Imperial Iran in the Eighteenth Century
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18th-century Iran
A01=Mohammad Amir Hakimi Parsa
Author_Mohammad Amir Hakimi Parsa
Category=NHG
early-modern history
early-modern Iran
empire
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
forthcoming
imperial history
Iran
Iranian history
Iranian Identity
Middle Eastern history
Nader Shah
Naderid
post-Safavid
state formation
Turco-Persianate
Product details
- ISBN 9781399553339
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 30 Jun 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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The 18th-century ‘interregnum’ between the Safavid and Qajar dynasties remains woefully understudied in Iranian history, regarded as a turbulent and inconsequential gap between two major dynastic periods. This book, however, argues that this period saw the emergence of the idea of Iran as the foundation for collective identity and state formation. It traces the development of a sacralised territorial identity that fused an irredentist notion of Iran-realm (Iranzamin) with Shiʿism, culminating in an unprecedented political idea: that of an ‘Iranian state’ (dowlat-e Irān), supposedly formed by the unanimous consensus of the ‘Iranian people’ (ahl-e Irān). The book then covers how this state, under Nader Shah (Nāder-e Irān), subjugated non-Iranian realms to form a new universal Islamic empire.
This is the first monograph to offer an integrated understanding of state formation in post-Safavid Iran (c.1720 – 1750), demonstrating how politico-cultural, military, administrative and ecclesiastic developments related to one another. Drawing on a wide range of neglected primary sources in Arabic, Turkish (both Ajami and Ottoman) and Kurdish (Hawrami), as well as Persian and European sources, the book sheds light on Iran in its last iteration as a great power.
Dr M. A. H. Parsa is an Assistant Professor of Imperial and World History at Ashoka University in India. His primary focus is on the post-Mongol empires and the Turco-Persianate world. Currently, he’s working on the emergence of popular sovereignty in eighteenth-century Iran, rooted in the Turco-Mongol tradition of consultative rule and Perso-Islamic mystical thought. He has published several articles on Nader Shah’s imperial inscriptions in ‘Ajami/Qizilbash Turkic. He completed his PhD at SOAS University of London in 2022 on the post-Safavid and Naderid history of Iran. He was a lecturer at NYU London and the University of St Andrews in Scotland before taking up his current position at Ashoka University.
