Karim Khan Zand

A forward thinking and notably popular leader, Karim Khan Zand (1705-1779) was the founder of the Zand dynasty in Iran. In this insightful profile of a man before his time, esteemed academic John Perry shows how by opening up international trade, employing a fair fiscal system and showing respect for existing religious institutions, Karim Khan succeeded in creating a peaceful and prosperous state in a particularly turbulent epoch of history.

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In From the Kur to the Aras George A. Bournoutian presents, for the first time, the military history of the First Russo-Iranian War using both Russian and Iranian primary sources of the period.

The eighteenth century was a crucial era in modern Iranian history, but up to now it has been little studied outside Iran. In Crisis, Collapse, Militarism and Civil War, Michael Axworthy has gathered leading experts on this period from around the world to provide a multifaceted account of this fascinating, dramatic, and turbulent era. The volume covers economics, intellectual history, military developments, politics, and the visual arts. In the 1720s, after the collapse of Safavid rule in 1722, it seemed that Iran might disappear altogether, partitioned between her neighbors. Within a few years the country surged back to make a bid for regional dominance under Nader Shah, but lapsed again into civil war after his untimely death in 1747. The civil wars lasted almost until the end of the century, albeit with an interlude of relative calm and good governance under Karim Khan Zand, who ruled from the mid-1750s until his death in 1779. In 1796, after more civil wars, Agha Mohammad Shah had himself crowned as the first monarch of the Qajar dynasty, which lasted until 1925. This formative period is vital for understanding modern and contemporary Iran, and it is a fascinating drama of events and personalities in its own right. It was a period of crisis and turmoil, but also a period of possibility and creativity in ways that have for the most part been forgotten. Until now, scholarship on the significance of the eighteenth century in Iran has been scant and often obscure. This volume will not only change that, but it will also reshape our understanding of the history of one of the most important and influential states in the Middle East.

The classic images of Iranian nomads in circulation today and in years past suggest that Western awareness of nomadism is a phenomenon of considerable antiquity. Though nomadism has certainly been a key feature of Iranian history, it has not been in the way most modern archaeologists have envisaged it. Nomadism in Iran recasts our understanding of this "timeless" tradition. Far from constituting a natural adaptation on the Iranian Plateau, nomadism is a comparatively late introduction, which can only be understood within the context of certain political circumstances. Since the early Holocene, most, if not all, agricultural communities in Iran had kept herds of sheep and goat, but the communities themselves were sedentary: only a few of their members were required to move with the herds seasonally. Though the arrival of Iranian speaking groups, attested in written sources beginning in the time of Herodutus, began to change the demography of the plateau, it wasn't until later in the eleventh century that an influx of Turkic speaking Oghuz nomadic groups-"true" nomads of the steppe-began the modification of the demography of the Iranian Plateau that accelerated with the Mongol conquest. The massive, unprecedented violence of this invasion effected the widespread distribution of largely Turkic-speaking nomadic groups across Iran. Thus, what has been interpreted in the past as an enduring pattern of nomadic land use is, by archaeological standards, very recent. Iran's demographic profile since the eleventh century AD, and more particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth century, has been used by some scholars as a proxy for ancient social organization. Nomadism in Iran argues that this modernist perspective distorts the historical reality of the land. Assembling a wealth of material in several languages and disciplines, Nomadism in Iran will be invaluable to archaeologists, anthropologists, and historians of the Middle East and Central Asia.

The Gulf Islands Dispute offers an international law analysis of the conflict between Iran and the UAE over ownership of three Gulf islands. The conclusions reached are based on centuries of Gulf history and challenge the positions of both parties.