The Safavid World

The Safavid World brings together thirty chapters on many aspects of the complex Safavid state, 1501-1722. With the latest insights and arguments, some offer overviews of the period or topic at hand, and others present new interpretations of old questions based on newly found sources. In addition to political history and religious life, the chapters in this volume cover economic conditions, commercial links and activities, social relations, and artistic expressions. They do so in ways that stretch both the temporal and geographical perimeters of the subject, and contributors also examine Safavid Iran with an eye to both its Mongol and Timurid antecedents and its long afterlife following the fall of the dynasty. Unlike traditional scholarship which tended to view the country as unique, sui generis, and barely affected by the outside world, The Safavid World situates Iran in a wider, regional or global context. Examining the Safavids from their foundations in the fourteenth century to their relations with the rest of the world in the eighteenth century, this study is essential reading for undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars of the Safavid world and the history and culture of Iran and the Middle East.

Rudi Matthee is the John and Dorothy Munroe Distinguished Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Delaware. He works on the political and socioeconomic history of early modern Iran. He is the author of four prize-winning scholarly books and the co-editor of another five volumes.

Introduction Part 1: Foundations 1. The emergence of the Safavids as a mystical order and their subsequent rise to power in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries 2. Who really were the Kizilbash? a rethinking of the Kizilbash movement in light of new sources and research 3. The rise of the Safavids as a political dynasty: the revolution of Shah Esma'il, founder of the Safavid state Part 2: History and Historiography 4. Custodial politics and princely governance in sixteenth-century Safavid Iran 5. Beyond charismatic authority: the crafting of a sovereign's image in the public sphere 6. Against all odds: the Safavids and the Georgians 7. Safavid Iran from Shah Safi to Shah Soltan Hoseyn: stability and stasis 8. Safavid historiography: the place of the Safavids in Iranian history 9. Continuing a legacy in times of change: courtly historiography in the sixteenth-century Safavid world Part 3: Safavid Society 10. The Safavid court and government 11. The Safavid army: continuity and change 12. The Safavid economy 13. Trade in Safavid Iran 14. Coinage and the monetary system 15. The status of women in Safavid society Part 4: Religious Life 16. Sufi habitus and shari'a practitioners in late Safavid Iran 17. Sufism in the Safavid period 18. Vaqf in the Safavid period 19. 'In the rifts of history': Iranian Jews in the Safavid era Part 5: Science, Art and Architecture 20. The occult sciences in Safavid Iran and Safavid occult scientists abroad 21. The mathematical sciences and medicine in Safavid Iran 22. Not all of the poets went to India: literary culture in Iran under Safavid rule 23. Deluxe manuscript production in the Safavid period 24. The Safavid ceramics industry 25. Safavid architecture Part 6: Safavid Iran and the World 26. Safavid relations with Muslim neighbors 27. The Kurdish frontier under the Safavids 28. Safavid Iran in the South Asian political imagination 29. Diplomatic relations between Safavid Iran and Europe 30. Portrait of a traveler in Safavid Iran: the frontispieces of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier's Six voyages (1678-1726)