The Safavid World

by Rudi Matthee (Editor)

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.

Genres: History, Iran, Middle East

766 pages, Paperback

Published January 9, 2023

About the author

Rudi Matthee serves as the John and Dorothy Munroe Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Delaware, where he teaches Middle Eastern history, with a research focus on early modern Iran and the Persian Gulf. His books include The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600-1730 (Cambridge University Press, 1999); The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500-1900 (Princeton University Press, 2005); Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan (I.B. Tauris, 2012); and, with Willem Floor and Patrick Clawson, The Monetary History of Iran. From the Safavids to the Qajars (I.B. Tauris, 2013). He co-edited, with Beth Baron, Iran and Beyond: Essays in Honor of Nikki R. Keddie (2000); co-edited, with Nikki Keddie, Iran and the Surrounding World, 1501-2001:Interactions in Culture and Cultural Politics (2002); and, with Jorge Flores, Portugal, the Persian Gulf and Safavid Persia (Peeters, 2011). He has also published numerous articles on aspects of Safavid and Qajar Iran. He served as president of the Association for the Study of Persianate Societies, 2009-2011. He received the 2006 Albert Hourani Book Prize, awarded by the Middle East Studies Association of North America, the Saidi Sirjani Award, 2004-2005, awarded by the International Society for Iranian Studies, the British-Kuwaiti Friendship Book Prize, 2012, and, twice, the prize for best foreign-language book on Iran from the Iranian Ministry of Culture.