This paper focuses on one of the most serious cases of famine in Iran in the nineteenth century. Reading through a wide range of contemporary documents, the principal aim here is to use this episode as a case study to talk about the larger problem of subsistence crises and natural disasters in Iran and the Middle East in this period. The paper studies the causes of a famine in 1860-61 and contends that a series of interlocking factors that had affected the political economy of the Qajar state had an important role in setting up a broad context in which food crises of this kind could occur frequently. Loss of transcontinental trade and territories, the decline of local industries, worsening trade deficits, the devaluation and scarcity of currency, as well as chronic imperial and state-building warfare in an increasingly globalized economy had led to the worsening fiscal crisis of the Iranian state and the rise of what was essentially new and predatory capital in the Qajar grain market. In such an atmosphere, people had become vulnerable more than ever before to natural and manmade disasters. When government officials decided to dispatch an expedition to the northeastern frontier in May to early October 1860, they thought they could bring about a dramatic reversal of some of these longer-term processes while countering the Russian expansion in Central Asia. The Persian defeat in the war, however, unleashed an array of aftereffects that ranged from tribal raids in the northern provinces and the resultant disruption of trade in half the country to more severe budgetary crisis of the government and the nonpayment of the wages of officials and civil servants. Average Qajar subjects, on the other hand, saw rapid deterioration of their means when a series of ecological disasters struck the country that winter. Outbreak of cholera and cattle disease were reinforced by the high mortality among people and working animals and extreme weather conditions which meant a year of drought was now followed by a year of incessant snow, storms, and flood. Under these circumstances, people saw the slowing down and cessation of the national transport system and a period of high inflation in the prices of food. The subsistence crisis of 1860-61 was, therefore, caused by no one factor alone. A series of events and processes with local, regional, and global dimensions were combined to create the “black winter” that year.