War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and ... - Oguzlar.az

Introduction 3level of scholarly engagement in the Qajar era has risen exponentially overthe past two decades since the fall of the Pahlavi dynasty, effected both bya reinterpretation of existing material and access to the vast troves of newlyavailable documents, artefacts and images from the Court archives and fromthe various libraries not only in Iran, but in such places as Georgia and Russia.What is more, there is now a level of debate about a range of issues of importanceduring that period, including questions of law and constitutionalism,finance and development, military capability and social organization, thatdid not exist before and which is helping to reduce the previous politicizationof Qajar studies and instead inspire a legitimate body of scholarly literature.The freighted subject of territorial integrity, for example, and how itrelated to historical conceptions of Persia proper, the expansion of empire andthe definition of boundaries has become a hotly contested area of scholarlyinterest as new material and analysis has opened up debate on the constraintsfaced by the Qajar rulers at the time, and what they meant to the prosecutionof war and diplomacy, as well as to the balance between domestic andforeign demands. The different views of how the Qajars addressed and managedthe territory of Persia and the treaties that attempted to lock the bordersinto their current position, colour as well as inform how related issues areunderstood, and, as can be seen throughout this volume, many unresolvedquestions remain. What is clear is that a significant domestic dimension,hitherto discounted or misconstrued, exercised an important role in theoutcomes of the Great Game. The debate reveals that our understanding ofthe complexities of the Great Game (and what it may illuminate concerningcurrent geopolitical interactions between the West and the Gulf ) hasmuch to gain from a more thorough investigation of the Persian historicalperspective.The establishment of the International Qajar Studies Association (IQSA)in 2000, as well as the setting aside of funds from many sources for the studyof various aspects of the Qajar era, has resulted in a plethora of new publications,conferences and analyses of a complex state with one side of its faceturned to the traditional Orient and one to the modernizing world, while beingin the crosshairs of a territorial struggle of momentous dimension betweenthe world’s greatest powers. In fact, although other aspects of Qajar Persia,such as the role of the clergy, have been the subject of initial scholarly treatmentprior to this time, the issue of war and the administration of the periodsof peace that ensued has been singularly lacking. Previously understoodand judged largely from the outside, both culturally and strategically, QajarPersia, the pivot around which the Great Game turned, and which nonethelessdefied colonial or other foreign takeover, is now being investigated onher own terms, or in relation to her near abroad, vantage points that offera completely different reading of history.What is more, political, economic and social theories are being utilizedfor the sake of locating aspects of Qajar history within a rigorous scholarlyframework. It is within such a framework that Manoutchehr Eskandari-Qajar’s