While it is generally recognized that the majority of the texts which survive in the Pahlavi (Zoroastrian Middle Persian) language were redacted in the ninth-tenth centuries CE, Zoroastrian priests continued to receive traditional educations in the Pahlavi language well into the nineteenth century. Though most Zoroastrian literary texts composed in Iran after the Mongol conquest were written in New Persian, learned priests continued sporadically to compose new texts in Pahlavi into the nineteenth century. Likewise, though Indian Zoroastrians had reportedly forgotten Pahlavi by the fifteenth century, the language was revived through contact with the Iranian priestly establishment such that Indian priests too came to compose new texts in Pahlavi. By the eighteenth century, it was not uncommon for a single learned Iranian Zoroastrian priest not just to read but to author new texts in both Persian and Pahlavi. What purpose did Pahlavi, usually understood to be a ‘dead’ language, play as a language of creative composition alongside Persian for Zoroastrians? In this talk, I sketch out the history of the little-studied 'Late Pahlavi' literature within the context of what we know about Persianate Zoroastrian education. I discuss certain features related to the circulation, genre, and language of these texts. I argue that the heterolingualism of medieval and early modern Zoroastrianism allowed Zoroastrians to express different forms of religious subjectivity which were simultaneously part of an atemporal Zoroastrian tradition, while at the same time situated historically within the broader Persianate world. At the conclusion of this paper, I briefly consider the impact that European philology and the historicization of 'dead languages' has had upon Zoroastrian communities.

The early nineteenth century was a transitional moment in Iranian history. In explaining how and why the Qajar state formed, most historians have concentrated on Qajar tribal conquests, on the creation of administrative offices, or on the political culture and religious thought that shaped the Qajar polity. This paper shifts the frame of analysis to the families that served in the early Qajar state. It does so by drawing on the abundant primary sources from the Qajar period, including biographical dictionaries (tazkirah), family histories, histories of political offices—like Sadr al-Tavarikh—and chronicles. Based on these sources, the paper makes two interventions. First, the paper traces the lineages of the chief ministers, court historians, and financial auditors (mustawfi) of the early Qajar period. Many of these individuals had ancestors who served key bureaucratic and administrative roles in the Zand, Afsharid, and in some cases, Safavid periods. Others were newly recruited by the Qajars. In other words, focusing on who filled bureaucratic positions in the nascent Qajar state provides an important perspective on continuity and change between Safavid, Afsharid, Zand, and Qajar rule. Moreover, such a perspective challenges the prevailing depiction of Iran’s eighteenth century as a period that witnessed a “decline in the bureaucracy,” by highlighting the endurance of bureaucratic families through decades of political turmoil. Second, the paper considers the politics of marriage between ministerial officeholders and the Qajar household, and sheds light on the rise of new elite families in nineteenth-century Iran. Families like the Farahanis, Nuris, and Ashtiyanis married Qajar princes and princesses, consolidating their political and economic interests. Their descendants remained politically influential not just in the Qajar period, but well into the twentieth century. In that sense, the story of modern Iran is a story of the legacy of early Qajar marital practices. Ultimately the paper suggests that our understanding of how states form must take into account the individuals and families that served the state. The paper therefore contributes to the growing historical and sociological scholarship that has drawn attention to the role families play in the production and reproduction of political and economic power.

Established in 1932 by Reza Shah Pahlavi, Iran’s modern navy was a major symbol of Iranian sovereignty and independence. It also contributed momentum to the surge of anti-colonial, nationalist feeling in Iran as Reza Shah’s government sought, by various means, to throw off the stranglehold of the British in its southern provinces and in the Persian Gulf. Though the new Iranian fleet was no match for the British navy, the advent of Iranian warships bolstered Iran's capacity to challenge British authority in and around the Persian Gulf waterway. In the 1930s, crises on the high seas brought Iran's new pattern of assertion in the Persian Gulf to a crescendo. The hauling down of a British flag on Qeshm Island by a group of Iranian naval officers in August 1933 caused much commotion in the British-protected Arab shaykhdoms where Iran's actions were viewed as an open insult and act of defiance against England. In Iran, this was regarded as a victory for the new navy and for a clever Iranian policy which leaned on the tactics of bluff and intrigue to put into force Iran's territorial claims while simultaneously bargaining with the British government to gain as many concessions as possible. These tactics rendered the Persian Gulf a volatile environment in which Iran’s attempts to challenge British authority fostered tension and ignited passions. This was a calculated strategy, aimed at gaining the Shah some leverage that he could use to abolish Britain’s capitulatory privileges, roll back its influence in the southern provinces, and restore Iran's territorial integrity and political independence. Today, Iranian sea power is significantly outgunned by Western naval forces, not the least of which is the American Fifth Fleet stationed at Bahrain. Flamboyant naval exhibitions and deliberately staged provocations in the Persian Gulf remain a potent tool in the hands of Iran’s leaders to stir up national pride: whereas Reza Shah showcased Iranian naval power by inviting the merchants of Bushehr and Lingah to tour Iran's new gun boats, the Islamic Republic of Iran loops video footage of missiles blasting over the ocean, submarines surfacing, helicopters deploying divers and commandoes and fast torpedo boats practicing attacks against American vessels. This paper examines Iran’s naval vision under Reza Shah Pahlavi to provide a foundation for understanding the role of Iranian naval forces in contemporary Iran. Sources for this research include British and Iranian archival documents, historical newspapers and contemporary media.

Historiography maintains that the Pahlavi period, and especially the era of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in power was a golden age for religious minorities. No doubt that to great extent this is true. Minorities were granted freedoms and rights that had not been shared with them before. However, the period of MR Pahlavi was characterized more by the frequent violations of human rights rather than promoting minorities’ rights. The Iranian regime halted any attempt to oppose the monarchy, promote democracy or protest the poor condition of human and political rights in the country. Under these circumstances, we see two generation of Jewish political activism that were not supportive of the Shah and his grandiose projects for the country and his people. In 1941 because of a political vacuum created by the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran and the subsequent overthrow of Reza Shah (r. 1925-1941), the Communist Party was allowed to re-organized and immediately drew scores of minority activists; partly as an antidote to anti-Semitism and xenophobic discourse promoted by Nazi propaganda. In a short time, Jewish activists and intellectuals had become leading figures in that nascent political force. In the 1950s with the emergence of the National Front, prominent Jewish leaders, and thinkers aligned themselves with that camp and actively encouraged the Jewish communities to take part in supporting the National Front. Lastly, leading toward the 1979 Revolution, a group of Jewish ex-communist activists employed Jewish teachings and radical politics to mobilize the Jewish communities of Iran in support of the Iranian revolution. In all the events mentioned above, Jews were over-represented. This paper argues that leveling the conditions and rights of the Jews allowed them to see the majority’s plea for democracy and rights as their own, thus giving up on fighting for sectarian rights and privileges.

Given the ecological diversity of modern Iran, environmental historians must take into account a wide variety of local experiences in comparative perspective. This observation has frequently been made in secondary literature, from Peter Christensen’s work on the decline of irrigation works and arable lands since antiquity, to Richard Bulliett’s groundbreaking studies of climate change and ecological transformation in early Islamic Iran. There is, unfortunately, very little research on the environmental history of modern Iran to allow for a comparative regional approach. One fruitful area of research that remains to be fully examined is the link between local economic structures and broader ecological systems. In Ottoman studies, where environmental history has gained some recent traction, there is a strong emphasis on central requisition systems and large-scale transfers of resources to provision military forces, the central bureaucracy, and large urban centers. Qajar Iran, by contrast, was significantly less centralized, with local political and economic structures operating with little central interference into the 1920s. In the environmental history of modern Iran, I will argue that avqaf (religious endowments) are an important starting point for research, given the need of analyzing local experiences in comparative perspective. Vaqf scholars have long observed that religious endowments provided a structure for local economies, social services, and land use patterns. This paper will follow up on that line of research by examining a Qajar era endowment from the Madrasa-yi Sultani in Kashan from an ecological perspective. I will demonstrate that such documents also reveal important elements of the reciprocal relationships between local communities and environments. This paper will analyze an 1814 vaqfnama for the Madrasa-yi Sultani, an 1871 geographical text on Kashan (Zarrabi’s Mir’at al-Qasan), and comments from both Qajar and British imperial sources, and demonstrate that this endowment is a clear example of how endowed institutions structured relationships between urban and rural areas. This includes land use and reclamation patterns, irrigation works, crop production, the flow of resources into urban centers, and the generation of demand for agricultural surplus.

Iranian Constitutional Revolution is often imagined as a set of events centered in major cities, limiting its history to the experiences of the larger urban centers. We have considerable information on how the Revolution unfolded and later influenced the social and political life of Tehran, Tabriz, and other major cities, but, we know very little on how it was experienced in smaller and more remote parts of the country. This is despite the fact that national elections to the parliament, founded right after the revolution, broadened the reach of central power to many other small and less visible cities and villages. Relying on a set of unpublished archival documents available in the Iranian Majles library in Tehran, this paper traces the new opportunities and struggles, brought by the elections in one of the smaller cities in the center of Iran, Kashan. I explore the various ways the local population of Kashan participated in and negotiated the process of elections to the second Majles (1909-11), asking what elections did for different actors involved in these struggles, and which kind of tools elections provided for them for framing their power struggle? Primarily based on around 65 documents on different election-related topics, consisting of around 140 pages dated between 1909 and 1910, I argue that the conduct of elections in Kashan enabled its population to engage with and participate in the Constitutional Revolution and the formation of the new political arrangements. This came not only through the simple defined way of casting a ballot, but by intellectual, legal, and even executive participation, expressed in their letters to the parliament. These letters (1) challenged the electoral rules by expressing different expectations and understandings of the constitutional revolution, (2) re-defined the borders, constituencies, and social relations imposed by the electoral rules, and (3) objected the improper/illegal conduct of elections, voter fraud, and voter intimidation. More significantly, the discourse produced by these letters finally prevented one of the elected people from entering the parliament. Analyzing these letters contributes to our knowledge of the way Iranian Constitutional Revolution was experienced, especially by the “subaltern”. The electoral struggles are not separable from everyday lives of those who were either included in or excluded from the new game. Looking at the historical material produced by the relatively less powerful let us include their views of the new system of representation in the story of the Constitutional Revolution.