The early Qajar period (1785–1848) and the rise of the Qajars remain sorely understudied in the scholarship on Iran. To the extent that the formation of Qajar Iran has received attention from scholars it has been treated in one of three ways. The first body of scholarship is that which treats the rise of the Qajars primarily as a tribal story: the Qajars had been one of the tribal groups who competed for political power in post-Safavid Iran, before eventually defeating their main rivals, the Afsharids and the Zands. A second body of scholarship tends to focus on the resuscitation by Qajar monarchs of what is sometimes called “Perso-Islamic” kingship: a form of monarchy that had its roots in both ancient Persian models of kingship as well as in Islamic concepts of just rule. Finally, there is the literature that presents the early Qajar period as, in effect, a prelude to the main story: the centralization and modernization efforts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This paper proposes an alternative path. It draws on a variety of sources, including traditionally-used sources like Qajar chronicles and foreign diplomatic reports, less frequently-used ones like visual sources, and most importantly, firmans (royal decrees), petitions, and correspondence, to analyze early Qajar political practices like gift giving, petitioning, and marriage alliances. What the paper hopes to demonstrate is that a detailed analysis of Qajar-era practices — how those practices functioned, who they drew in, and to what ends they were used — helps us understand the system of Qajar governance and the social ties that were necessary to sustain the Qajar government. More broadly, it forces us to reevaluate some of the assumptions about the nature of the Qajar state because, as this paper will show, gift giving, petitioning, and marriage alliances were imperial modes of governance, shared with tributary empires in other places and other times, that neither fit a “modern” nation-state nor a premodern tribal polity. Ultimately this paper argues that greater attention to the pattern of building ties — what might be described as a “socially-oriented political history” — enriches our understanding of Qajar and Iranian history. But by highlighting similarities and differences between Qajar Iran and other tributary empires, this paper also argues for the importance of a comparative approach to Iranian history.