission,” 186–7. 59 Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles, 199–200. Sykes noted that “few women or girls are employed, which keeps the work at a high state of excellence.” 60 Preece, “Report of a Journey” (27 Feb 1894), 31. 61 Ibid. 62 Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles, 199; Preece, “Report of a Journey” (27 Feb 1894), 31.

136 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82

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Sykes, Ten Thousand Miles, 199. Preece, “Report of a Journey” (27 Feb 1894), 31. Browne, Year Amongst the Persians, 482. English, City and Village, 87–88. Ibid. Ibid., 92–93. Dillon, “Carpet Capitalism.” Ibid., 468–69. Ibid., 471. Ibid., 475–76. Mirza Riza Muhandis, “Safarnama,” 140. See especially Camron Michael Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman: Gender, State Policy, and Popular Culture, 1865–1946 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 4; Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, “Patriotic Womanhood: The Culture of Feminism in Modern Iran, 1900–1941,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 32, no. 1 (2005); Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, “From Patriotism to Matriotism: A Tropological Study of Iranian Nationalism, 1870–1909,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 342 (2002). See especially Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity, 2–4. Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran, 1–8. See the monumental archive of documents at “Women’s Worlds in Qajar Iran,” Harvard University, www.qajarwomen.org. Parvin Paidar, Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 112. Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 38. Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman, 25–26. Ibid., 27–30. Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 107, 39, 41. Ibid., 156.

6

The household politics of revolution

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Kirman fostered a circle of radical intellectuals and political activists who proved critical to the success of Iran’s 1906–11 Constitutional Revolution. Inspired by contemporary modernist thinkers, most notably the local nationalist figure Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani (d. 1896), a new generation of radical intellectuals and activists in Kirman began agitating for constitutionalism to curtail Qajar despotism and bring about greater social justice in the 1890s and 1900s. Among this group were Kirman’s local historian Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi (d. 1921), who would twice serve on the Majlis (parliament) in Tehran, and his childhood companion Mirza Muhammad Nazim al-Islam Kirmani (d. 1917), the organizer of the Anjuman-i Makhfi (Secret Society) and author of a voluminous chronicle of the revolutionary movement, Tarikh-i Bidari Iraniyan [History of the Awakening of the Iranians]. This movement promoting constitutional limits on the patrimonial rule of the Shah was based on a curious contradiction, however, in that it developed and thrived in large part due to a close association with a group of Kirman’s own patrimonial authorities. The leading figures in Kirman’s modernist, constitutionalist community were members of, or closely tied to, the Ahmadis, one of the province’s leading mutasharʿi clerical families, producing the province’s leading mujtahids and marjaʿ al-taqlids generation after generation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Ahmadis also fostered a small but influential group of young radicals and lent a measure of legitimacy to their cause through their active involvement in the education of these men and the involvement of members of their own family in agitating for constitutionalism. Although accommodating a wide array of motivations and ideologies, the Constitutional Revolution has been widely viewed as a milestone in the modernization of Iran in the view of many historians.1 However, continuing household factionalism among the so-called traditional elite, appearing in the garb of religious sectarianism, produced an important precipitating event in the revolutionary struggle. Leading members of the Ahmadi and Vakil al-Mulki households led a revolt in 1905 against the provincial authorities in Kirman over the appointment of several members of the Ibrahimi household to important administrative posts, using the Ibrahimis’ association with Shaykhism to provoke a large-scale uprising in Kirman City. The provincial authorities attempted to make an example of

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Hajj Mirza Muhammad Riza, the son of Shaykh Abu Jaʿfar Ahmadi and now the town’s leading mujtahid, for his role in inciting the riots. He became a critical figure in the constitutional movement after Kirman’s governor took the monumental step of inflicting the bastinado on him, a member of the ʿulamaʾ, and then expelling him from the city. The assault of a mujtahid by a secular authority of the state became an important symbolic event that rallied clerical support for the constitutional movement. Nazim al-Islam Kirmani credited this incident with helping to forge the critical alliance between two of Tehran’s leading ʿulamaʾ, Ayatullah Bihbihani and Ayatullah Tabatabaʾi, in support of constitutional rule, and calls for compensation for the mujtahid were included alongside their demand for a constitutive assembly in the petitions forwarded to Muzaffar al-Din Shah in 1906. Following the success of the Constitutional Revolution, the contradictions became apparent in the anti-patrimonial movement, which was itself nurtured locally through the patrimonial institution of the elite household. The very same households that were influential in the success of the revolution at the state level, and that contributed members to the Majlis in Tehran, in turn utilized their intermediary position to limit the scope of the Constitutional Revolution locally by contesting the authority of revolutionary institutions at the provincial level. The anjumans (societies or councils), the chief manifestation of the revolution at the provincial level, presented a challenge to the patrimonialism underlying the social power of Kirman’s elite households by usurping their long-standing control over local administration. After failing to control these institutions to further their own interests, the Ahmadis and Vakil al-Mulkis opposed and marginalized them, ultimately subordinating the provincial anjuman to patrimonial authorities within Kirman’s elite urban households. The role of provincial elite households in mediating social, political, and economic change in Qajar Kirman was perhaps nowhere as evident as here, in the successes and failures of constitutionalism.

The Ahmadi household and intellectual radicalism in Kirman By the turn of the 20th century, Kirman was producing another notable export, aside from its renowned opium and carpets: radical intellectuals and constitutionalists. Kirman’s rich ethnic and religious diversity, its distance from the centers of imperial and religious authority, and its booming global networks all helped to cultivate a thriving intellectual community. An atmosphere of intellectual radicalism emerged in Kirman marked by criticism of Iran’s social and political institutions, identification with Iranian nationalism (often with reference to pre-Islamic Iran), and appeals for constitutionalism as a means of placing limits on the despotic rule of the Qajars. The most prominent of Kirman’s radical intellectuals, Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani (d. 1896), fled Kirman in 1883 and joined a number of expatriate Iranian writers and activists in Istanbul in the 1880s and 1890s. He corresponded extensively with other notable intellectual figures of his time like Mirza Malkum Khan, editor of the important publication Qanun, and the pan-Islamist revolutionary Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani’s influence was felt strongly

Household politics of revolution 139 during the Constitutional Revolution, realized some ten years after his death. This was particularly true in his native Kirman, where a small, but dedicated, circle of modernist writers and political activists emerged which was instrumental in the revolutionary struggle. This group coalesced around Shaykh Abu Jaʿfar, the head of the Ahmadi household of Rafsanjan, and his disciples. Shaykh Abu Jaʿfar was the son of Hajj Aqa Ahmad, who was once Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani’s principal teacher in the field of Islamic jurisprudence, and the leading mujtahid in Kirman up to his death in 1878.2 As the son of a merchant, Aqa Ahmad was shrewd to forge alliances with leading Shiʿi religious scholars outside the province in addition to establishing himself in Kirman’s important Maʿsum Bik Madrasa.3 He was, consequently, also a leading voice of the local mutasharʿi ʿulamaʾ, and his household played an important role in both the 1878 and 1905 factional conflicts with the Shaykhi community. Mirza Aqa Khan was a freethinker with a wide range of influences. He was indeed very critical of Shiʿi legal, theological, and theosophical thought in his writings. However, through his connections with Aqa Ahmad he forged lifelong relationships with Kirman’s mutasharʿi elites and intellectuals who would play an important role in later events. Abu Jaʿfar was a friend and mentor to many of Kirman’s most prominent constitutionalist figures in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Born in 1258/1842–43, Abu Jaʿfar studied fiqh and hikmat under his father before making his way to Isfahan, where he studied under one of the town’s leading mujtahids, Hajji Shaykh Muhammad Baqir.4 After traveling to Mecca and the ʿatabat, his father sent him back to Isfahan for further study under three other leading scholars, Hajj Sayyid Asad Allah, Hajj Sayyid Muhammad Shaʿshaʿani, and Aqa Mir Muhammad Hashim Charsuʾi.5 Bastani-Parizi credits these three men with broadening Abu Jaʿfar’s intellectual horizons and converting him into something of an “enlightened” thinker in addition to his training in Islamic jurisprudence.6 Abu Jaʿfar returned home in Rabiʿ I 1286/June–July 1869 to take up teaching, and quickly became one of Kirman’s leading Shiʿi jurisprudents.7 When his father, Aqa Ahmad, died in 1878, Abu Jaʿfar succeeded him as both Kirman’s leading mutasharʿi jurisprudent and as head of the Ahmadi household. Among his leading disciples were two of Kirman’s most well-known constitutionalist activists: his younger brother Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi and his close friend Mirza Muhammad Nazim al-Islam Kirmani.8 Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi, the author of two local histories of Kirman, notes in his works that he was only about eight years old when he began studying alongside the somewhat older Mirza Muhammad Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, both of whom had a strong influence on his intellectual development.9 Nazim al-Islam’s connection to the Ahmadis began when he studied Arabic under Abu Jaʿfar in about 1880, and became something of a mentor to Abu Jaʿfar’s younger brother Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi as well. During these early years, he also met and studied with Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani, whom he notes as having a tremendous influence on his intellectual development.10 Nazim al-Islam left Kirman in 1891 to study theology in Tehran and became a major player in

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the Constitutional Revolution. Like many of his contemporaries, he first became politically active during the protests over the Tobacco Regie. He went on to found the Anjuman-i Makhfi, the “secret society” that debated radical social thought and revolutionary political theory as applied to the Iranian situation and helped organize the early revolutionary movement.11 He was also the author of Tarikh-i Bidari Iraniyan [The History of the Awakening of the Iranians], a three-volume history of the Constitutional Revolution which remains the most detailed and reliable source for the early years of the movement. Prior to his departure in 1891, Nazim al-Islam and Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi spent ten years together in Kirman. Unlike Mirza Aqa Khan and Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Shaykh Yahya married a Kirmani woman and settled in Kirman, opting not to follow his dear friend to Tehran.12 Nazim al-Islam remembered this period fondly in Tarikh-i Bidari Iraniyan, recalling that “when I departed, he was unable to go because he was married. The two of us were very close and I still am sorrowful when I think of these 17 years [spent apart].”13 Through Nazim al-Islam, Shaykh Yahya was exposed to a wide range of works on history and social and political thought at a young age. In the opinion of Bastani-Parizi, without the influence of Nazim al-Islam, “after his brother’s death, he would certainly, as his younger brother, have taken up his position.”14 Instead, Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi was encouraged by Nazim al-Islam to apply himself to the study of his home province. He produced two major works on Kirmani history. One was a local history entitled Farmandihan-i Kirman [The Rulers of Kirman], organized as a political history of Kirman under the governors appointed by successive dynasties. The narrative itself, though, also contains significant commentary on social and economic developments in Kirman, and critical commentary on defective sections of Vaziri’s texts that omit several important episodes in the Qajar period.15 His other major work was a timeline of historical events, drawing connections between three concentric circles of Kirman, Iran, and the world. This work carries a strong sense not only of local pride, but also a form of proto-nationalism in which Kirman is conceived as part of a broader Iranian collective, set in the context of wider global developments in the broader community of nations.16 Shaykh Yahya was later active in politics as well, was twice elected to represent Kirman in the Majlis-i Shawra-yi Milli, and served later in his life as the head of the Muʿarif va Vaqf-i Kirman (Ministry of Sciences and Endowments of Kirman) until his death from malaria in 1921.17 The centrality of the Ahmadi household to both Kirman’s mutasharʿi establishment and modernist intellectual circles lent important credibility to the constitutionalist cause. As Asghar Fathi has argued, the “traditional leader,” that is, one who occupies a position of personal authority based on his position within society as either a religious scholar, tribal chief, guild leader, or otherwise, was in a unique position in Qajar Iran to legitimize calls for change.18 In Kirman, the bearers of the political program to place constitutional limitations on the powers of the Qajar monarchy were attached to a prestigious local line of mutasharʿi elites, acting as mujtahids, administrators of local mosques, and powerful landowners, with strong relationships to other mutasharʿi families like the Vakil al-Mulkis,

Household politics of revolution 141 who dominated the provincial administration. Connections to the Ahmadi household not only provided a degree of protection to modernist and constitutionalist thinkers, but also helped to legitimize modernist ideas and confirm their agreement with core Islamic principles – combatting a charge often leveled at modernists and constitutionalists. This would be critical, given the tense environment that soon developed in Kirman in the years immediately prior to the 1906–11 Constitutional Revolution.

The 1905 Shaykhi–mutasharʿi conflicts Shaykhi–mutasharʿi factionalism continued to dominate Kirman’s social and political life into the first decade of the 20th century, culminating in the 1905 Shaykhi–mutasharʿi conflicts in Kirman, which in part precipitated the emergence of a full-scale revolutionary movement throughout Iran. Ostensibly a sectarian conflict between rival religious communities, this factionalism was rooted in competition over the control of economic resources, stipendiary posts, and religious institutions by a core group of Kirman’s local elite households. By the late 19th century, the mutasharʿi Shiʿi community was dominated by two prominent local households, the Ahmadis, who produced a line of Kirman’s leading mujtahids, and the Vakil al-Mulkis, descendants of former governor Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan Vakil al-Mulk (d. 1868). With control over lucrative vaqf endowments, large tracts of prime agricultural land in Rafsanjan, and one of the principal madrasas of Kirman City, the Maʿsum Bik Madrasa, the Ahmadis held considerable prestige and influence in the region. The Vakil al-Mulkis, on the other hand, became wealthy through the Persian Gulf trade under the governments of Vakil al-Mulk and Vakil al-Mulk II. Vakil al-Mulk II’s son Mirza Husayn Khan ʿAdil al-Saltana became a principal investor in the carpet boom of the 1890s and contributed to a revival of the household estate. He and a number of his relatives continued to control key administrative and military posts in Kirman. ʿAdil al-Saltana held the position of sardar-i nusrat as chief aide to the governor; his uncle Vali Khan controlled the governorship of Bam and was the zabit (military chief) for numerous districts; ʿAdil al-Saltana’s brother, Jumlat al-Mulk, was the sartip (commander) of the provincial army and artillery. Two other brothers, Mirza Mihdi Khan and Rustam Khan, were likewise commanders of smaller district forces throughout the province.19 The Ahmadis and Vakil al-Mulkis were both directly involved in the 1878 disturbances between Kirman’s mutasharʿi and Shaykhi communities, resulting from drought and shortages in the province. As discussed in Chapter 4, Shaykhis had become a target of attacks during the shortages of 1878 when the mutasharʿi ʿulamaʾ incited crowds that attacked Shaykhi houses and opened the government granaries.20 The Shaykhi community remained closely tied to the Ibrahimi household, descendants of the early 19th century Qajar prince-governor Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla (d. 1826). The spiritual head of the Kirmani branch of the Shaykhi movement had become a hereditary position following the death of Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan in 1878 and the succession of his son, Hajji Muhammad Khan

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(d. 1906). The Ibrahimi estate, as detailed in earlier chapters, was rooted in three major activities. First, the Ibrahimis controlled an enormous vaqf established by their ancestor Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla for the Ibrahimi Complex in Kirman City, which included a bazar, water reservoir, bathhouse, and the important Madrasa-yi Ibrahimiyya.21 Secondly, through the building projects of Ibrahim Khan and the investments of his heirs and descendants, the Ibrahimis owned considerable land throughout the province, and especially in Rafsanjan, where many of his descendants settled.22 Third, as heads of the Kirmani Shaykhi community, they controlled the resources committed by their followers to local Shaykhi institutions. As a branch of the royal Qajar household, and proponents of what was widely considered a conservative social outlook supported by a shallow form of metaphysical contemplation, the Shaykhis were viewed by the mutasharʿi community as narrow elitists closely identified with the Qajar state. They made enemies of the mutasharʿi ʿulamaʾ in particular by supporting an ideological position which questioned the role of the Shiʿi jurisprudent as marjaʿ-i taqlid (a supreme model of imitation) while simultaneously alluding to a similar function for the Shaykhi spiritual leader as an intermediary between the Shiʿi community and the imams.23 Through the Ibrahimi landholdings and endowments, the Shaykhis also controlled considerable wealth and property from sources independent of mutasharʿi institutions. In early 1903, after two years of drought, Kirman was again faced with a scarcity of grain, and as many of the province’s sheep had died, meat was also difficult to find at market.24 Bread riots again broke out in Kirman, but the continuing strength of the international carpet trade helped temper the situation, which was quickly put down by the provincial governor Zafar al-Saltana.25 However, when the famine failed to subside by 1904 and was compounded by a major downturn in the carpet trade with Europe, the situation quickly began to deteriorate. Mr. Eldrid, the manager of the Imperial Bank of Persia’s Kirman branch, noted that foreign markets were now overstocked on Persian carpets, which were no longer selling, in his opinion, due to a drop in quality and the “hideous semi-European designs” taken up by weavers. The British consulate, at the same time, reported a significant rise in brigandage and predatory attacks by nomadic tribes on the major communication and trade routes as a result of the famine, which further damaged international trade.26 The Qajar government, too, was in significant financial trouble by the turn of the 20th century. This was, in part, due to a series of poorly conceived foreign loans with high interest rates that the court was unable to pay off. With the ever-growing need for revenue, the Qajars resorted to selling concessions to foreign nationals to exploit the country’s natural and mineral resources and develop domestic infrastructure. These included the extensive 1872 Reuter Concession, which Lord Curzon called “the most complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has probably ever been dreamed of,” followed by the 1891 Tobacco Concession granted to General Talbot, which was cancelled following a large-scale popular uprising against it.27 The Qajars also raised revenue by extending the practice of selling offices like

Household politics of revolution 143 provincial governorships to the highest bidder while demanding higher and higher fees from potential governors.28 This in turn was deflected onto the peasantry in the form of increased taxes and expropriations and worsened the effects of the famines and shortages. In 1904, Rukn al-Dawla purchased the right to govern and collect tax revenues in Kirman. According to Nazim al-Islam, Rukn al-Dawla was very unpopular from the time of his arrival, staying in his private quarters, rarely socializing with the local elites, and acting cruelly and ruthlessly in his collection of taxes.29 In an effort to recoup his investment in the governorship, Rukn al-Dawla sold offices in the provincial administration to willing members of the local elite. In doing so, he threatened the position of several prominent local households who had held particular positions as essentially a hereditary right and relied on these posts for income, prestige, and political influence. Kirman’s Imam Jumʿa, Aqa Mirza Jalal al-Din, the son of Sayyid Javad Shirazi, died in late December 1903 and the post remained unfilled on Rukn al-Dawla’s arrival in early 1904.30 Aqa Mirza Hasan, the brother of the deceased Imam Jumʿa, whose family had held the position since the 1820s, was now forced to pay 2,000 tumans to be confirmed as the new Imam Jumʿa, and the British consul reported that the governor attempted to hold out for an additional 2,000 tumans.31 In February 1904, Rustam Khan of the Vakil al-Mulk household was removed as the governor of Sirjan and replaced by Rifʿat al-Saltana, a Shaykhi and member of the Ibrahimi household who was apparently willing to pay a higher fee.32 He, in turn, resigned in June 1904, as he “apparently consider[ed] it impossible to extort the increased revenue and pishkesh.”33 He was replaced by the governor’s brother, Rifʿat al-Dawla, who was advanced the necessary money from the Imperial Bank of Persia, while Rifʿat al-Saltana subsequently took bast (sanctuary) along with the governor of Khanaman against Rukn al-Dawla.34 Rukn al-Dawla failed, however, to meet his debts and by early 1905 the Qajar court began to harass him over 40,000 tumans in arrears.35 To maintain his position, he sold the positions of deputy governor to his brother ʿAyn al-Mulk and, to the chagrin of the mutasharʿi ʿulamaʾ, offered to sell the office of vazir, with full control of local administration, to a member of the Ibrahimi household, Amir al-Umaraʾ.36 Amir al-Umaraʾ, in turn, subcontracted out numerous administrative posts in the provincial government and the office of kalantar of Kirman City to members of the Shaykhi Ibrahimi household.37 The assembly of a Shaykhi administration raised the ire of the local mutasharʿi elites. A leading member of the Vakil al-Mulk household, ʿAdil al-Saltana, raised an objection to the sudden influence of the Ibrahimis and used the issue of Shaykhism to bring about the closure of the bazar and incite a mob to take to the streets of Kirman City on the night of May 24, 1905 to declare their refusal to submit to a Shaykhi government.38 The British and Russian consulates as well as the local branch of the Imperial Bank of Persia then received petitions bearing 377 seals from local mutasharʿi Shiʿis calling on them to pressure the governor to dismiss the Amir al-Umaraʾ and prevent a repeat of the 1878 riots, an open threat of unleashing a mob to meet their political ends.39

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In the midst of the political dispute over the appointment of the Shaykhi vazir, a fiery young Khurasani preacher named Shaykh Shamshiri Barini arrived in Kirman. He developed an immediate following in Kirman City by delivering sermons against minority religious and ethnic communities. He declared the Zoroastrian and Hindu minorities kafir-i harbi – unbelievers not living in conformity with their subordinate status as dhimma – and called their wealth and their blood halal (licit). Since the arrival of the British consulate in 1894, Zoroastrian and Hindu merchants had come to dominate the Persian Gulf trade and had developed into small but wealthy and well-connected minority communities with British sponsorship and protection. It is perhaps not surprising then that the unemployed masses, many of them from the failing carpet manufactories, feeling the effects of the ongoing drought and shortages, were receptive to this message. Shaykh Shamshiri reserved his harshest words for the Shaykhis, however, whom he called deviants and innovators, denounced their leaders as infidels, and even declared marriages conducted by Shaykhi ʿulamaʾ invalid. In Kirman City, people gathered by the thousands to hear his sermons, which became increasingly inflammatory and indecent.40 The Ahmadi household was quickly drawn into the conflict. Abu Jaʿfar had died several years earlier in June 1896. His son and successor, Mirza Muhammad Riza, had been away from Kirman completing his studies. After 14 years in Isfahan and the Shiʿi shrine towns in the Ottoman Empire, Mirza Muhammad Riza returned to Kirman in May/June 1905 to take up the place of his father and grandfather as Kirman’s leading mujtahid. He was greeted by an unusually large welcome on his arrival to the city, and people began flocking to him to seek his guidance on the matter of Shaykh Shamshiri and give sanction to his anti-Shaykhi rhetoric. He did not, however, respond to these requests and attempted to remain neutral.41 It is likely that Mirza Muhammad Riza still lacked the support of Kirman’s other leading mutasharʿi ʿulamaʾ and wished not to become too deeply involved in a contentious issue so soon after his return. According to Gianroberto Scarcia, other leading mutasharʿi ʿulamaʾ, including the new Imam Jumʿa, sought to avoid an outbreak of violence and were attempting to marginalize Shaykh Shamshiri.42 His followers were persistent, however, and took to following Mirza Muhammad Riza around the city, crowding into his home and mosque, repeating the message that they would not submit to Shaykhi rule.43 Fearing that he was sowing discontent, the governor had Shaykh Shamshiri arrested in June 1905 and sent to Ravar, from whence he was expected to make his way back to Khurasan. When the news of this spread, the city erupted in protest and the government was subsequently forced to allow for his return to the city.44 He set up in the house of the moderate mutasharʿi cleric Aqa Baqir, where he received a flood of guests and once again took up preaching against the Shaykhis.45 Rukn al-Dawla relented to the pressure and dismissed the Amir al-Umaraʾ, along with the Shaykhi kalantar Mukhtar al-Mulk, and the administration was entrusted primarily to the Vakil al-Mulki household.46 This only emboldened the Shaykh and his followers and opened the door for a greater escalation of the factional violence. The murder of a mutasharʿi woman by her Shaykhi husband in Mahan

Household politics of revolution 145 in July provided the opportunity for Shaykh Shamshiri to again incite his followers.47 It was rumored that the woman was beaten to death for refusing to call the name of the Shaykhi leader and kiss his picture. Her tongue was said to have been cut out and her body mutilated, which was then paraded around town by a group of mutasharʿis for several days to inflame tensions further.48 It is at this time that Mirza Muhammad Riza began openly taking an anti-Shaykhi stance and participating in the factional strife. Accounts of the Shaykhi–mutasharʿi conflicts in 1905 note the importance of the “crowd” or the “mob” in Kirman City, a large number of young men, as well as women, who could be mobilized by elites and religious leaders to take to the streets. Contemporary reports indicate a substantial growth in the urban population during the carpet boom and the opening of carpet manufactories in the city. By 1904, with the decline in carpet weaving, some 20% of the urban population was living in abject poverty.49 The ability of local elites to use local religious institutions by preaching, providing a meeting place, and offering a host of charitable and social services associated with these institutions and their endowments, to harness and direct the energies of the urban poor, was a major factor. It was, then, perhaps a practical as well as a symbolic act that the first target of the mutasharʿi elites was the Shaykhi mosque in Bazar-i Shah. This mosque was a central element of the Shaykhi community and was supported by significant endowment revenues. It was seized by Mirza Muhammad Riza’s cousin, Aqa Shaykh Muhammad Sadiq, who then acted as its new mutasharʿi prayer leader.50 He occupied the mosque along with a large number of followers and denied the Shaykhis access. According to Scarcia, over the following weeks these crowds continued targeting other elements of the Ibrahimiyya Complex, notably the bazar complex, where they destroyed considerable merchandise. A group also broke into the Shaykhi mosque built by Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani and defiled it.51 The Ibrahimi–Shaykhi leadership eventually succeeded in convincing the governor Rukn al-Dawla to intervene in the seizure of the Bazar-i Shah mosque. On August 21, 1905, the new kalantar ʿAdil al-Sultan, the brother of ʿAdil al-Saltana and a member of the Vakil al-Mulki household, was ordered to clear the mutasharʿis from the mosque, which he accomplished through the use of force. Despite the fact that he was himself a member of a leading mutasharʿi household, his intervention on behalf of the government to the benefit of the Shaykhis turned the crowd against him. ʿAdil al-Sultan fled and made his way to the house of the Shaykhi leader Hajj Muhammad Khan but was turned away and eventually fled over rooftops and through a latrine to the governor’s palace in the citadel.52 Government troops were sent out to restore order and clashed with the crowd, which had by now made its way to the front of Hajj Muhammad Khan’s house. The army used clubs and rifles to disperse the crowd and in the course of doing so injured some forty young men and boys.53 According to British consular reports, a guard was kept in front of the Shaykhi leader’s home to prevent any further attacks, which led to a widespread rumor that troops were on their way from Tehran to put down the riots. The bazar was closed the following day in

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protest. Two days later, on August 23, 1905, Mirza Muhammad Riza announced he was leaving to go to Mashhad, a blatant attempt at rallying his followers behind him, who, of course, pleaded with him to return as soon as he left the gates and hosted an elaborate istiqbal (a ritualized welcoming ceremony) upon his reentry into the city.54 Soon after this incident, Rukn al-Dawla was dismissed from the governorship for failing to maintain order and was replaced by the Minister of War, Zafar al-Saltana. The dismissal of Rukn al-Dawla did not put an end to the factional strife in Kirman; in fact, the conflict soon escalated into one of the key incidents in precipitating the Constitutional Revolution. On Wednesday, October 25, 1905, a group of men violated the homes of several Jews in the city who had been reported to Mirza Muhammad Riza Mujtahid for selling wine. When confronted by ʿAdil al-Saltana, the lieutenant governor, the mujtahid claimed not to know who had done this, condemned the incident, and told ʿAdil al-Saltana to do what he wished with the men if he found them. Not convinced of his innocence, ʿAdil al-Saltana persisted in questioning him until again the mujtahid threatened to leave for Mashhad. This time, a large gathering estimated at 10,000 strong by Nazim al-Islam crowded the streets in support of the mujtahid, refusing to let him leave. A group of Buchaqchi tribesmen, recently hired to help maintain order in the city, were sent to the home of the mujtahid. These tribesmen, according to Nazim al-Islam’s account, were sent by two partisans of the former governor Rukn al-Dawla, now serving under Zafar al-Saltana, in an attempt to incite a riot and see their patron returned to office. A conflict ensued, in which four men were killed in front of the home of Mirza Muhammad Riza Mujtahid by the Buchaqchis. The tribesmen then entered the house of the mujtahid and put him and several men from his entourage under arrest for creating the disturbance.55 Mirza Muhammad Riza Mujtahid and several other clerics involved in the incident were then taken to the citadel, where the extreme measure was taken of beating the cleric on the soles of his feet with a long stick, a common form of corporal punishment in Qajar Iran. He was then quickly sent away from the city, first toward Bam and then to his lands in Rafsanjan, before anyone in the town caught word of what had happened.56 The beating of a clerical leader was symbolic of the grave injustices perpetuated by the Qajar state and would fuel the Constitutional movement in the following months. For several days after the incident, Kirman City was absolutely quiet; the shops and mosques were all closed, with the sole exception of the Shaykhi institutions, as a protest in light of the seriousness of the incident. This was ironically misinterpreted by the British consul as a sign of the weakness of the local elites. The general opinion in the town is that the Mujhtahid went too far and brought his punishment on himself, they however consider that the Sardar had no right to beat a Mujhtahid and as a protest the other Mullas have not yet gone to the Musjids to pray. In any case the town is absolutely quiet and it is freely stated that after the severe measures taken there will be no further

Household politics of revolution 147 trouble. I am inclined to think that provided this present dissatisfaction takes no vigorous form of dissent from the people the power of the Mullahs is weakened forever.57

The Constitutional Revolution in Kirman Curiously, the very same households who produced revolutionaries at the state level led the charge to dismantle the new political institutions brought to Kirman by the success of the movement. Through the influence of these individuals, Nazim al-Islam Kirmani in particular, the conflict between a small number of Kirman’s urban elites escalated into a precipitating event in the Constitutional Revolution (1906–1911). Demands for redress of the bastinado of Hajj Muhammad Riza Mujtahid became a rallying cry against Qajar despotism and were included in the demands forwarded to Muzaffar al-Din Shah alongside the call for the establishment of a constitutive assembly. At the provincial level, the creation of anjumans (local societies or councils) became the chief institutional manifestation of the revolution. The anjumans presented an alternative framework for local administration along the lines of the modernist political theories of Kirman’s reformist intellectual circles, and one which challenged the patrimonial authority of Kirman’s elite households. After failing to usurp power in the new ruling body, the Provincial Council (anjuman-i iyalati), the Ahmadis and Vakil al-Mulkis led a local revolt against the leaders of the anjuman and helped discredit the institution as an ineffective form of mob rule. Kirman’s elite households played the role of powerful mediators in defining the scope of the revolution at the provincial level. What appears on the surface a major contradiction in the constitutional movement in fact is neatly in line with the politics of households, as Kirman’s elites successfully redefined their standing vis-à-vis the Qajar state, while continuing to pursue the interests of their estates locally by reasserting their control over local administration. The reach of Kirman’s intellectual circles into the heart of Iran’s constitutional movement was achieved primarily at the hands of Mirza Muhammad Nazim al-Islam Kirmani. Educated in Kirman’s modernist intellectual circle connected to the Ahmadi household, Nazim al-Islam left his hometown to make his way to Tehran in 1891.58 Over the next decade and a half, he became further radicalized by political developments like the movement against the Tobacco Concession in 1891–92, the encroachment of Russia and Great Britain on national interests, and the state’s dramatic fiscal decline. He became active in the intellectual circles of Tehran, organizing like-minded thinkers from among the elite. Nazim al-Islam promoted the concept of constitutionalism as a new framework for domestic politics that would limit the scope of the Shah’s powers, encourage wider popular participation in decision making, and set the foundations of a new progressive order. He was shrewd in representing his views in Islamic terminology to build alliances with diverse actors, accommodating calls for mashruʿa (institution of sharʿia law) in the context of his movement for mashruta.59 Notably, in 1905, he made a powerful ally in one of the leading mujtahids in Tehran, Aqa Mirza Sayyid Muhammad Tabatabaʾi, with whom he began pushing an immediate program of revolutionary political change.60

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On February 9, 1905, Nazim al-Islam and Tabatabaʾi formed the Anjuman-i Makhfi, or “Secret Society,” with a group of their associates in Tehran.61 The immediate purpose of the group was to provide a forum for pro-constitutionalist thinkers to discuss the issues of ideology, organization, and methods for instituting change, and their meetings involved political discussions, lectures by members of the anjuman, and readings of controversial or banned literature. In the group’s first meeting, Nazim al-Islam noted the recent success of anti-imperial movements worldwide, namely the Japanese defeat of the Russian navy, the revolutionary movement within Russia itself, and the uprisings in India against British colonialism, all as models for instituting change in Iran. He stressed the importance of founding a national majlis as a means of breaking the despotic power of the Qajars and instituting critical reforms to modernize the Iranian state, economy, and society. These goals included, most notably, the expansion of education (especially women’s education) as a means of politicizing a progressive public and preparing the way for greater popular participation in governing.62 The participation of leading ʿulamaʾ like Tabatabaʾi, as Janet Afary noted, was critical in protecting the anjumans from claims of heresy.63 A critical alliance, in fact, between the Constitutional Revolution’s two leading clerical voices was forged through the mediation of Nazim al-Islam Kirmani in the aftermath of the bastinado of Hajj Mirza Muhammad Riza Mujtahid in Kirman. Telegrams reporting the incident to Prime Minister ʿAyn al-Dawla in October were covered up and the event was not generally known in Tehran for several weeks, until the post arrived from Kirman.64 Nazim al-Islam called a meeting of the anjuman on November 15, 1905 to discuss the incident, after which he and his close associates, including another Kirmani native, Majd al-Islam, approached Tehran’s clerical leaders. He cites an impassioned speech by Majd al-Islam connecting the incident in Kirman with the struggle for mashruta (constitutional government), which caught the attention of the prominent Ayatullah Aqa Sayyid ʿAbd Allah Bihbihani. This Hajj Mirza Muhammad Riza is among the most prominent ʿulamaʾ and the son of the late Hajj Abu Jaʿfar, the grandson of the late Hajj Aqa Ahmad, one of the students of Akhund Mulla Kazim Khurasani. In his asceticism, virtue, and actions he was a first class person in Kirman. His authority in Kirman is even greater than your authority in Tehran. Today it is that Zafar al-Saltana struck him with a stick, tomorrow ʿAyn al-Dawla may hang you. If we don’t stop this now, tomorrow we will fall to harm.65 When challenged by another Tehrani clerical leader, Shaykh Fazl Allah, on the meaning of mashruta, Majd al-Islam redefined mashruta as a movement in support of the sharʿia: The rule of mashruta means the rule of mashruʿa [i.e., of the sharʿia or religious law]. It means they must weigh on the scale of the sharʿia the Shah and the beggar equally under the law of Islam.66

Household politics of revolution 149 These discussions were credited by Nazim al-Islam with creating the critical alliance between Tabatabaʾi and Aqa Sayyid ʿAbd Allah Bihbihani.67 He ultimately failed to convince Shaykh Fazl Allah that mashruta was not an assault on Islam, however; and in fact Shaykh Fazl Allah would later be executed in Tehran as a traitor to the revolution. The events in Kirman became a major rallying point for the clerical participants in the constitutional movement late in 1905. Over the course of that year, clerical leaders in Tehran organized strikes and basts against the actions of the Qajar state. Toward the end of 1905, the news from Kirman, followed shortly by the beating of two prominent merchants in Tehran over the price of sugar, brought tensions to a head. Tabatabaʾi, Bihbihani, and several hundred of their theology students took bast at the Shah ʿAbd al-ʿAzim shrine outside of Tehran in December.68 A list of four demands was drawn up which included the dismissal of Tehran’s governor, the punishment of Kirman’s governor Zafar al-Saltana for the bastinado of Hajj Mirza Muhammad Riza Mujtahid, the removal of a tribal guard placed on the road to Qum, and compensation to Mirza Muhammad Riza Mujtahid.69 These demands were later modified (dropping, for instance the demand for the removal of Kirman’s governor, as he had already been dismissed) prior to their submission to the prime minister to include two new sets of demands. First was the founding of a House of Justice (ʿAdalatkhana), a demand articulated by the constitutionalist leaders, in which Nazim al-Islam’s anjuman was central.70 Secondly, reflecting the array of social forces behind the constitutional movement were several items identified by Vanessa Martin as long-standing points of interest to the ʿulamaʾ designed to help bring in their support, including the return of confiscated vaqf (religious endowment) properties and amnesty for supporters of the Shiʿi ʿulamaʾ who wished to return to Tehran.71 The demands for compensation to Kirman’s leading mujtahid, whose assault by Qajar officials became symbolic of the central goals of the constitutional movement, remained a centerpiece of these demands, which would succeed in the course of the following year in establishing Iran’s first period of constitutional government. The order establishing Iran’s first constitution, signed by the ailing Muzaffar al-Din Shah on August 5, 1906 and ratified December 30, 1906, created a National Constitutive Assembly (Majlis-i Shawra-yi Milli) with delegates representing provincial communities, various social groups (ʿulamaʾ, landlords, merchants, etc.), and minority religious denominations (Jews, Zoroastrians, etc.). The Majlis limited the power of the Shah by taking control or oversight of key areas of administration and policy. In Kirman, elections were held for the Tehran Majlis appointments between November 1906 and March 1907 for seven seats, at least four of which were designated to represent the specific interests of Kirman’s khans, landlords, ʿulamaʾ, and merchants. The elections for the Tehran Majlis institutionalized aspects of the politics-of-households model of social power in Kirman, in which a small group of elite households who dominated local landholdings, administration, and religious institutions represented the local

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community in relations with the state and state appointees. In this case, appointments to the national Majlis intervened to institutionalize the access of local notables to the state and even granted them specific powers at the state level. The elections were conducted not by popular vote but through consultation among the elites of Kirman City and, as such, represented the alignment of power in Kirman’s elite circles in 1906 and 1907. During the elections, the local mutasharʿi elites split into two factions, which represented not distinct sets of ideologies or political priorities, but a small group of elite households on one side attempting to nearly monopolize the proceedings and a group of households of secondary standing among the elite on the other side attempting to use revolutionary institutions to assert their own influence. The election order itself was announced by Hajj Mirza Muhammad Riza in the Friday Mosque in November and was dominated by his household, the Ahmadi, and their allies.72 The Vakil al-Mulkis and Ahmadis, the province’s most powerful administrative and clerical households, respectively, pushed a set of candidates closely connected to their households and networks. The election of ʿAli Muhammad Khan, a close associate of Hajj Mirza Muhammad Riza Mujtahid to represent the local ʿulamaʾ was a highly unpopular choice among the opposition party and its supporters. ʿAli Muhammad was from a prominent

Table 6.1 Kirman’s representatives to the first Majlis-i Shawra-yi Milli, 1906–08 (1) Mirza Hasan Kirmani (2) Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi

Vakil al-Mulk household Ahmadi household

(3) ʿAli Muhammad Kirmani

Son of Aqa Baqir Mujtahid

(4) Mirza Hidayat Allah Shams al-Hukuma

Brother of Nazim al-Islam Kirmani

(5) Shaykh Mihdi Kirmani Bahr al-ʿUlum

Brother of Shaykh Ahmad Ruhi

(6) Shaykh Muhsin Khan

Ibrahimi household

(7) Nasr Allah Muʿavin al-Tujjar

Yazdi merchantiii

A follower of the Bahaʾi faith according to Bastani-Parizii Younger brother of Shaykh Abu Jaʿfar and author of Farmandihan-i Kirman Representative of the ʿulamaʾ. Closely aligned with the Ahmadi household His family intimately involved in the modernist intellectual circle connected to the Ahmadis His brother, Shaykh Ahmad Ruhi, was a companion of Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani. Bastani-Parizi states that like his brother, he was an ʿAzali Babiii A Shaykhi, nephew of the Shaykhi leader Hajj Muhammad Khan Sarkar Aqa Representative of the merchant community

  i Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani-Parizi, Introduction to Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 24.   ii Ibid. iii Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 80.

Household politics of revolution 151 local clerical household as the son of another local mujtahid, Aqa Baqir. He, however, was considered corrupt by the local population, was involved in stirring up anti-Shaykhi sentiment before the 1905 riots, and may have been involved in misappropriating vaqf monies.73 Immediately, notices on placards appeared in the bazar protesting his appointment.74 According to British observers, the Vakil al-Mulkis and Ahmadis continued to succeed in appointing their own candidates, which eventually brought together an opposition party headed by several local ʿulamaʾ.75 This group, headed by two mutasharʿi clerics named Aqa Mirza Muhammad and Aqa Sayyid ʿAli, headed a group which fought these appointments, in part by using the popular method of taking bast in the local telegraph office in protest.76 The seven delegates who represented Kirman in the Tehran Majlis were a strikingly diverse group, despite the clear Ahmadi and Vakil al-Mulki influence in its construction, and included not only Shaykhi, but even Bahaʾi and ʿAzali Babi members.77 This deputation included members of the Vakil al-Mulki and Ahmadi households, as well as a group connected to the modernist circle that developed around the Ahmadi household from the time of Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani, including the younger brother of Aqa Khan’s close companion Shaykh Ahmad Ruhi. This group was closely connected to Nazim al-Islam Kirmani and the Anjuman-i Makhfi, including his brother, Shams al-Hukuma, and childhood companion Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi. These members of Kirman’s deputation in particular were highly influential in the first Majlis given their close connections to the leading constitutionalist activists in Tehran connected to Nazim al-Islam.

Containing the revolution: conflicts over the local anjumans Paradoxically, Kirman’s revolutionaries against patriarchal rule in national politics formed a reactionary force locally in agitating against the institutions of the revolution. The very same households in Kirman connected to its modernist intellectual circles, participated in the 1905 Shaykhi–mutasharʿi riots precipitating the revolution, and sent delegates to the Tehran Majlis led the opposition to Kirman’s provincial anjuman once it threatened their own patriarchal power. Anjumans were the chief manifestation of the Constitutional Revolution in provincial communities. Afary described the anjumans as “grassroots councils that spread throughout Iran in 1906,” a manifestation of popular political participation for the first time in Iranian history.78 The term anjuman itself refers to a wide array of associations, from provincial governing councils to women’s groups to merchant assemblies. As Heidi Walcher pointed out in her recent history of Qajar Isfahan, many of the provincial anjumans formed after the revolution were organized and controlled by local elites and became yet another tool for local religious leaders to dominate local society. In Isfahan, for instance, she notes that the fiery clerical leader Aqa Najafi headed the provincial anjuman and utilized it to further his local economic interests and continue a long-standing political rivalry with the princegovernor Zill al-Sultan.79

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In Kirman, three known anjumans were in operation by mid-1907. One of these groups is called a “general” anjuman in British consular reports and was headed by a local mujtahid, Aqa Mirza Mahmud, until his death in September 1907. The other two represented the sayyids (recognized descendants of the prophet Muhammad) and the city’s carpet weavers, respectively.80 The function of these anjumans is unclear but they did not have an explicit role in the provincial government. The first such provincial anjuman (anjuman-i iyalati), which was to rule in concert with the Qajar governor, was established by the provincial governor himself, Nusrat al-Dawla Farman Farma, in January 1907, and as such was under the direct control of his own entourage. This anjuman was composed of eight members of the governor’s personal staff and only six representatives from the local elite. A member of the governor’s staff presided over the council, which met weekly in order to settle claims and disputes.81 This arrangement was short lived. Aqa Husayn Nazim al-Tujjar, a prominent Yazdi merchant active in Kirman since the carpet boom, who was apparently working on behalf of the merchant and carpet weavers’ anjumans, provoked a conflict with the governor, Nusrat al-Dawla.82 Nazim al-Tujjar sent a telegram to Tehran protesting the governor’s usurpation of the provincial anjuman and demanded a protocol (nizamnama) for conducting fresh elections for a new council to replace the current system.83 The protocol for new elections for a provincial anjuman arrived in late August 1907, and Farman Farma appointed a preliminary group on September 1 as preparations were made to select the other members by the local elites. There was considerable unrest, however, over a provision that called for equal representation by class or social group, which was only resolved a month later when the representatives of local tribes voluntarily reduced their number of seats on the anjuman in favor of the ʿulamaʾ. In the midst of this conflict, Nazim al-Tujjar emerged as an influential political figure commanding significant popular support. He became the figurehead of what is described in British reports as the “popular party,” which opposed the Ahmadi–Vakil al-Mulki domination of local administration.84 In the absence of Hajj Mirza Muhammad Riza from the city, Nazim al-Tujjar and his ally Nayib Hajji Ibrahim managed to dominate the new provincial anjuman through their command of popular support.85 The local anjuman was strongly opposed by both Nusrat al-Dawla and the Vakil al-Mulk household, whose control over local administration was threatened by the presence of a constitutionally sanctioned council with strong popular support. In the immediate aftermath of the election, Farman Farma succeeded in expelling Nazim al-Tujjar from the city, an act which triggered an enormous popular protest in the public square in front of the citadel on October 9, 1907. Government troops fired on the crowd, claiming to have been fired upon first, killing at least two men and wounding numerous others.86 The bazar was subsequently closed for a week in protest of the arrest of Nazim al-Tujjar, forcing Farman Farma to allow his return to the city on October 17, greeted by a large crowd as he presided over a ceremony for the victims of the protest from the previous week.87 The enormous popularity of Nazim al-Tujjar and his control of the provincial anjuman led to complaints from elites that the town was “in the hands of the

Household politics of revolution 153 lowest classes” and slipping from their control.88 The opposition was led by the Vakil al-Mulki and Ahmadi households, whose positions as the leading administrative and religious elites were directly threatened by the provincial anjuman. Nazim al-Tujjar, for his part, was successful in turning much of the local population against ʿAdil al-Saltana and the Vakil al-Mulkis. ʿAdil al-Saltana was accused not only of ordering the attack on the crowd in October in a widely circulated petition,89 but even of poisoning the previous head of Farman Farma’s provincial anjuman, Aqa Mirza Mahmud when he died in September.90 Emboldened by their popular support, Nazim al-Tujjar and Nayib Hajji Ibrahim gradually attempted to assert the authority of the anjuman over the governor and civil authorities. This quickly brought to a head their conflict with the Vakil al-Mulkis, the Ahmadis, and the Qajar governor Nusrat al-Dawla. The Vakil al-Mulkis and Ahmadis convinced the British that Nayib Hajji Ibrahim was ruling dictatorially and trampling on the authority of the anjuman and the provincial governor, even as they themselves were maneuvering against the constitutionally mandated council.91 Nazim al-Tujjar and Nayib Hajji Ibrahim, however, commanded enough support among the lower classes to prevent ʿAdil al-Saltana from returning to the city after he left on a brief trip to Baft and Jiruft in January 1908.92 The anjuman proved unable to cope with the growing lawlessness in the province and brigandage on the part of tribal groups who were taking advantage of the weakening of the central government. This led to an effective closure of most major thoroughfares through the province, severely limiting trade and transportation. Ultimately it was this inability to restore order, along with the almost total lack of support for the anjuman by local elites, that doomed it in 1908. In June, the ʿAdil al-Saltana returned to Kirman City and with the support of the town’s leading ʿulamaʾ, Aqa Baqir in particular, forced Nayib Hajji Ibrahim out of the city.93 Nazim al-Tujjar was unable to raise enough support now to return his ally to the city and was himself arrested and deported in October 1908.94 Soon after this event, the British consul reported that “a telegram was received from Teheran ordering arrangements to be made for new elections to the Majlis. I hear that a telegram was sent in answer saying that Kerman had had enough of Mashrutah.”95 Ultimately the movement against patriarchal rule faltered once it challenged the patriarchal rule of its patrons. So effective was the opposition that Kirman declined even to appoint a representative to the second Majlis. The opposition of the Vakil al-Mulki and Ahmadi households along with the Qajar governor Nusrat al-Dawla Farman Farma effectively gutted the provincial anjuman and reduced it to an advisory committee without real influence or authority. The administration instead reverted to the control of the Vakil al-Mulk household, led by ʿAdil al-Saltana (now titled Sardar-i Nusrat), who became de facto governor of the province under a series of Qajar appointees who came and went after brief terms over the following years. The Vakil al-Mulkis’ control over the provincial government became so complete as to have been considered “the principle obstacle to a strong and settled government in the province.”96 In 1910, Nazim al-Tujjar furtively returned to Kirman City in a last effort to reform the anjuman-i iyalati. The incident is telling of the totality of the

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local elite’s success in curtailing the revolution and reasserting the politics-ofhouseholds model of social power in the province. Nazim-ut-Tujjar . . . led a mob of some fifty or sixty of the town rabble into the local assembly, which he harangued, asking what had become of constitutional government in Kerman, where the heads of departments were, and why they were not doing their work. The speech was directed against the Governor General who, it was insinuated, was gradually centralizing all power in himself, after the old fashion.97

Conclusion The role played by local elite households in mediating social, political, and economic change in Kirman is evident in the rise of radical intellectual movements there, the success of their revolution at the state level, and ultimately the failure of the institutions the movement created. The intellectual legacy of Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani was nurtured through a circle of radical intellectuals who were protected from charges of unorthodoxy through their connections to the powerful Ahmadi household, which boasted a line of three leading mujtahids in Kirman over the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Members of this circle, most notably Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, the founder of the Anjuman-i Makhfi “secret society” and author of the Tarikh-i Bidari Iraniyan [History of the Awakening of the Iranians], helped organize the constitutional forces in Tehran, build critical alliances with the ʿulamaʾ, and establish widespread legitimacy for the constitutional movement. The bastinado of the head of the Ahmadi household, Kirman’s leading mujtahid, Mirza Muhammad Riza, galvanized the constitutional movement and became a powerful symbol of the injustice and illegitimacy of Qajar patriarchal rule. Thus the Ahmadis and the intellectual circles they supported were critical not only for the nurturing of local radical intellectuals, but for the events leading to the success of the movement in Tehran. Once the revolution arrived in Kirman to challenge the patriarchal rule of provincial elites, it immediately came into conflict with the interests of Kirman’s elite households. When local elites failed to usurp the newly formed anjumans, which began to threaten their households’ authority over local administration, a powerful alliance of the Ahmadis, Vakil al-Mulkis, and the Qajar governing household successfully marginalized and subordinated the provincial anjuman. The revolution did not lead to greater popular political participation in Kirman or grassroots organizing, rather it introduced a new set of institutions that became a new object of elite competition, as with the elections to the Tehran Majlis. Once the institutions of the revolution left their control and threatened to become truly popular institutions, local elites in their role as mediators of social change successfully reasserted their own authority. Once again, Kirmani elites reaffirmed the role of the elite household in the provincial social order in the face of radical change and assumed the role of intermediaries, shaping developments in line with the interests of their household estates.

Household politics of revolution 155

Notes 1 Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911 : Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy and the Origins of Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); Vanessa Martin, Islam and Modernism: The Iranian Revolution of 1906 (London: Tauris, 1989); Nikki R. Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003). Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran. 2 Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 125–27. 3 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 31, 44–45. 4 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 16. Muhammad Baqir was the father of the infamous Aqa Najafi, the persistent rival of Zill al-Sultan in Isfahan and a leading voice of anti-Qajar dissent in the late 19th century. Husayn ibn Muhammad Ibrahim Tahvildar Isfahani and Sutudah, Jughrafiya-yi Isfahan, 66. On Aqa Nafaji, see Walcher, Shadow of the King. 5 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 16. 6 Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani-Parizi, Introduction to Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 10. 7 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 16–17. Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 127. 8 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 17. 9 Bastani-Parizi, Introduction to Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 9. 10 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 11. 11 Ibid. 12 Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 27. 13 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 17. 14 Bastani-Parizi, Introduction to Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 11. 15 Ibid. 16 Tarikh-i Yahya. 17 Bastani-Parizi, Introduction to Farmandihan, 10. 18 Fathi, “Role of the Traditional Leader in Modernization of Iran, 1890–1910,” 87–98. 19 Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 124–25. 20 Vaziri, Tarikh, 812–14; Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 123. 21 Hermann and Rezai, “Le Rôle du Vaqf,” 94. 22 Vaziri, Jughrafiya, 30–31. 23 Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent, 74–83. 24 Sykes, “Report for the Year 1902–03 on the Trade of the Kerman Consular District,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Diplomatic and Consular Reports [Cd. 1386] (1903), 6. 25 Ahmadi, Farmandihan-i Kirman, 172. 26 Sykes, “Report for the Year 1904–05 on the Trade of the Kerman Consular District,” House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, Diplomatic and Consular Reports [Cd. 2236] (1905). 27 George Nathaniel Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question (London; New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1892), I: 480. 28 A. Reza Sheikholeslami, “The Sale of Offices in Qajar Iran, 1858–1896,” Iranian Studies 4, no. 2/3 (1971). 29 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 309. 30 Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 174. 31 FO 248/820, “Extracts from the Kerman Diary for 1st Week in February 1904.” 32 FO 248/820, “Extracts from the Kerman Diary for 2nd Week in Feb 1904.” 33 FO 248/820, “Extracts from the Kerman Diary for the 1st Week in July 1904.” 34 FO 248/820, “Extracts from the Kerman Diary for the Second Week in July 1904.” 35 FO 248/846, “Diary of H.M.H. Consul Kerman for Week Ending 27th May 1905.” 36 Amir al-Umaraʾ is consistently noted in Persian and English sources as a member of the Ibrahimi household, but his name and his exact familial relationship within the household are never disclosed.

156 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

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Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 309. FO 248/846, “Diary of H.M.H. Consul Kerman for week Ending 27th May 1905.” FO 248/846, “Kerman Diary” (n.d., entries are for week ending June 3, 1905). Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 310. Ibid., I: 311. Scarcia, “Kerman 1905,” 228. Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 311. Ibid., I: 310. FO 248/846, “Diary for the Week Ending 19th June 1905.” FO 248/846, “Diary for the Week Ending 10th June 1905.” Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 312. FO 248/846, “Diary for the Week Ending 23rd July 1905.” Gleadowe-Neucomen, “Report on the Commercial Mission to South-Eastern Persia During 1904–1905.” Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 312. Scarcia, “Kerman 1905,” 228. FO 248/846, “Diary for Week Ending 31st August 1905.” Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 312. FO 248/846, “Diary for Week Ending 31st August 1905.” Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 314–15. Ibid., I: 316. FO 248/846, “Kerman Diary. Week Ending October 28, 1905.” Sayyid Muhammad Hashimi Kirmani, “Sharh-i Hal-i Nazim al-Islam Kirmani” in Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: xvii. He concurs with comments by Tabatabaʾi’s son in their meeting in February 1905 prior to the founding of the Anjuman-i Makhfi that without the institution of a fundamental law, Iran would cease to remain a Muslim country altogether. Ibid., I: 144. Ibid., I: 143. Ibid., I: 145. The event is given the date February 23, 1905 in Afary, Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 42. Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 144–49. Ibid., I: 182. Ibid., I: 320. Ibid., I: 321–22. Ibid., I: 322. Ibid., I: 324. Afary, Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 51–52. Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 253. Ibid., I: 258. Martin, Islam and Modernism, 73. FO 248/906, “Kerman Diary from October 28th to January 6th 1907.” Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, I: 311. FO 248/906 “Kerman Diary from 29th March to 4th April 1907.” FO 248/906, “Kerman Diary from October 28th 1906 to January 6th 1907.” FO 248/906, “Kerman Diary from 7th to 13th March 1907.” FO 248/906, “Kerman Diary from 29th March to 4th April 1907.” Ghulam Husayn Mirza Salih, Muzakirat-i Majlis-i Avval, 1324–1326: Tawsiʾa-yi Siyasi-i Iran dar Vartaʾi Siyasat-i Bayn al-Milal (Tehran: Intisharat-i Maziyar, 2005), 757. Afary, Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 38. Walcher, Shadow of the King. FO 248/906, “Kerman Diary from 31st May to 6th June 1907.” FO 248/906, “Kerman Diary from 5th to 15th January 1907.”

Household politics of revolution 157 82 This is not the Hajj Aqa Husayn Nazim al-Tujjar who was the son of Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani. He died in 1305/1887–88 according to Ahmadi, Farmandihan, 142. 83 FO 248/906, “Kerman Diary from 6th to 13th June 1907.” 84 FO 248/906, “Kerman Diary from 20th to 26th September 1907.” 85 FO 248/906, “Kerman Diary from 3rd to 10th October 1907.” 86 Ahmadi, Tarikh-i Yahya, 333. FO 248/906, “Kerman Diary from 3rd to 10th October 1907”; FO 248/906, ” Kerman Diary from 11th to 17th October 1907.” 87 FO 248/906, “Kerman Diary from 18th to 24th October 1907.” 88 FO 248/906, “Kerman Diary from 1st to 7th November 1907.” 89 An original copy of this petition can be found in FO 248/906. 90 FO 248/906, “Kerman Diary from 13th to 19th September 1907.” 91 FO 248/906, “Kerman Diary from 5th to 12th December 1907.” 92 FO 248/938, “Kerman Diary from 10th to 16th January 1908.” 93 FO 248/938, “Diary no. 25 of 1908. From 12th to 18th June 1908.” 94 FO 248/938, “Diary no. 42 of 1908. Week Ending October 15, 1908.” 95 Ibid. 96 FO 248/1030, Haig to Barclay (21 September 1911). 97 FO 248/1030, “Kerman No. 25 of 1911, News for the Week Ending June 22, 1911.”

Conclusion Mediating modernity in Kirman

This book has explored the powerful mediating influence of local elite families in Kirman during a fascinating transitional period in Iranian history, between the rise of the Qajar Empire, with the devastating conquest of Kirman City in 1794, and the upheavals of the Constitutional Revolution and World War I in the early 20th century. Despite its apparently peripheral location in the Qajar Empire, across a vast salt desert from the Qajar court in Tehran, Kirman was frequently found at the center of developments reshaping Iran in this period. Over the Qajar period, Kirman City was nearly destroyed during the Qajar conquest. It was subsequently rebuilt by two prominent Shaykhi and mutasharʿi Shiʿi families who became embroiled in a prolonged factional rivalry in the province, its commercial opium and carpet weaving industries expanded rapidly to reach global markets, and the region eventually became a major center of radical modernist and nationalist agitation in the years leading up to the 1906 Constitutional Revolution. This study highlighted the activities of several prominent families involved in these local transformations, acting nearly autonomously from external influence in the absence of direct central control by external imperial powers, of which the Qajars were but one. Through the dual impact of household factionalism and private estate building over four generations, these elites adapted to global transformations and participated in shaping change in their community. In exploring the global connections of Kirmani households and their strategies for managing wealth and prestige in a climate of intense factionalism, this study relied on the careful reconstruction of local household networks, their adaptive strategies, and the norms and institutions that shaped them. In exploring the experiences of Kirman’s elite households, this book pursued three key theoretical and methodological aims. First, as a study in “mediating modernity,” it is engaged in the project of salvaging the term “modern” from Eurocentric historical narratives. The significance of non-Western agency in the creation of local, contingent forms of modernity was explored here through the experience of a discrete community in Kirman. Social and economic histories dealing with Qajar provincial communities have been dominated by structural theories based on “immiseration” or “peripheralization,” models in which modernity is granted the status of historical actor, reshaping the Middle East and Indian Ocean regions seemingly at will. Building on the growing literature on local

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history in Qajar Iran, including Heidi Walcher’s study of 19th century Isfahan, In the Shadow of the King, and Christoph Werner’s work on Tabriz, An Iranian Town in Transition, this work addressed how powerful local players participated in reshaping their own communities in the context of the enormous changes taking place in the world around them.1 Second, this work has sought to bridge the historiography of the Middle East and Indian Ocean regions in addressing the question of local agency in mediating modernity. Building on the work of Claude Markovits, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Manu Goswami in exploring the regional dimensions of global trade and the creation of local and contingent forms of modernity in the greater Indian Ocean region, this work explored the adaptive strategies of locally rooted households through the dynamics of “estate building.”2 Applying a form of Michael Mann’s and Rudi Matthee’s “networks of power” analysis, this book discussed how local families managed their networks of social power through their management not only of wealth, but also of various social and cultural resources at their disposal.3 Similar approaches have been fruitfully applied already in Ottoman studies by Beshara Doumani and Michael Meeker, who have explored the influence of economic and political networks, respectively, on social change.4 In Kirman, we see intense factionalism among prominent families manifested in competition not only over managing land and wealth, but also over prestige and standing. By grounding the theoretical approaches applied by several scholars of the Indian Ocean world and the Ottoman Empire in the experience of a discrete community, a combination of factors can be explored simultaneously, and the connections among them directly interrogated. This allows us to explain not only change, but also some striking continuities in central norms surrounding prestige and status for landowners, religious scholars, and administrators participating in elite culture. The third aim, particular to Iranian studies but of broader world historical significance, was to stress the variety of the local experiences of regional communities in the context of empire. Social and economic histories of Qajar Iran have suffered from a combination of an exaggerated focus on Tehran (which is often allowed to stand in as representative of the whole by default) and the use of “Iran” as a focus of analysis, as though it were an integrated national entity. In this work, the assumption that the territories of the Qajar Empire represented anything like a nation-state or possessed a national economy was interrogated and rejected. Instead of taking a center–periphery approach, Kirman was dealt with as a discrete historical locale, with the Qajar court as one of several external points of contact. This allowed for exploration of the central question of this work: how local families mediated change in their communities through adapting to broader changes that they, in their own modest ways, participated in shaping globally. From navigating the politics of the Great Game, to commercializing opium and carpet production, to carefully delineating the reach of new institutions born in the Constitutional Revolution, a small group of local families were frequently at the heart of shaping and contesting these changes. Instead of viewing modernity as a malignant external force that “struck Iran” in the 19th century, the central role played by local elites in shaping modernity

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for themselves and their communities demands greater recognition.5 With greater acknowledgment in recent decades of the world historical dimensions of modernity, there has been likewise a greater appreciation for the unique, local, and contingent forms modernity has taken. Too often in seeking to define modernity in the historiography of Iran and the Islamic Near East at large, it is presented either as a European intervention into local historical processes, or reduced to a set of discursive shifts confined to an upper elite in capital cities or among a handful of prominent intellectual figures. This book has presented an entirely different model of modernization in terms of the transformation of the patterns of political, economic, and social life at the local level mediated by the household as the central normative institution in provincial social relations. Of course, there was certainly something “Qajar” about Qajar Iran. This regional focus on Kirman detailed the emergence of a core of elite families that emerged alongside the rise of Qajar imperial politics. Urban households like the Vaziris, Kalantaris, and Ibrahimis (the latter originating as a branch of the Qajar royal family) all cultivated ties with the provincial government, participating in the empire’s system of negotiation of power with provincial elites, described by Vanessa Martin as the “Qajar pact.”6 While periodic revolts against imperial control appeared at times of waning central authority, these elite families generally held an interest in the continuance of this system of power, drawing prestige, security, and political influence from access to Qajar appointees. By the late 19th century, Qajar control over its outlying territories was anything but absolute, opening the way to increasing Russian and, especially, British influence in Kirman. Some of the major works utilized in this study of regional political, economic, and social change are rooted in the Qajars’ attempts to better know and control provincial territories in light of growing European influence. Vaziri’s geographical and historical treatises, subsequent updates, annotations, and commentaries on his texts, and the travelogues and commentaries of Iranian and British administrators, travelers, and merchants are artifacts of this imperial competition in the late 19th century. These texts are not mere sources of information, but interactive players in this story of multifaceted external influence and local mediation. These dynamics were very clearly seen in the period between the arrival of Vakil al-Mulk in 1859 and the onset of World War I in 1914, when Kirman experienced a radical economic transformation related to the process of global economic integration. The intensification of foreign trade, the improvement of transportation and communication, the commercialization of key sectors of the local economy, and the greater integration of rural districts into urban-centered political and economic structures have been identified by scholars with the rise of modernity in Iran, although analysis of their development has focused on the abstract process of modernization at the level of the national economy. A small core of elites were responsible for crafting these new institutions at the provincial level, in particular through the strategies they employed in adapting their household estates to meet new challenges and opportunities. Global structures did not transform provincial society alone. The activities of elites in adapting to foreign economic and political pressures were key to the

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active transformation of the institutions of provincial life. As the price of commodities like cotton, opium, and henna skyrocketed due to foreign demand, the Kalantaris, Vaziris, and Ibrahimis bought up enormous tracts of land in the province’s core agricultural regions of Rafsanjan and Sirjan and led the commercialization of rural production. Kirman, like other areas in the Near East, thus became a producer of raw materials for foreign industrial economies in the context of economic globalization. Similarly, in Bam, the Bihzadi household took advantage of the political exigency of asserting Qajar control in Baluchistan during the Great Game to solidify control over the local military establishment and acquire lucrative henna-producing lands in nearby Narmashir. Urban elites not only came to dominate landholdings in the province’s most lucrative districts, but usurped the long-standing social and political roles of rural elites who were unable to compete with the resources and connections of their urban counterparts. Ultimately in adapting their estates to foreign economic pressures, the activities of these elites led to an unprecedented level of rural integration in the province, which greatly intensified social, political, and economic contacts between Kirman City and the rural hinterland. Similarly, the adjustment of local productive practices was led by elites during the carpet boom in the 1890s and 1900s, which produced a significant social transformation in Kirman City. In contrast to the way that contact with foreign markets supported a boom in commercial agricultural production, competition with industrial manufacturers nearly obliterated local handicraft weaving in the late 19th century. For centuries, shawl weaving was common among rural families and tribal groups as a means of supplementing household incomes, and was practiced in small urban workshops in Kirman City by master weavers. Competition with inexpensive, industrially produced British textiles on both the domestic and international markets led to a steady drop in demand over the late 19th century, which nearly decimated local textile production. Weaving recovered in the form of luxury carpet manufacturing in the 1890s to fill a niche in European markets. While Tabrizi merchants are generally credited with establishing carpet weaving in Kirman by financing production and carrying out their international trade, it was Kirman’s urban elites who led the restructuring of productive relations, opened or converted numerous carpet manufactories in Kirman City, helped supply the necessary inputs for weavers, and, like their Tabrizi counterparts, invested heavily in carpet production on speculation. In Kirman City, the social impact of the carpet boom was enormous. The initial decade of the carpet boom between 1894 and 1904 coincided with a significant rise in the urban population. Although estimates vary widely, the population of Kirman City rose from approximately 30,000–40,000 in the 1870s to between 50,000 and 60,000 by the first decade of the 20th century, with the most significant period of growth noted in the 1890s and 1900s. The opening of the urban carpet manufactories in the 1890s drew in rural weavers and laborers who would become a potent force in the political life of Kirman City in the years leading up to the Constitutional Revolution. During these decades of rapid economic change, the global networks of Kirmani elites expanded rapidly. Increased trade with India, China, the Ottoman

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Empire, and Europe developed, involving Kirmani exports like cotton, dyes, opium, shawls, and fine carpets. Intellectual and religious networks strengthened parallel to this trade. The continued interaction with the Ismaʿili and Zoroastrian communities of India, the education of Kirmani elites in the shrine towns of Najaf and Karbala, and a steady flow of pilgrims to Mashhad were all features of these regional spiritual networks. By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Kirmani intellectuals like Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani, Shaykh Ahmad Ruhi, Majd al-Islam, and Nazim al-Islam Kirmani were active in the radical intellectual circles of Istanbul and Tehran and directly participated in political activism, calling for the curtailment of Qajar patrimonial rule throughout Iran. Simultaneously, and not without irony, the radical intellectual circles of Kirman developed through a close relationship with Kirman’s own patrimonial elites. The success of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution (1906–11) and the function of revolutionary institutions in Kirman both bear the imprint of Kirman’s elite households. The powerful clerical household, the Ahmadis, helped foster and legitimize a circle of radical intellectuals between the 1870s and 1900s who would prove critical to the success of the revolution. Among their number were the revolutionary thinker Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani (d. 1896), historian and parliamentarian Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi (d. 1921), and the founder of the Anjuman-i Makhfi “secret society” and author of Tarikh-i Bidari Iraniyan [History of the Awakening of the Iranians], Mirza Muhammad Nazim al-Islam Kirman (d. 1917). The bastinado of a member of the Ahmadi household, who was Kirman’s leading mujtahid, for inciting factional strife became a rallying point that helped bring together the revolutionary coalition in Tehran. This event has thus been identified as a turning point in the early revolutionary movement: “the spark that first set the fire of the Constitutional Revolution.”7 Once a constitution was granted, leading mutasharʿi elites like the Ahmadis and Vakil al-Mulkis participated in organizing elections and sending delegates to the Tehran Majlis. However, once the provincial anjuman was formed and challenged the patrimonial domination of local administration by these same households, the Ahmadis and Vakil al-Mulkis organized an opposition to its leaders and successfully regained control over local administration. Thus while helping foster a climate of intellectual radicalism in Kirman and participating in the movement to curtail the unchecked patrimonial rule of the Shah, these same households were instrumental in curtailing the operations of revolutionary institutions locally once they began to challenge the interests of their households and estates. The objects of elite competition subtly shifted in the late 19th century in the context of new economic and political pressures. Landownership, long important to household estates as both a financial and sociocultural resource, became far more important in the context of commercial agriculture. The rising prices of commodities drove up the price of land, creating new avenues for wealth while also intensifying competition among the small core of urban elites who could afford the investment. However, even while the material aspects of household estates changed markedly between 1794 and 1914, local elite status remained firmly tied to long-standing objects of sociocultural prestige common in Islamic

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societies. The maintenance of sociocultural prestige must be considered an essential component of household estates alongside material property, landholdings, and administrative posts, and in fact was necessary to carry out critical political functions like rural tax collection and the building of constituencies among the population. In the context of fierce competition over resources, a small number of the most successful of Kirman’s urban households maintained their domination over the local economy and provincial administration by adapting their estates to political and economic change while maintaining a sense of sociocultural legitimacy through appeals to historical ties to a prestigious eponym and connections to local religious institutions. Kirman’s elites actively upheld the institution of the household in the course of adapting to new economic and political forces as a means of sustaining their social power. In fact, throughout this period of radical transformation, the institution of the household not only survived as the organizing principle of elite society, but in fact thrived in this environment. Membership in an elite household connected individuals to the historical legacy of a prestigious eponym, provided access to a network of collective self-help, and thus contributed to the security of one’s economic and political station in a period of radical transformation marked otherwise by great uncertainty. The scope and influence of urban households only increased with the expansion of their rural landholdings, usurpation of rural administration, and control over production and productive relations. The very institutions upheld by elites as part of the process of modernization would later become the focus of authoritarian modernizing reform in the 20th century as remnants of a medieval social system ill-suited for the new era in the nation’s history—yet the survival of household networks as the organizing principle of elite society was a central element of the process of modernization from the very beginning.

Notes 1 Walcher, Shadow of the King; Werner, An Iranian Town in Transition. 2 Markovits, Global World of Indian Merchants; Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008); Goswami, “From Swadeshi to Swaraj: Nation, Economy, Territory in Colonial South Asia, 1870 to 1907.” 3 Mann, The Sources of Social Power; Matthee, Politics of Trade. 4 Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine; Meeker, A Nation of Empire. 5 Vahdat, God and Juggernaut, 27. 6 Martin, Qajar Pact. 7 Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent, 183.

Appendix Genealogical charts

Source: Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman; Ahmadi, Farmandihan-i Kirman; UK National Archives. Public Records Office. Foreign Office Archives.

Figure A.1 The Ibrahimi household

Source: Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman

Figure A.2 The Vaziri household

Source: Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman; Ahmadi, Farmandihan-i Kirman.

Figure A.3 The Vakil al-Mulk household

Sources: Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman; ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farman Farma, Musafaratnama-yi Kirman va Baluchistan.

Figure A.4 The Bihzadi household

Source: Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman; Ahmadi, Farmandihan-i Kirman.

Figure A.5 The Ahmadi household

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Index

Numbers in bold denote figures and tables. Notes are indicated with an n following the page number. Abariq 79 ʿAbbas Mirza 35 ʿAbbas Quli Mirza 35–6, 47r49 Abbott, Keith 15, 102, 125 ʿAbd al-Hamid Mirza Nasir al-Dawla 20n52, 106, 125 ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farman Farma 13–15, 20n52, 59–60, 106–7, 119 ʿAbd al-Riza Khan Yazdi 35 Abu al-Hasan Biglirbigi 42 Abu al-Hasan Khan Anari 85 Abu Jaʿfar see Shaykh Abu Jaʿfar Ahmadi ʿAdil al-Saltana see Mirza Husayn Khan ʿAdil al-Saltana ʿAdil al-Sultan 145 administrative posts: and the constitutional anjuman 5, 17, 147–53; and cultural prestige 9, 11, 13, 54, 70–2, 80, 140–1, 162–3; as objects of elite competition 1, 4–5, 26, 32–3, 44, 73–6, 80–1, 87, 117; Qajar 12, 31–2, 40, 49, 52, 74, 80; rural and tribal settings 28, 37–41, 73–5, 85–6, 108, 120, 122; sale of 4, 83, 142–3 Afshars 29–30, 122; carpet production 103, 111n61 agency 3, 5–7, 70, 92, 94–6, 108, 116, 158–9 agriculture 29, 55, 73, 75–9, 82; see also commercial agriculture Ahl-i Haqq 131, 133 Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri-Kirmani: biography 32, 54–5; works 9, 13, 32, 50–1, 55–60, 62–3; see also Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, Tarikh-i Kirman Ahmadi Family: in the constitutional period 1, 150–2, 154; genealogy 169;

as opponents of provincial anjuman 2, 17, 147, 152–3, 162; origins 4, 81–3, 117; role in Shaykhi-mutasharʿi factionalism 4, 83, 117–18, 141, 144; support for modernist community 61–2, 132, 137–41, 147, 150, 154, 162; see also Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani; Hajj Aqa Ahmad; Mirza Muhammad Riza Mujtahid; Shaykh Abu Jaʾfar; Shaykh Yahya ʿAli Allahis see Ahl-i Haqq ʿAli Khan Bami 118–19 ʿAli Muhammad Khan 150–1 ʿamil 38, 40, 73–4, 80 Amin al-Raʿiya see Hajji Muhammad ʿAli Amin al-Raʿiya Amin al-Zarb 100 Amir al-Umaraʾ 143–4, 155n36 Amir Baraq Hajib 54 Amir Saʿid Khan 41, 75 Anar, 85, 106 Anjuman-i Makhfi 14, 61, 132, 137, 140, 162; founding of 148; role in Constitutional Revolution 148–9, 151, 154 anjumans: carpet weavers’ 152; merchants’ 106, 152; provincial 2, 17, 138, 147, 151–4, 162; Zoroastrian 98 Aqa ʿAbd al-Rahim Bardasiri 131 Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani 11, 81, 117 Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani (Shaykhi merchant) 11, 61, 83, 85–7, 145 Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi 25, 31–2, 35, 38, 54, 72 Aqa Baqir Mujtahid 144, 150–1, 153 Aqa Husayn Nazim al-Tujjar 152–3 Aqa Khan Mahallati 30, 41–4, 62, 106, 118 Aqa Mihdi Tajir-i Tabrizi 105

180

Index

Aqa Mir Muhammad Hashim Charsuʾi 139 Aqa Mirza Hasan 143 Aqa Mirza Jalal al-Din 143 Aqa Mirza Mahmud 152–3 Aqa Mirza Muhammad 151 Aqa Muhammad Khan Qajar 25, 31–4, 72 Aqa Muhammad Taqi 31, 54 Aqa Najafi 151 Aqa Sayyid ʿAli 151 Aqa Sayyid Javad Shirazi 36–7, 143, claims to Ibrahimi estate 36–7 Aqa Shaykh Muhammad Sadiq 145 ʿArab Bastamis 119 Ardashir Mihriban 98 Arzuya 38, 72, 76 Asaf al-Dawla 123 ʿAtaʾ Allah Nizar 41–2 ʿAtaʾ Allahis 30, 41–2 ʿatabat 29, 35–6, 82, 139, 144, 162 aʿyan 7–9, 72–3, 80, 88n19, 105, 118 ʿAyn al-Dawla 148 ʿAyn al-Mulk 143 Babis 35–7, 81, 131, 150–1 Baft 153 Baghayn 77, 84 Bahaʾis 35, 81, 151 Bahramabad 85 Baluchi tribes 30, 76, 86 Baluchistan 28, 33, 57, 76, 86, 105, 118–20, 161 Bam 25, 43, 72, 86, 141, 146; Citadel of 25, 43, 86; military importance of 14, 86, 118–20, 161; trade routes 69, 77 Bampur 118, 120 Bandar ʿAbbas 30, 69, 76–9, 81, 99 Bardasir 131, 133 Baring, Walter 15 Bazar-i Shah Mosque 1, 4, 118, 145 Bihbihani, Ayatollah 138, 148–9 Bihzadi Family 86–7, 118–20, 124, 161; genealogy 168; see also Ibrahim Khan Bihzadi; Ibrahim Khan Saʿd al-Dawla; Zayn al-ʿAbidin Khan Bombay 2, 78–9, 97–9 boundary commissions 15, 41, 49, 59, 69, 75, 126 brigandage 30, 123, 142, 153 British consulate: opening of 15, 58; promotion of carpet trade 93, 104, 108; support for Shikarpuri and Zoroastrian merchants 94, 98–100, 144 Browne, Edward G. 15, 26–7, 103, 127

Buchaqchi tribe 122–3, 146 Bushihr 77–8 capitalism 3, 5–6, 70, 77, 84–5, 94–6, 108, 116–17, 128–9 caravanserais 69, 77–8, 106 carpets: commissions 103–5, 128–9; manufactories 93, 100–1, 103–4, 124–7; production 101–3, 107, 128–9, 159; trade boom 60, 92–3, 97, 99–101, 103–8, 124–30, 133, 161–2; trade bust 124–6, 130, 142, 145; weavers 102–3, 124–9, 152, 158 Chihil Sutun Mosque 83, 145 China 2, 29, 70, 75, 79, 96–7, 161 class 5, 70, 73, 86–7, 94, 108, 124, 128–9 commerce: British 97, 99–101; and class 86–7, 94; and elite status 117; and non-European agency 3–4, 70, 108; promotion of 33, 69–70, 77; and tribal raids 123 commercial agriculture: development of 29, 69, 77; local initiative 17, 85, 92–3, 116–7, 120–1, 158; and regional integration 69, 74–9, 81–7, 92–3, 124, 162; wealth from 103–4, 108, 124 Constitutional Revolution: and 1905 factional riots in Kirman 1, 137–8, 141–7; and conflict over local anjuman 2, 17, 138, 147, 151–4; Kirmani activists in 1–3, 14, 60–2, 131–3, 138–41, 147–9, 162 cotton 2, 29, 76–7, 79, 81, 84–5, 95, 101, 161–2 craft production 97, 101–3; commercialization of 16, 92, 94, 100–1, 103–8, 161; decline of 121, involution 128–9; in rural and tribal settings 73, 121, 128–9 Curzon, Lord 97, 142 customs 79, 81, 99–100 divan 32–4, 39, 54, 56, 69, 93, 118–9 Dubsky, Count 52 dyes 75–6, 85, 107–8, 128–30, 162; see also henna economy: global 29, 86–7, 92, 94–5, 124, “national” 78, 96, 159, regional integration of 17, 70–1, 86–7, 92–3, 107–8, 128–9, 133 estates: and cultural capital 9–11, 13, 26, 32, 37–8, 70–3, 79, 83, 162–3; and factionalism 36–7, 45, 63, 81–3;

Index mediating influence of 5–6, 8, 14, 16–17, 69, 71, 158–61, 163; normative aspects 8–14, 34, 71–2, 116–18, 154, 162–3 Euan Smith, Charles Bean 15, 41, 69, 75, 126–7 factionalism: and economic development 51, 92–3, 115; as elite household competition 1, 4–5, 16–7, 30, 37–8, 44–5, 62, 81–3, 118, 141, 158; see also Shaykhi-mutasharʿi conflicts famine 25, 28, 92–3, 121, 125–6, 141–4 Farmandihan-i Kirman 14–15, 62–3, 71, 82, 140 Farman Farma Family 14, 20n52; control of governorship 93, 106–7; see also ʿAbd al-Hamid Mirza Nasir al-Dawla; ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farman Farma; Firuz Mirza Nusrat al-Dawla Farman Farma; Husayn ʿAli Mirza Farman Farma Fars 33, 53, 57, 79, 123 Fath ʿAli Khan Nuri 76 Fath ʿAli Shah 33–5, 42, 72, 101 Firuz Mirza Nusrat al-Dawla Farman Farma 20n52, 43, 93, 106, 152–3 Furuq al-Dawla 43 Ganj ʿAli Khan 34 Gavk 38, 55, 81 gender 10, 17, 115–6, 130–33 Goldsmid, F.J. 15, 59; see also boundary commissions Great Britain: commercial interests 96–100; imperialism 49, 51–2, 58–9, 63, 70, 78, 98, 118, 147–8, 160; support for Zoroastrian and Hindu traders 78, 94, 98–100, 108, 128, 144; see also British consulate Great Game 2, 15, 31, 49, 51–2, 58–63, 86, 97–8, 116–18, 159–61 Hajj Aqa Ahmad 81–3, 92, 132, 139, 148 Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan 30, 35–7, 82, 92, 141 Hajj Muhammad Rahim Khan 1, 92–3 Hajj Sayyid Asad Allah 139 Hajj Sayyid Muhammad Shaʿshaʿani 139 Hajji ʿAli ʿAskar Khan 123–4 Hajji ʿAli Virdi 106 Hajji Muhammad ʿAli Amin al-Raʿiya 106 Hajji Muhammad Khan Sarkar Aqa 141, 145, 150

181

Hajji Shaykh Muhammad Baqir 139, 155n4 handicrafts see craft production henna 55, 76, 84, 86, 101, 108, 119–20, 161–2 Hindus 30, 99, 144; see also Shikarpuris Households: and kinship 9–10, 29–30, 122; as networks of power 4, 9–12, 14, 26, 37–8, 45, 70, 73–4, 108, 115; politics of 9–12, 149, 162–3 Hulaku Mirza 36, 43 Husayn ʿAli Mirza Farman Farma 43, 86 Husayn ʿAli Khan Sartip 93 Husayniyya 82 Ibrahim Khan Bihzadi (son of Saʿd al-Dawla) 120 Ibrahim Khan Saʿd al-Dawla 86, 118–120 Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla 33–6, 54, 56, 72, 79, 82, 119, 141–2 Ibrahimi Family: estate 33–8, 56, 72–3, 81–3, 85–7, 115, 142, 161; genealogy 165; as leaders of Shaykhi community 4, 35–8, 56, 92, 141–2; role in Shaykhimutasharʿi factionalism 4, 35, 44–5, 62, 81–3, 117–19, 137, 143; see also ʿAbbas Quli Mirza; Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan; Hajj Muhammad Rahim; Hajji Muhammad Khan; Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla; Rif ʿat al-Saltana Ibrahimiyya Complex 34, 36–7, 44, 82, 92, 142, 145 Identity: and the household 9–10, 38; local 28–9, 55–8, 62–3, 70–1, 108, 140; national 7–8, 62–3, 66n63, 116 imam jumʿa 36–7, 143–4 India: migration 43, 78; mercantile networks 2, 70, 78, 96, 97–100; trade with 29–30, 70, 75–6, 78–80, 84, 94, 97, 100, 102, 105, 161 Indian Ocean 2–3, 6, 18, 94–6, 159 Iqtaʿ 38, 72 irrigation 28–9, 79, 82, 84, 123 Isfahan 3, 8, 27, 53, 77, 80, 97, 139, 144, 151, 159 Isfandiqa 82 Isfandiyar Khan 123–4 Ismaʿilis 30, 41–5, 162 Istanbul 100, 104–5, 131–2, 138, 162 Jalk 119 Jamal al-Din al-Afghani 131–2, 138 Jewish community 146, 149 Jiruft 29, 38, 41, 75, 82, 85, 153

182

Index

Jughrafiya-yi Kirman 13, 32, 50, 53–7, 63, 71, 73, 140 Jumlat al-Mulk 141 Jupar 25, 77 Kabutar Khan 84 kalantar: of Kirman City 11, 32, 80, 93, 143–5; tribal 122; Zoroastrian 98 Kalantari Family 32–3, 44, 118, 161; estate 37–8, 79–81; as kalantars 11, 32, 80 Kalanzahu 79 Kalat 15, 41, 75, 86, 126 Kalavan 119 Karbala 82, 162; see alsoʿatabat Karim Khan Zand 38 Kashan 13, 53 Khabis 38, 55, 81, 106 Khalilabad 79 khalisa lands 38–9, 77, 79, 91n90, 118, 120; sale of 83–4, 91n89, 121 Khanaman 143 Khanikoff, Nicolas de 15, 27, 30 Khanu 41, 75 Khurasan 12–13, 29, 33, 41, 55, 69, 75, 102, 144; see also Mashhad Kirman City; conquest of 25, 31–2, 54, 158; development by Vakil al-Mulkis 69, 72, 78–9, 158; economy 103, 124; geography 26–8, 56; population of 28, 124–5; reconstruction under Ibrahim Khan 26, 33–4, 44, 72–3, 82, 158; trade routes 77 Kiyamurs Mirza ʿUmid al-Dawla 76 Kuhak 42, 119 kurk: see wool Kuruk 79 Kushk 38, 72 labor 17, 102, 104, 108, 126; child labor 104, 126–7 land tenure 29, 38–9, 71–5, 84 landownership: categories of 38–40, 72; as cultural capital 9, 11–13, 38, 71, 73–4, 79, 81–2, 117, 162–3; and wealth 73, 162 Langar 118 Lik Tribe 85, 122 locality 3, 34, 55–8, 62, 69, 106 local history 2–4, 8, 57–8; Qajar-era sources for 12–16, 32, 50–1, 53–4, 59–63 Lucas, G. 15 Lutf ʿAli Khan Zand 25, 31, 43, 72 Madrasa-yi Ibrahimiyya see Ibrahimiyya Complex Madrasa-yi Maʿsum Bik 82, 139, 141

Mahallat 42–3 Mahallati Revolt 30, 41–4, 62, 106, 118 Mahan 32, 41–2, 55, 77, 103, 106, 131, 144 Majd al-Islam Kirmani 148, 162 Majlis-i Shawra-yi Milli 61, 82, 132, 138, 148–51, 162; appointments to 150 Malcolm, John 54, 76 Mashhad 12, 102–3, 146, 162 Mast ʿAli Shah 43–4 Merchants: “big merchants” 5, 70, 81, 100; and class structure 5–6, 30, 83, 86–7, 117, 149; global networks 75, 77–9, 92, 94, 96, 98–102, 104, 108, 128; see also Shikarpuris Mihni Tribe 86 military 7, 10, 30, 35, 39, 41–3, 84, 122; establishment at Bam 14, 84–6, 118–20, 124, 141, 161 Mirʾat al-Buldan 13, 50, 53 Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani 1–3, 14, 61, 131–3, 137–40, 150–1, 154, 162 Mirza Aqasi 43–4 Mirza Hasan Kirmani 150 Mirza Husayn Khan 38 Mirza Husayn Khan ʿAdil al-Saltana 141, 143, 145–6, 153 Mirza Husayn Vazir 32, 35, 54, 72 Mirza Khalil 32–3 Mirza Malkum Khan 138 Mirza Mihdi Khan 141 Mirza Mihdi Khan Kalantar 81, 93 Mirza Muhammad Nazim al-Islam Kirmani see Nazim al-Islam Kirmani Mirza Muhammad Riza Mujtahid 61, 118, 138, 144–6, 150, 152; bastinado of 1, 4, 146–9, 162 Mirza Riza Kirmani 131–2 Mirza Riza Muhandis 84, 120, 125 Mirza Sadiq 42 Mirza Taqi Sipihr 44 Mirzaʾi Family 86, 119 modernists 14, 17, 61, 130–33, 137–41, 147, 150–1, 154 modernity 5–7, 11, 71, 116, 129–33, 137, 158–60, 163 Muhammad Hasan Khan ʿItimad al-Saltana 53 Muhammad Husayn Khan 93 Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan Vakil al-Mulk 16–17, 26, 56, 69, 76–9, 85–6, 103, 141; building campaign 17, 26, 72, 77 Muhammad Karim Khan see Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan Muhammad Qasim Khan Sarhang 120

Index Muhammad Rahim Khan see Hajj Muhammad Rahim Khan Muhammad Shah 35, 42–3 mujtahids 147, 151–4; from Ahmadi line 61, 82, 92, 117–18, 132, 137–42, 144, 146–50, 154 Mukhtar al-Mulk 144 Munshi Family 11 Mushtaq ʿAli Shah 42 Mustawfi Family 11 Murtaza Quli Khan Vakil al-Mulk II: building campaign 69, 72, 76, 78, 117, 141; governorship 69, 76, 78–9, 103, 119, 141; removal from office 92–3, 106, 118 mutasharʿi Shiʿism: defined 1; as a factional bloc 1, 4, 18n3, 30, 35–6, 41–2, 44, 61–2, 81–3, 139–144, 151, 158 Muzaffar al-Din Shah 138, 147, 149 Muzaffar ʿAli Shah 42, 131 Najaf 82, 162; see also ʿatabat Narmashir 77, 86, 119–20, 161 Nasir al-Din Shah 12–13, 49–50, 52–3, 59, 76, 84 Nasiriyya 79 Nasr Allah Khan Zand 31 Nasr Allah Muʿavin al-Tujjar 150 nationalism 7–8, 62–3, 66n63, 116, 130–1, 138, 140 Nayib Hajji Ibrahim 152–3 Nazim al-Islam Kimani, Mirza Muhammad 2, 14, 61, 126, 132, 137–40, 147–51, 154, 162 Nazim al-Tujjar see Aqa Husayn Nazim al-Tujjar Neucomen Mission 15, 84, 99, 106–7, 120, 125, 129 Niʿmat Allahis 32, 41–4, 131 Nur al-Din Rudbari 41, 75, 85 Nusrat al-Dawla see Firuz Mirza Nusrat al-Dawla Farman Farma Nusratabad 79 opium: 55, 77; commercial production 2, 17, 29, 75–77, 79, 81, 84–5, 100, 108, 120, 161; consumption 15, 77; trade 29, 75, 84–5, 101, 103, 158, 161–2 Ottoman Empire 2, 17, 29, 92, 101, 144, 161–2; historiography of 5–6, 10, 40, 71, 96, 159 Parsis see Zoroastrians Pasha Vaziri 60, 81, 105, 111n68, 125

183

pastoral-nomads 8–9, 29–30, 41, 44, 53, 57, 69, 73, 77; and craft weaving 101–3; and regional integration 107, 115, 121–4, 128, 133 patrimonialism: actively upheld 17; Qajar 3, 40, 43, 76, 137–8, 162; and elite households 10, 17, 75, 115–16, 118, 120, 124, 130–33, 137–8, 147, 162; tribal elites 122, 124 Persian Gulf: steamship service 75, 78; trade boom 29, 31, 71, 77, 96–7, 99, 104, 128, 141, 144; trade routes 2, 28–30, 69–71, 76–7, 79, 81, 84, 102 pomegranates 4, 55 population 28; and carpet capitalism 94, 104, 124–5, 145, 161 Pottinger, Henry 25, 29, 34, 101 Preece, J.R. 15, 27–28, 97, 104, 126–7 Qahraman Mirza 76 Qajar Empire; 7–8, 12; administrative structure 26, 30–1, 40, 49, 72–4, 80, 130; bargaining with 3, 35, 44, 70, 72, 115, 159–60; establishment of 25; granting concessions 142; historiography of 3, 5, 7–8, 116, 159; as an imperial power 2, 12, 16, 49–51, 53, 63; reforms 49, 59, 83–4; sale of offices 83, 142–3 qanats see irrigation Qanat Ghasan 118 Qandahar 43 Rafsanjan 11, 28, 69, 77, 83, 85, 93, 139, 141–2, 146; economic significance 29, 40, 76, 79, 81–3, 141, 161 Ravar 144; carpets 101–3, 106, 121, 126 regionalism 28–9, 55–8, 70–1, 108, 140 religious education 34, 36–7, 39, 62, 82, 139 religious institutions: charitable foundations (vaqf  ) of 39, 72, 106, 141, 145; in Kirman City 28, 34, 45, 56, 82, 141, 163; as sources of prestige 6, 9, 11, 26, 32, 44–5, 54, 72–4, 83, 106, 115, 141, 145, 149 Rifʿat al-Saltana 143 Rudbar 38, 41, 75, 85; khans 40–1, 56, 75, 85 Rukn al-Dawla 4, 143–6 rural areas: administration of 37–41, 73–5, 115, 120–1; decline of elites 17, 74–5, 84–7, 161; development of 75–8; integration of 17, 29, 60, 69, 115, 117–21, 133, 161

184

Index

Russia 2, 12, 49–52, 59, 70, 97–9, 118, 143, 147–8, 160 Rustam Khan 141, 143 Saʿidabad 79, 123–4 Salariyya see Tarikh-i Kirman Saqi see Vakilabad Sarhad 118 Sayyid Javad see Aqa Sayyid Javad Shirazi Sayyid Kazim Rashti 35–6, 82 settlement patterns 28–9, 128 Schindler, Albert Houtum 15, 78 Shafiʿabad 79 Shah ʿAbbas 80 Shah Khalil 42 Shah Niʿmat Allah Vali 42; shrine 42, 77, 103 Shahrbabak 30, 38, 72 Shams 35 Shams al-Hukuma 150–1 Shawls 15, 97, 100–5, 107–8, 115, 121, 124, 126–7, 161–2; see also craft production Shaykh Abu Jaʿfar Ahmadi 61, 82, 92–3, 132, 138–40, 144, 148, 150 Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsaʾi 1, 30, 35–6, 81 Shaykh Ahmad Ruhi 150–1, 162 Shaykh Fazl Allah 148–9 Shaykh Mihdi Kirmani Bahr al-ʿUlum 150 Shaykh Muhsin Khan 150 Shaykh Muzaffar ʿAli Shah 42, 131 Shaykh Niʿmat Allah Bahrayni 36 Shaykh Shamshiri Barini 144–5 Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi 2, 14, 61–3, 82, 132, 137, 139–40, 150–1; works 14–15, 62, 71, 140; see also Farmandihan-i Kirman Shaykhis 1–2, 30, 35–7, 62, 92, 118–19; as factional bloc 4, 30, 37, 44–5, 61–2, 81–3, 93, 115, 117, 137, 141–5 Shaykhi-mutasharʿi conflicts: and 1878 famine 81–3, 93, 106, 118, 139, 141; 1905 factional strife 1–2, 4, 14, 61, 118, 126, 137, 139, 141–7; as elite factionalism 4, 35, 37, 44–5, 62, 158 Shikarpuris 30, 70, 78, 94, 96–101, 104, 108, 128, 144 Shirkat-i ʿUmumi Kirman 105 Shujaʿ al-Saltana 35–6, 43 Sirjan 28, 30, 38, 40, 72, 76–7, 79–81, 123–4, 143, 161 Sistan 28, 57 South Persia Rifles 16, 27, 59

St. John, Oliver 15, 27, 78 Sufism 32, 41–2, 131 Sughan 38, 72 Suhrab Khan 43 Suliman Khan Sartip 120 Sykes, Percy 15–16, 27, 49–51, 58–60, 99, 107, 118, 127; opening of consulate 15, 58; writings 15–16, 58–9, 63 Tabatabaʾi, Ayatollah 138, 147–9 Tabriz 8, 52–3, 104–5, 128, 159, 161 Tabrizi carpet merchants 100–1, 104–5, 108, 127, 161 Tarikh-i Kirman [Salariyya] 13, 15, 32, 50, 53–5, 58, 60–3, 140 tax collection 38, 52, 73–5, 143; alignment with landownership 40–1, 73–4, 80, 87, 115, 120; in rural and tribal settings 57, 73–5, 119, 121; see also administrative posts Tehran: communication with 43, 52, 59, 70, 78, 123, 152; in constitutional period 138–40, 147–9, 154; deportations or summons to 25, 76, 92, 118; as focus of Qajar historiography 2, 5, 7–8, 116, 130, 159; as imperial center 5, 7, 26, 29, 42, 52, 59, 98, 103, 118, 123, 130–1, 158; modernist community 12, 61, 130, 138–9, 147, 151, 162; elites of 8, 12, 138, 147; opium production 77 telegraph 52, 59, 78, 90n54, 99, 148; office as site of bast 151 textiles 2, 102–4, 107, 121, 161; see also carpets; shawls; wool Tobacco Revolt 61, 140, 142, 147 trade routes 33, 51, 69, 76–7, 79, 81, 100, 105, 123, 142 tribalism 29–30, 40–1, 52, 57, 69, 77, 121–4, 132; attacks on trade routes 123, 142, 153; attempts to subordinate 33, 76, 119; decline of elites 85–6, 124; historiography of 8, 128–9; and kinship 9–10, 41; and military power 25, 42, 44, 85; and trade 103, 107–8; see also pastoral-nomadism ʿulamaʾ: mutasharʿi 35–6, 42, 55, 82, 139, 141–4; sociopolitical role 37, 142, 146–9, 151–2; as a status group 1, 9, 11–12, 61, 73–4, 82, 138, 149–51 Vakil al-Mulki Family: control over local administration 4, 140–1, 144;

Index establishing local roots 56, 106; estate 56, 69, 78–9, 85–6, 102, 107, 117; genealogy 167; governorships 16–7, 56, 69, 76, 78–9, 92; role in factional conflicts 18n2, 62, 81, 83, 115, 117–18, 137, 141, 144–5; opposition to provincial anjuman 138, 147, 150–4, 162; see also ʿAdil al-Sultan; Mirza Husayn Khan ʿAdil al-Saltana; Mirza Mihdi Khan; Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan Vakil al-Mulk; Murtaza Quli Khan Vakil al-Mulk II; Rustam Khan; Vali Khan Vakilabad 79 Vali Khan 141 vaqf: confiscations 149; and cultural capital 9, 72 , of Mahan shrine 42, 103; and family estates 12, 34, 39, 72, 82, 141, and land tenure 38–9, as patronage 42; Shaykhi 34, 82, 118, 142, 145 Vaziri Family 11, 16, 26, 31–3, 37–8, 44, 54, 60, 62, 72–3, 85, 87, 115, 159, 161; genealogy 166; see also Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri-Kirmani, Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi, Aqa Khan Vaziri, Mirza Husayn Vazir weavers: anjuman 152; carpet 101–8, 121, 124, 126–8, 130, 142, 161; Indian 75,

185

97, 102; shawl 101–2 , 104, 108, 124, 127, 161 Weber, Max 9–10, 38, 73 women 13, 25, 71, 102, 126, 130–3, 145, 148, 151 wool: kurk 30, 69, 75, 79–80, 97, 101–2, 107–8, 122, 127; procurement of 94, 101–2, 106–8, 128–9; trade with India 2, 75, 97, 101; Vakil al-Mulki monopoly 69, 79, 102, 107, 112n91, 117, 122 World-Systems Theory 3, 70, 95–6, 116 Yahya Khan 93 Yazd 27, 29–30, 35, 42, 57, 76, 82; opium processing at 77; trade routes 69, 76–7, 79, 81, 85, 102; Zoroastrian community of 30, 98–9 Zafar al-Saltana 142, 146, 148–9 Zand Dynasty 25, 31, 38, 42–4, 54, 72 Zarand 77, 102, 126 Zarin 93 Zayn al-ʿAbidin Khan 120 Zill al-Sultan 8, 48n88, 87n7, 151, 155n4 Zoroastrians 30, 98, 128, 144, 149; in India (Parsis) 98, 105, 162; mercantile activities 98–101, 104–5, 108, 128