Sholeh Quinn's Persian Historiography Across Empires: The Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals is a sweeping and erudite study exploring the enterprise of historical writing in Persian during the 16th and 17th centuries. The book underscores the connectedness of histories and the permeability of political boundaries, as individual historians, styles, genres, and specific texts moved across and within the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal empires.
One of the strengths of Quinn's book is its decentering of Iran in its exploration of Persian historical writing, as well as how it brings Safavid historiography into direct conversation with Ottoman and Mughal historiographies. The book highlights a trans-regional, trans-imperial Persianate world connected through texts and people, and documents what happens to those texts and people as they circulated across the Persianate world. Quinn's scholarship identifies trends and highlights commonalities among a broad collection of the historical writing of three different empires, offering a 30,000-foot view of the enterprise of historical writing in Persian during the 16th and 17th centuries and demonstrating the arbitrariness of silo-ing Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal histories from one another.
Among the book's central arguments is that Persian historical writing drew on earlier Persian language literary-historiographical models, most notably the Timurid models. Quinn is attuned to the texts’ interdependence on each other and how they were transformed through use and revision. Quinn argues that a method of imitative writing—which drew on earlier works—permeated 16th and 17th-century Persian historical writing, and authors were engaged in a creative process of “active engagement and dialog with the past” (p. 8) when interacting with, modifying, changing, or rewriting earlier texts. Quinn draws attention to four conventional elements often found in Persian histories: the benefits of history; bibliographies; genealogies; and dream narratives. Quinn makes two main observations: firstly, the survival of these conventional elements was highly dependent on whether the author modeled his history on earlier works; and secondly, these conventional elements, when they existed, appeared across imperial boundaries and were shared among Persian chronicles.
Quinn builds her argument about the continuity and transformation of Persian historiography on the basis of several microhistories and close readings, focusing on individual historians; themes embedded within histories written by various authors; and the issue of genre. In Chapter 3, Quinn zooms in on historian Ghiyas al-Din Khvandamir (ca. 880–942/ ca. 1475–1535/1536), who moved from Khurasan to India, tracing the arc of a career and oeuvre that moved between empires, genres, and patrons. Khvandamir was not the only historian to move from Safavid to Mughal domains, however, and thus Quinn also briefly addresses the family of Mir Yahya Sayfi Qazvini, who, with his descendants, were known for their literary compositions. Turning from individual historians to themes within historical writing, Chapter 4 traces how universal histories composed for the Ottomans, Safavids, Uzbeks, and Mughals narrated the story of Kayumars, who Persian tradition considers to be the first human or first king. Quinn explores whether chroniclers used pre-Timurid or Timurid models in their treatment of Kayumars, and how the imperial influence of the authors’ patrons shaped accounts of Kayumars in different ways. Chapter 5 considers how historians moved material from one genre to another when interacting with earlier texts and composing their own works, focusing on the ways in which the genres of “mirrors for princes” and biographical compendia (tazkereh) intersected with Persian histories.
The apparatus of Quinn's book is well organized and easily accessible, particularly the “Appendix,” which allows Quinn to focus on building her argument throughout the study and cataloguing the details of the historians and chronicles in the appendix. A thorough index and detailed bibliography of primary and secondary sources will be valuable to students and scholars of history working on the Persianate world.
Quinn's attention to historiographical continuity and transformation is in line with recent trends in Islamic and Middle Eastern historiography, including Persianate historiography's sibling field, Arabic historiography. However, Quinn's work is most notable in its extremely broad range of sources, as it draws not only on Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal works, but also two Central Asian texts, one Kurdish history, and one source from the Delhi sultanate. Her sources are “predominantly Persian prose historical chronicles that are historiographically related to each other and/or to earlier works” (p. 11)—a very broad selection of materials. This breadth necessarily complicates the project.
Recent monographs in Persian and Arabic historiography seldom employ as many resources. For comparison, in the sibling field of Arabic historiography, Najam Haider's recent work—The Rebel and the Imām in Early Islam: Explorations in Muslim Historiography (Cambridge University Press, 2019)—explores early Islamic historiography and uses an impressive range of sources in terms of both genre (chronography, biography, and prosopography) and authors’ communal affiliations (Twelver Shi‘i, Zaydi Shi‘i, and non-Shi‘i/Sunni); however, this is still a far fewer collection of sources than Quinn's book.
The inherent challenge of such a wide-ranging and ambitious project is the corralling of disparate sources and the need for a variety of historiographical approaches to create a compelling and systematic argument, given the substantive differences in the sources’ contexts. Anyone looking to this book for a novel model for reading Persian historical writing will be disappointed, as this is not Quinn's goal. Rather, her project aims to extract these interconnected texts from the restrictively narrow contexts and subfields in which they are often read and identify how authors and texts moved, transformed, and were used across the Persianate world.
Over the past decade, the Persianate sphere as a conceptual framework has become increasingly influential, with important monographs and edited volumes by Nile Green, Mana Kia, Abbas Amanat, and Assef Ashraf, to name a few. This trend is closely tied to the movement towards examining interconnected geographic frameworks that traverse imperial, linguistic, and cultural boundaries, such as the Indian Ocean, with prominent scholarship by Engseng Ho, Sanjay Subramanyan, Johan Mathew, and Fahad Bishara, among others. The frameworks of both the Persianate and Indian Ocean stress interconnectedness, mobility, and transcultural exchanges.
In a field increasingly attuned to the concept of a trans-imperial Persianate world, which stresses transregional connections and connectedness as an avenue for inquiry, Quinn's scholarship should have broad and enduring appeal, particularly for scholars of Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal history and historiography. Quinn's general argument, that historical writing entailed both continuity and transformation, is neither new nor controversial, but it is extremely valuable in identifying how historiographical models traversed political and geographic boundaries, creating trans-cultural norms and expectations. Quinn's book demonstrates mastery over a wide array of texts and genres, as she is able to see both the forest and the trees, toggling back and forth between the macro and micro views in demonstrating the interconnectedness of individuals, texts, and empires in the Persianate world in the 16th-17th centuries.
