Labor, Intimacy and Power: The Servant Class of Gulistan Harem in Late Qajar Iran explores the social, spatial and cultural dimensions of the women’s quarter of Nasir al-Din Shah’s court, variously referred to as his harem or andarun, through looking at the laboring classes within it. While this period is generally understood to coincide with the emergence of modernity in Iran, the maintenance of a large-scale royal harem is often associated with a traditional and outdated Islamic convention. As such, the expansion of the Gulistan harem in the second half of the 19th century, concurrently with greater contact between the Qajar empire and Western modernity, presents us with an interesting paradox. This paper will focus specifically on the differing classes of maids, servants, and slaves that resided and worked within the royal palace. These specific classes of residents reveal a great deal about interregional and transnational networks and the various forms of migration within them during the period. For its time, the cultural and ethnic heterogeneity within the Gulistan harem, which was in large part the result of the presence of various laboring bodies, was quite unique, housing an estimated 700 to 2000 residents from across the empire and far beyond. Located within the ever-expanding Gulistan Palace, and in the heart of the Qajar capital, the harem was physically and socially structured around a set of extremely rigid hierarchies, which were often undermined by various affective bonds, developed through relations of proximity and cunning negotiations. As such, many of these individuals were significant figures in the royal court and wielded various forms of power within the complex court system. While there are many visual and textual traces of this class of constituents, it is only recently that they have emerged as a subject within Qajar historiography.