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

Building a new army 83Shah decades are dealt with by Reza Ra’iss Tousi, “The Persian Army, 1880–1907”,Middle Eastern Studies 24/2 (April 1988): 206–29. The individual military forcesof the constitutional and late Qajar periods have fared rather better, see below,footnotes 44, 57–9, 68. The only foreign mission to have received serious attentionis the Swedish mission of the constitutional period, see Markus Ineichen, DieSchwedischen Offiziere in Persien 1911–1916 (Bern and Oxford: Peter Lang, 2002).This article is the first to examine the foreign military missions to Iran as a generalphenomenon.3 el Moudden, “Looking Eastward”, p. 243.4 The Safavids claimed descent from the seventh Imam and had ruled an empirewhich at its height stretched from Baghdad to Herat.5 Reza Shah, like his contemporary Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, conceptualized thestate-building project in terms of consolidating these borders, not on an irredentistchallenge.6 This was indeed a global phenomenon. See David B. Ralston, Importing theEuropean Army: The Introduction of European Military Techniques and Institutionsinto the Extra-European World, 1600–1814 (Chicago and London: Universityof Chicago Press, 1990).7 The use of such strategies continues in the contemporary Middle East, most notablyby Hizbullah in Lebanon. The similarity of this approach to methods of guerrillawarfare adopted in other areas of the world is obvious.8 Avigdor Levy, “The Officer Corps in Sultan Mahmud’s New Ottoman Army,1826–1839”, International Journal of Middle East Studies 2/1 (January 1971): 21–39.9 Rudi Matthee, “Between Sympathy and Enmity: Nineteenth Century Iranian Viewsof the British and the Russians”, in Beata Eschment and Hans Harder, eds, Lookingat the Colonizer: Cross-Cultural Perceptions in Central Asia and the Caucasus, Bengaland Related Areas (Wurzburg: Ergon, 2004), pp. 311–38.10 See C. E. Bosworth, “Army, ii. Islamic, to the Mongol Period”; M. Haneda, “Armyiii, Safavid”; J. R. Perry, “Army iv, Afsar and Zand”, in Encyclopaedia Iranica(New York: Encyclopaedia Iranica Foundation).11 Several contemporary accounts of the army in the late eighteenth–early nineteenthcenturies have been left by European observers. See, inter alia, Comte de Ferrieres-Sauveboeuf, Mémoires Historiques, Politiques et Géographiques des Voyages duComte de Ferrieres-Sauveboeuf Faits en Turquie, en Perse at en Arabie, depuis 1782jusqu’en 1789 (Paris: Buisson, 1790); George Forster, A Journey from Bengal toEngland (London, 1798); Dr G. A. Olivier, Voyage dans l’Empire Othoman, l’Egypteat la Perse (Paris, 1800–1807); P. A. L. Gardane, Journal d’un voyage en la Turquied’Asie et la Perse fait en 1807 and 1808 (Paris, 1809); James Morier, A Journeythrough Persia, Armenia, and Asia Minor, to Constantinople, in the Years 1808 and1809 (London: Longman, 1812); James Morier, A Second Journey through Persia,Armenia, and Asia Minor, to Constantinople, Between the Years 1810 and 1816(London: Longman, 1818); Moritz von Kotzebue, Narrative of a Journey into Persia(London: Printed by Strahan and Spottiswoode, Printers-Street; For Longman,Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, Paternoster-Row, 1819); J. M. Tancoigne, ANarrative of a Journey into Persia, and Residence at Teheran: Containing a DescriptiveItinerary from Constantinople to the Persian Capital, from the French of M.Tancoigne (London: William Wright, 1820); Pierre Amédée Jaubert, Voyage enArmenie et en Perse: fait dans les années 1805 et 1806 (Paris: Pélicier [etc.], 1821).12 Morier, A Journey through Persia, pp. 242–3.13 For the zamburaks see Manoutchehr M. Eskandari-Qajar, “Mohammad ShahQajar’s Nezam-e Jadid and Colonel Colombari’s Zambourakchis”, Qajar Studies5 (2005): 52–79.14 Muriel Atkin, Russia and Iran, 1780–1828 (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1980).