A History of Iran by Michael Axworthy

Author:Michael Axworthy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780465098774
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2016-03-29T16:00:00+00:00

The point was not that the Persians were bad soldiers, nor really that they had fallen behind technologically (not yet). It was just that the Qajar state was not the same kind of state, nor was it trying to be.37 It controlled its territory loosely, through proxies and alliances with local tribes. The state bureaucracy was small, revolving around the court much as it had in the days of the Safavids. It has been estimated that between a half and a third of the population were still nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists.38 Provincial governors were often tribal leaders. They ruled independently, with little interference from the capital, and sent there what tax revenue was left after they had deducted their own expenses, which was not usually very much (Abbas Mirza’s army was largely recruited and paid for from the province of Azerbaijan in which he was governor). To raise money for the wars, Fath Ali Shah had alienated crown lands, increasing the devolved tendency. Nader Shah would have handled matters differently, but the apparent lesson of his reign was that ambition, greater integration, centralization, militarism, and higher taxation went together—they alienated important supporters, created opposition and revolt, and led to civil war. All Persian rulers after Nader, from Karim Khan Zand onward (even Agha Mohammad Shah), seemed to have absorbed that lesson. They rejected Nader’s model and accepted a more devolved state as the price of stability and popular consent to their rule.

The other side of the story is that most Iranians at the time probably preferred it this way. In the smaller towns and villages of the country (where most still lived), the wars in Armenia and Shirvan were a long way off, and there would have been only sporadic (and inaccurate) news of them. The civil wars between the Qajars and the Zands, let alone the earlier revolts in the time of Nader Shah and the Afghans, had affected many more Iranians either directly or indirectly through economic dislocation. Those terrible events were still within living memory, and most Iranians would have been grateful to have been spared them. Under Fath Ali Shah some moderate prosperity returned to these traditional communities.

But the popular agitation for war and the murder of Griboyedov showed the influence of the mullahs, and the closeness of some of them to at least one important strand of popular feeling in the towns (as always, one should be wary of assuming all the mullahs thought the same way—they did not). In later decades, as other European powers demanded, secured, and exploited the same privileges as those accorded the Russians at Turkmanchai, popular feeling became more and more bitter at the apparent inability of the Qajar monarchy to uphold Persian sovereignty and dignity.

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