This compact book offers a closely researched account of the early years of the Qajar dynasty and state, whose political development was permanently marked by the territorial struggle with the Russian Empire in the South Caucasus in its first three decades. Behrooz's work builds on Muriel Atkin's classic Russia and Iran 1780–1928 (1980), and although unlike Atkin he does not make use of any sources in Russian, the range of Persian-language material he draws upon is much greater, and the two books complement each other well. The first two chapters effectively set the political scene, providing a review of the circumstances of Aqa Muhammad Khan's rise to power, his struggle with the Zand rulers of Shiraz, and the extensive preparations he made to secure the succession of his nephew, Baba Khan Jahanbani, the future Fath Ali Shah. These bore fruit when Aqa Muhammad Shah was murdered by his own servants in Shusha in 1797. Significantly, this took place during a campaign to subdue Qarabagh. The central figure of the book, and of the wars against Russia, is Fath Ali's son Abbas Mirza, but a particular strength of Behrooz's account is his close understanding of the family and intertribal relationships among the Qajar elite, as well as of the petty dynasties that ruled in Qarabagh, Iravan, Badkubeh (Baku), and Derbent in this period.

As Behrooz makes clear, the mobilization capacity of the Qajar state never came close to matching that of Russia, or indeed that of Nader Shah's state two generations earlier. Drawing upon Turko–Mongol warrior traditions, Qajar armies had a heavy emphasis on irregular cavalry and were particularly weak in artillery, apart from the camel-mounted zamburak (falconet). Aqa Muhammad Shah's 10,000- man force of tofangchi (musketeer) infantry were armed almost exclusively with matchlocks, which had not been seen on European battlefields for 100 years. The European-style Nezam-e jadid infantry, known as Sarbaz, which was developed under Fath Ali Shah after 1804, never seems to have numbered more than 6,000 men, which when combined with 800 or so Russian deserters provided the nucleus of a modern fighting force, but no more. Even this lacked up-to-date weaponry and was prone to seeing discipline dissolve when faced with the prospect of loot. Under these circumstances what is remarkable is not that Iran lost so much territory in the Caucasus to Russia between the 1790s and the 1820s, but that the Qajars were able to put up any effective resistance at all to a military juggernaut that had repeatedly crushed the more powerful Ottomans and played a major part in defeating Napoleon between 1812 and 1814. One of Behrooz's important contributions in this book is demonstrating how this was possible: partly because of the hubris of Russian generals such as Tsitsianov, who consistently underestimated their Qajar opponents, but also because of the logistical difficulties that the Russians faced in the South Caucasus, which limited the size of the forces they could bring to bear. Both the 1804–13 and 1825–28 wars (Behrooz convincingly revises the chronology of the latter) began with Russian setbacks: the failed siege of Iravan in the first war, and a series of defeats that pushed the Russians out of Lenkoran and Talesh and back across the Aras into Qarabagh in the second.

In neither case could this initial success be sustained: the Russians were quicker to learn from their mistakes than the Iranian military leadership, and could draw upon additional resources of men and ammunition that simply were not available to Abbas Mirza. Nevertheless, the impression provided by Behrooz is that the quality of Russian military leadership in the Caucasus was not particularly high. He offers a scathing, and in my view justified, verdict on Alexei Petrovich Yermolov, a “patriotic” hero of the Napoleonic Wars who became notorious for his cruelty in the suppression of the long-standing resistance to Russian rule in Daghestan and Chechnya in the North Caucasus. Behrooz makes a convincing case that in the South Caucasus Yermolov deliberately provoked the outbreak of war by occupying territory around Lake Gokcha in spring 1825, when this clearly was still Iranian territory under the terms of the 1813 Treaty of Golestan. The celebrated Council of Sultaniyeh in 1826, of which he provides a detailed, blow-by-blow account, was therefore debating how to respond to an existing Russian act of aggression, rather than launching an aggressive war of its own, as has often been concluded in British and Russian sources. The second Russo-Iranian war gets a less thorough treatment than the first in his account, but it also was notably more one-sided. The Treaty of Turkmanchai that brought it to an end not only led to the complete loss of Nakhchevan and Iravan to Russia, but to the establishment of a powerful and permanent Russian presence in Tehran, to the extent that the British believed the Qajars were now effectively puppets of the tsar. This fueled British anxiety over India's security and launched what is often misleadingly called the “Great Game.” That story, and the curious combination of patronage and aggression that characterized Russo–Qajar relations for the rest of the nineteenth century, lies beyond the scope of Behrooz's book; it has been well documented by, among others, Moritz Deutschmann in Iran and Russian Imperialism (2015). Instead Behrooz leaves us with a series of seven concluding points, most of which are unexceptionable: the guarding of a territorial dominion imagined in Safavid terms as the main source of Qajar legitimacy; the failure of the limited feasible military reforms to create a war machine that could stand up to Russia; the global context of rising European power (which as the author points out also doomed even Muhammad Ali's much wealthier and more dynamic Egyptian realm); the role of the Shi'i ulama in supporting the Qajar regime's attempts to resist Russia; the failure of British promises of support; and the personal role of Abbas Mirza, who Behrooz concludes had fine qualities as a war leader but was often very poorly advised.

It is only a final point on the modern Iranian state's search for deterrence against aggression that seems to strike a slightly false note, not least as it unexpectedly projects the argument into the present day. Behrooz claims that Iran has not invaded any neighboring countries since Nader Shah's campaigns of the 1740s, although the Georgians might beg to differ (the book opens with the sack of Tiflis by Aqa Muhammad Shah in 1796), and, although Iraq was certainly the aggressor in 1980, the war was significantly prolonged because of the subsequent Iranian invasion of Iraqi territory. The Islamic Republic's use of paramilitary proxies on the territories of several other near eastern states today also calls this analysis into question. Behrooz emphasizes the aggression Iran has faced from the West in the twentieth century, but in light of the book's subject surely a more interesting question is why Iranian fear of Russia has apparently become so much less pronounced during that time. After all, although informal British imperialism in Iran is now a distant memory, the territories lost by the Qajars in the Caucasus were lost for good, and some are still part of the Russian Federation. The bloody history outlined in this book was followed a hundred years later by the Russian-led suppression of the Persian constitutional revolution, which involved the destruction of the Majlis in Tehran and the shelling of the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, not to mention the Russian/Soviet occupation of northern Iran during both the First and Second World Wars. That the Islamic Republic and Russia's current criminally aggressive regime should now be so closely allied despite this bitter legacy suggests that the historical memories of foreign aggression that Behrooz sees at the root of the Iranian desire for credible deterrence are actually very malleable, and have been cynically aligned with the current interests of the regime.