PATTERNS OF LANDOWNERSHIP IN QAJAR KIRMAN

Kirman, like other provinces in Qajar Iran, was dominated not by the state, but by a small group of elites residing in its urban center, Kirman City, as well as in several of its larger villages. The status of belonging to the aʿyān, or local elite, was based on control over three key areas of social, political, and cultural life: (a) landholdings, which accumulated in the hands of a small number of urban households connected to Kirman City and Bam over the course of the 19th century; (b) religious institutions, including extensive vaqf (religious endowment) revenues, religious ceremonies, the provision of various social services, and opportunities for patronage; and (c) access to stipendiary administrative posts. Each set of resources was valuable not only for access to wealth but also as symbols of social and cultural standing.Footnote ¹⁹ This was a continuation of a longstanding system prevalent in the medieval Islamic world, the “aʿyān-amīr system of social power,” as defined by Hodgson, wherein locally rooted aʿyān regulated social and political life in provincial cities “with minimal interference from large scale political institutions,” providing a certain stability to the patterns of provincial life through the dizzying rise and fall of dynastic states.Footnote ²⁰ The aʿyān thus not only formed the backbone of provincial elite society but were also uniquely positioned to act as intermediaries between local communities and the wider world.

At the time of the Vakil al-Mulks’ building campaigns between 1859 and 1878, the two most powerful landholding households in Kirman were the Ibrahimis and Vaziris. Both had successfully maintained their estates intact and reproduced their social power for several generations. According to Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri-Kirmani, a member of the Vaziri household, his family members were descendants of Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi, a wealthy Zand-era merchant and landlord from the agricultural center of Sirjan. During the brief period of Zand rule in Kirman (1758–94), Aqa ʿAli was granted administrative control over the entire western portion of the province—including Shahrbabak, Sirjan, Iqtaʾ, Arzuyah, Kushk, and Sughan—where he already likely possessed significant landed properties.Footnote ²¹ After the Zand prince Lutf ʿAli Khan arrived in Kirman in a final attempt to restore the Zand state, he confiscated property from Aqa ʿAli. In response, Aqa ʿAli appealed directly to Aqa Muhammad Khan Qajar to encourage, and assist in, removing the Zand prince from the city. He thus became one of the few members of the Zand-era elite to survive the subsequent Qajar massacre in the city with his life and property intact. For his service to the Qajar shah, his eldest son was installed to govern the remnants of the city for the next several years, while another son, Mirza Husayn, was appointed first sandūqdār and then the vazīr of Kirman (from which the family became known as the Vaziris) and quickly emerged as one of the leading landholders in the province.Footnote ²²

In 1805, Fath ʿAli Shah Qajar attempted to rebuild Kirman City, which had been largely destroyed during the Qajar conquest. He allocated a sizable share of the city's tax revenues to the new Qajar prince-governor, his uncle Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawlah, for a building campaign in the city. Ibrahim Khan, the ancestor of the Ibrahimi family, ruled the province until his death in 1826 and accumulated extensive landholdings in the province through development, purchase, confiscation, and intermarriage with established landholding families.Footnote ²³ The descendants of these two lines, the Vaziri and Ibrahimi households, became the core of Kirman's urban-based landholding elites, passing control of their landholdings through several generations into the late 19th century.

Landownership was a major preoccupation for urban households for a variety of reasons. In terms of economic benefit, owners of what are termed arbābī lands—those held by an absentee landlord (arbāb) as private property (milk)—controlled the flow of agricultural wealth from the province's hinterland into its larger villages and urban centers. Cultivation of these lands was accomplished with input from both the absentee landlord and the peasant laborers. The landowner normally provided all capital and material factors (land, water resources, and most or all of the seed), with the peasants providing the labor. At harvest, the produce was divided according to either a customary agreement or an annual contract drawn up or agreed upon orally between the landlord and the peasant laborers in which the landowner, according to the input factors they contributed, would take roughly 70 to 80 percent of the crop.Footnote ²⁴ In addition, the landlords held prerogatives over what to plant, whether the rent was to be collected in cash or kind, and the appointment of local agents to represent their interests in rural districts. Given that Kirman's local economy was essentially agrarian, supplemented by tribal and handicraft production, possession of land and water resources was the primary basis of wealth.

It is important, however, to expand our view of an “estate” beyond money and material goods to look at the entirety of the social and cultural resources at the disposal of the elite household and its extended familial network, which constituted the basic building block of provincial elite society in Qajar Kirman. Vaziri's description of the local aʿyān in Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, despite his attempts to categorize individuals by social or political functions (ʿulamaʾ, landowners, administrators, etc.), makes it clear that the entire group is drawn almost exclusively from a small number of elite families in the province, each bearing the name of a prestigious eponym. Max Weber, in his studies of social power in Italian city-states, described a system that operated very similarly. Weber was among the first to recognize that kinship relations were not simply “natural,” beyond perhaps the bond between a mother and a child, but rather operate within economic relationships and reinforce collectivities that are in essence self-help groups.Footnote ²⁵ In the case of Qajar Iran, the influence of elite households was not based solely on their wealth or on their position as members of a distinct economic class. They formed a sociocultural status group in which the cultural prestige afforded by owning land, maintaining relationships with local religious institutions, and securing access to administrative posts were as important to their social power as was the wealth that these activities afforded them. Each household carved out a sphere of proprietary interests in the rural hinterland, which provided important resources in elite household competition both as independent sources of revenue and for the prestige associated with landholding.

These networks also extended into the realm of administration. Tax collectors, or ʿummāl (singular: ʿamil), were charged with collecting the taxes levied on a particular community by the provincial government. For administrative and taxation purposes, the province (ustān or vilāyat) was broken down into a number of districts (bulūk), each consisting of one or more large villages (qaṣbah) as well as smaller villages (dih) and the agricultural settlements (mazrāʿah) connected to them as dependencies. Just as the central government maintained control over major cities and provincial centers through the cooperation of elite local households, provincial governors were able to collect taxes and maintain order in their domain only with the aid of those households with the prestige and local know-how to make administration possible, even within the modestly proscribed limits of collecting taxes and maintaining basic order. There was no salary for tax collection as such. It was expected that in the course of his duties, the ʿamil would collect a surplus as compensation. Though this surplus was often quite large, and certainly added to the pressures on the peasantry, it was not considered an impropriety from an administrative standpoint. Rather, within certain limits, it was an extension of the right of members of elite society to acquire the surplus of peasant labor, and leveraging their positions within the government was one of several means to do so. Despite the relatively clear function of the ʿummāl from the perspective of the provincial government, their ultimate authority over a rural community lacked clear delineation. The office and title amounted to an endorsement by the provincial government for an individual to exercise power as a proxy of the governor's person.

A key aspect of the totality of landholding families’ control over village communities was the fact that administration and tax collection heavily overlapped with land ownership in Qajar Kirman.Footnote ²⁶ This connection has been overlooked in most studies of Qajar administrative history due to the fact that the centrality of household estates and their networks are likewise overlooked. Ervand Abrahamian famously described the Qajar shahs as “despots without the instruments of despotism,” and posited that the fragmentation of Iranian society created an atmosphere of loosely organized chaos with no particular administrative body or social group able to assert its authority over provincial populations.Footnote ²⁷ Yet, in practice, to administer villages and rural areas, the governor would rely on the intermediacy of a household with the proper connections and local knowledge to carry out tax collection properly and thoroughly. These tasks, in turn, would be delegated through the broader household networks. This system granted recognition and sanction to the power of household leaders as landlords and as intermediaries with urban society, while at the same time augmenting their income by allowing them to collect an additional percentage of the crop from the peasant laborers as taxes. Included among the ranks of these households were the ʿulamaʾ, whose connections to prestigious institutions of Islamic learning and recognized sociocultural status among the local population afforded them significant influence. Such household networks were more capable than any other social group of legitimizing or delegitimizing the actions of the governor and his entourage.

Despite the success of a handful of elite families in Kirman City, the overall pattern of landholdings and rural administration prior to the intensification of commercial agriculture was one dominated by rurally based elite households residing in outlying districts where they held property. These rural households, by extension, enjoyed hereditary control over tax collection and administration as part of their functional role as intermediaries between the state and village populations. The reason this system of patrimonial authority in rural areas was so persistent is perhaps best demonstrated by the example of Nur al-Din Rudbari and his relationship with the provincial government. Nur al-Din Rudbari was the head of a landholding family in Rudbar that came to the area from Khurasan early in the 18th century and held a position of authority there for the next 150 years. Nur al-Din's Father, Amir Saʿid Khan, had developed enormous wealth through land investments in Rudbar and Jiruft by early in the 19th century.Footnote ²⁸ Captain Euan Smith of the Perso-Kalat Boundary Commission, who traveled through Kirman in 1872, visited Nur al-Din at Khanu and offered some insightful commentary on his relationship with the governor of Kirman:

RURAL DEVELOPMENT AND THE COMMERCIALIZATION OF AGRICULTURE

As early as the 17th and 18th centuries, Kirman supported a thriving international trade in kurk wool, carried by the East India Company to supply Indian weavers.Footnote ³⁰ After the disruptions caused by the long post-Safavid interregnum and the brutal Qajar conquest of Kirman, exports of grain and other foodstuffs to India picked up again by the 1840s. Merchants realized quickly the enormous potential for wealth in connection with international markets by selling other goods like dyes and opium in India, China, and western Europe, particularly after access to these markets was made quicker and less expensive with the introduction of steamship service on the Persian Gulf and with the opening of the Suez Canal in the 1860s.Footnote ³¹ The rising price of raw materials on the international market encouraged landowners to intensify production of these goods.Footnote ³² Iranian merchants made small fortunes in the Indian trade as the commercial sector of the agricultural economy surged. As a result, landowners too became gradually more sensitive to global economic forces.

As Kirmani merchants found lucrative markets overseas for agricultural goods, the commodities commanding the highest profit margin began to supplant traditional staple crops such as wheat and barley. Gad Gilbar has argued that cash cropping was driven primarily by importers seeking to offset the growing imbalance in foreign trade, paying cash to merchants and cultivators for agricultural goods to sell on their return trips to India and China.Footnote ³³ However, the local impetus of this shift in production patterns is clear once the activities of Kirmani landowners are explored. While our Kirmani sources note that producers continued to send a considerable quantity of cereals and dried fruits overseas in the 1870s, it was rather the shipments of cotton and dyes bound for India that made the elite landowning households of Kirman wealthy. Vaziri's comments in the mid-1870s paint a vivid picture of the rise in fortunes of Kirmani landowners.

While working to augment their own household's wealth and prestige, the Vakil al-Mulks’ building program set the basic groundwork for the participation of wealthy elites throughout the province in the growing overseas trade through the Persian Gulf. The widespread commercialization of agriculture began in Kirman in the 1840s, when trade relations with India were revitalized. Kirman quickly became an exporter of raw materials such as cotton, opium, and henna alongside food staples such as wheat, barley, dried fruit, and nuts. Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan Vakil al-Mulk (d.1868) and his son Murtaza Quli Khan Vakil al-Mulk II (d.1878) controlled the governorship of Kirman during the pivotal years between 1859 and 1878. Unlike many Qajar governors, the Vakilis were not connected by blood or marriage to the Qajar royal family. Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan was the son of Fath ʿAli Khan Nuri, who, incidentally, served Sir John Malcolm during his travels in the early 19th century.Footnote ³⁵ In the late 1850s, Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan was falsely accused of participating in some form of conspiracy with Prince Qahraman Mirza (d.1841); he was taken before Nasir al-Din Shah in Tehran and quickly absolved of any wrongdoing. Qahraman Mirza's son, Kiyamurs Mirza ʿUmid al-Dawlah, was subsequently granted the governorship of Kirman in 1859 with Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan as his pīshkār (deputy).Footnote ³⁶ Such appointments were common in the patrimonial Qajar government as a means of allocating a salary to a member of the royal household or others in positions of favor with the court.Footnote ³⁷ Vaziri noted in the 1870s that the governorship was Kiyamurs Mirza's only in name, with the actual tasks of governing delegated to the more capable Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan.Footnote ³⁸ By 1867, he was granted the royal title of Vakil al-Mulk in recognition of his administrative abilities and received a full appointment to govern the province.Footnote ³⁹

Among Vakil al-Mulk's first accomplishments in Kirman was a successful campaign in Baluchistan in 1862 to subjugate the tribal khans. He then shrewdly cemented peaceful relationships with leading khans through intermarriage and alliance.Footnote ⁴⁰ Normalizing the relationship with the Baluchi khans had an immediate impact on Kirman's local economy. By limiting the threat of tribal raids, Kirman's major caravan routes linking Yazd, Rafsanjan, Bam, and Kirman City to the port of Bandar ʿAbbas began once again to flourish, enabling local landowners and merchants to find markets overseas for agricultural surplus. This was aided by Vakil al-Mulk's construction of a series of caravanserais on these major trade routes and improvements to the basic infrastructure of major villages in the province. As Rudi Matthee notes in his study of the Safavid silk trade, such economic policies were normally designed to advance commerce as a taxable activity, and had nothing to do with either mercantilist or capitalist economic theories.Footnote ⁴¹

This series of building projects, along with the subjugation of pastoral nomadic tribes and increased patrols on major trade routes, helped improve the security of transportation throughout the province and accelerated Kirman's transformation into a producer of raw materials on the global market. The turn to commercial agriculture has been well documented by historians, but the far-reaching effects it had on the structure of provincial communities has not.Footnote ⁴² The political economy of Kirman was centered on the networks of socially and economically powerful elite households based in the urban center of Kirman City, not on the activities of the Qajar state or the provincial government, except as the latter were pursued by provincial governors on behalf of their own private estates, as in the case of Vakil al-Mulk.

As the cotton market dried up after the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865, many landowners began growing and processing poppies (khashkhash). British observers noted in 1869 that “near Tehran for instance and in many other districts where [opium] was formerly almost unknown, large fields are at present under cultivation.”Footnote ⁴³ By the 1870s, poppies were produced alongside cereals throughout Kirman, and are mentioned by Vaziri among other local crops in Narmashir, Jupar, Baghayn, Sirjan, Zarand, and Mahan.Footnote ⁴⁴ The last of these, a village just east of Kirman City where the Shah Niʿmat Allah Vali shrine is located, was touted by Kirmanis as the producer of the finest opium in the world. The crop was said to never hit the market and was rather collected by agents of the shrine and khalīṣah (or crown) properties in Mahan and “sent as gifts and as a curiosity.”Footnote ⁴⁵ By the 1880s, however, the opium trade was fundamentally transformed by local landowners responding to global economic forces. In 1879–80, Kirman produced some 4,500 mans (58,500 lbs.) of opium.Footnote ⁴⁶ This figure more than doubled by 1896, when the British consulate noted the export of 9,500 mans of opium valued at 16,400 pounds sterling, from Kirman.Footnote ⁴⁷ This corresponded to a dramatic increase in opium production throughout southern Iran, with Isfahan and Yazd the two chief centers of processing and packing for export.Footnote ⁴⁸

Kirman's exports departed primarily from the port at Bandar ʿAbbas, for which, unfortunately, there is less reliable information on the mid-19th century than for other ports along the Gulf. The British Legation's figures for net tonnage from Bushihr and Basra, however, are telling of the overall trends in the Persian Gulf trade. The volume of trade passing through the Persian Gulf ports began a meteoric rise in the early 1870s. From 1872 to 1873, the overall trade between the Persian Gulf and London more than doubled, from 2,591 tons to 6,516 tons, and more than doubled again the next year to 13,146 tons. Over the following decade, British administrators estimated that Bushihr's exports doubled, while those of Bandar ʿAbbas nearly tripled.Footnote ⁴⁹ The volume of trade continued to increase sporadically up to the eve of World War I in 1913, by which time it had reached 319,000 tons.Footnote ⁵⁰

The evidence is compelling that structural changes in local economies throughout Iran, in particular the transition to cash cropping, were driven by the activities of local merchants and producers, and not simply “uninvited, and partially harmful, intervention by European countries in the Iranian political economy,” as Homa Katouzian among others has argued.Footnote ⁵¹ The booming export trade through southern Iran was overwhelmingly in the hands of native Iranian merchants, not Europeans.Footnote ⁵² About forty merchants in Kirman in the mid-1870s were engaged in international trade, the most successful of whom established their own permanent agents overseas, particularly in Bombay.Footnote ⁵³ Improved communication technologies such as the telegraph lines connecting Tehran to the outside world and the introduction of steam service at Persian Gulf ports improved the flow of information and security for merchants engaged in long-distance trade.Footnote ⁵⁴ It is true that much of the transport was in the hands of the Indian community, mainly immigrants from Shikarpur who enjoyed British protection and the concessionary 5 percent tariff on exports.Footnote ⁵⁵ International merchants, however, were only one economic group to participate in, and benefit from, commercialized agriculture.

THE VAKILI ESTATE

Contemporary European observers tended to attribute the economic expansion in late 19th-century Kirman entirely to Vakil al-Mulk, whom they saw as an enlightened ruler whose measures achieved exceptional progress in a hopelessly lost backwater of the world. St. John was of the opinion that Vakil al-Mulk's measures “raised Karman from the desolation it had been plunged in, since the siege, to its present position of the most orderly and one of the most prosperous divisions of the kingdom.”Footnote ⁵⁶ A. Houtum-Schindler, who visited Kirman in 1879 and was particularly keen on documenting the city's architecture, noted that most of the new buildings in town were built by either Vakil al-Mulk I or Vakil al-Mulk II, who had also funded substantial repairs and the addition of a large miḥrāb in the Friday mosque.Footnote ⁵⁷ These projects not only contributed to Kirman City's development but also evoked Islamic legitimacy and prestige, tying the Vakili name to the geography and history of the city. It was, in short, a method of demonstrating a commitment to elite culture and the practice of legitimate authority. Vakil al-Mulk's son, Murtaza Quli Khan Vakil al-Mulk II, was able to inherit his position and title upon his death in 1284/1867–68; this was exceptional for someone who was not a member of the royal household and had little experience in administration. The son continued his father's policies and finished a number of his major works, including the commercially important Vakili Caravanserai in Kirman City.Footnote ⁵⁸

Vaziri noted that Vakil al-Mulk, “in addition to governing, was first among merchants and landowners in the trade with Calcutta and India, and in landholding and agriculture,” and financed much of his development projects through private means.Footnote ⁵⁹ He quickly became one of Kirman's principal landowners, primarily through securing control over water resources. He built or repaired qanāts throughout the province and claimed rights to the lands they irrigated.Footnote ⁶⁰ Among the qanāts and irrigation works whose creation or upkeep are credited to Vakil al-Mulk and his son are those of the villages of Vakilabad, Kuruk, Kalanzahu, Abariq, and Nusratabad.Footnote ⁶¹ The Vakilis also purchased villages in some of the most profitable agricultural districts of the province, especially Rafsanjan. The elder Vakil al-Mulk acquired three important villages there from previous owners, Shafiʿabad, Khalilabad, and Saqi (renamed Vakilabad). In addition to these, he acquired the lucrative village of Nasiriyyah by reviving its qanāt, which ultimately fed khaliṣah lands downstream.Footnote ⁶²

Much like Zahir al-Dawlah had done a half-century earlier, the Vakilis used landownership to enhance their family's wealth and prestige and enter into Kirman's elite circles with a locally rooted estate, rather than simply remaining outsider appointees from the distant Qajar capital. With multiple members of the family owning land as absentee landlords and holding a monopoly over the sale of kurk wool, the Vakil al-Mulk household controlled the flow of significant resources from rural areas into the urban center. At the same time, they established themselves as one of the leading administrative households, drawing on their newly established connections in rural society and the sociocultural prestige of the Vakil al-Mulk name. Kirmani historians note the Vakilis as one of the most powerful administrative and landholding families of Kirman into the 20th century.Footnote ⁶³

THE KALANTARI ESTATE IN SIRJAN

Much like the Vakili family, the Kalantari household established its control over an economically important agricultural district in Kirman through landownership. The Kalantaris founded the city of Saʿidabad (modern Sirjan) along the Yazd-Bandar ʿAbbas road in the early 1790s. Saʿidabad quickly became a flourishing center of agriculture and trade in the early period of commercial agriculture in Kirman. The Sirjan district surrounding Saʿidabad produced roughly 250,000 mans of cotton and 600,000 mans of grain, much of which made its way overseas via Bombay.Footnote ⁶⁴ A significant portion of the produce from Rafsanjan and Yazd bound for export via Bandar ʿAbbas also ran through this town, as did goods passing between Fars and Kirman.Footnote ⁶⁵ Saʿidabad became a flourishing trade depot with a population of about 9,000 by 1904, and contained a customs outpost and post office.Footnote ⁶⁶

The proximity of Sirjan to the Persian Gulf ports and its abundance of arable land made it well suited for cash cropping. During the cotton boom, Sirjan was among the leading producers of cotton bound for India. Likewise, with the expansion of opium production for the Chinese market, poppies were grown in large quantities alongside fields of wheat and barley. Vaziri tells us that the price of Sirjani-produced raw materials on the foreign market was such that “the power and wealth of the farmers now is more than that of the former owners of the hamlets, and the shepherds too have become wealthy because of the nirkh [fixed price] on kurk and wool.”Footnote ⁶⁷ By 1894, the British consul in Kirman, Percy Sykes, compared the conditions of peasants throughout Kirman favorably with their counterparts in India.Footnote ⁶⁸

Members of the Kalantari household reinforced their control over the agriculturally rich district of Sirjan through securing posts in administration and tax collection, passing down the office of ʿamil starting in the 1840s.Footnote ⁶⁹ By doing so, they also profited from surplus tax collection from the peasant population, as was the norm, and expanded their landholdings in that district. Vaziri describes their role in Sirjan both as ʿamilī (administration and tax collection) and riyāsat (headmanship), reflecting what Sheikholeslami has called a lack of functional differentiation in the Qajar bureaucracy, mirrored here at the provincial and district level.Footnote ⁷⁰ Offices and titles were often vague and inconsistent, reflecting the authority of the officeholder rather than the power or responsibilities of the office itself.Footnote ⁷¹

Just as landholdings were valuable as both sociocultural and financial resources, administrative positions held a similar dual importance to household estates. The Kalantari household was a major player in provincial affairs, based not so much on its wealth or landholdings, but on the cultural prestige associated with its hereditary control over the position of kalāntar, or chief magistrate, of Kirman City. Vaziri relates a widely circulated story according to which the Kalantaris’ lofty role in Kirmani politics originated in a complaint sent to Shah ʿAbbas I in 1015/1606–07, that the kalāntar of Kirman City was abusing his position and oppressing the local population.

This narrative was no doubt utilized by the Kalantari household to stress a traditional right, supported by no less an authority than the legendary Shah ʿAbbas, to maintain its high status in Kirman's politics through hereditary control over a lucrative and prestigious post. The household's ability to maintain its place among Kirman's aʿyān relied not only on its members’ ability to reproduce their cultural prestige from generation to generation but also on their ability to maintain their usefulness to Qajar appointees and the local population alike. For Kirman's governors, they provided indispensable knowledge of local administrative affairs, substantial and longstanding ties with other members of elite society, and credibility and prestige with the local population.

In Gavk and Khabis, to the east of Kirman City, the Kalantaris had carved out a similar enclave with extensive landholdings coupled with administrative control since early in the 19th century.Footnote ⁷³ In this case, it appears they used their influence as administrators and urban notables to accumulate land, rather than, as in Sirjan, using their position as landholders to take hold of administrative functions. There was a noticeable absence of powerful rural notables in Khabis, which no doubt allowed the Kalantaris an opening to profit as tax collectors and administrators. Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri-Kirmani's son, Aqa Khan Vaziri, comments in his annotation to the Jughrafiya-yi Kirman that another member of the Kalantari household, Mirza Mihdi Khan Kalantar, held the administration of Khabis for most of his life. Between the 1880s and 1900s, he acquired some of the most desirable properties in the district and extended the landed estates of the Kalantari household into eastern Kirman.Footnote ⁷⁴

RAFSANJAN: LAND INVESTMENT AND SHAYKHI-MUTASHARʿİ FACTIONALISM

Although Sirjan was certainly thriving, it was Rafsanjan that became the center of commercial agricultural production in the 1870s. Rafsanjan was further than Sirjan from Kirman City and the Persian Gulf, but it was located along the Yazd-Bandar ʿAbbas trade route, which was favored by many merchants as a way to avoid Kirman City, where an additional 5 percent in customs was often assessed in addition to the regular duties at Bandar ʿAbbas.Footnote ⁷⁵ According to Vaziri, not only landowners but even peasants saw an improvement in their standard of living; as he puts it, “this district's farmers mostly became hajjis.”Footnote ⁷⁶

The economic significance of Rafsanjan also made it a battleground in a growing factional conflict between two blocs of household networks in Kirman connected to the Vakilis and the Ibrahimis. During their respective tenures as governor, the eponyms of these two households bought substantial tracts of land and founded a number of new villages in Rafsanjan, where several members of each household resided on large landed estates into the late 19th century. The families coexisted here in tense and uneasy circumstances, fueled especially by the fact that the Ibrahimis had long assumed the leadership of the local Kirmani branch of Shaykhism (a religious movement based on the metaphysical teachings of the late Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsaʾi, from whom the Babis and Bahaʾi also trace back their prophetic heritage) while the Vakilis were central players among the local mutasharʿī (or so-called “orthodox”) Shiʿi community.

With the expansion of commercial cotton and opium production, several Rafsanjani merchants emerged whose household estates were subjected to the growing confrontation between the Ibrahimis and Vakilis in the guise of Shaykhi-mutasharʿī factionalism. The Ahmadi household's eponymous founder, Hajj Aqa Ahmad, was the son of one of Kirman's most successful early 19th-century international merchants, Aqa ʿAli, who passed down to him considerable landed estates in Rafsanjan. Hajj Aqa Ahmad, however, did not take up his father's profession as a merchant and instead pursued an education in religious sciences. He studied first with the mutasharʿī ʿulamaʾ in Kirman and Yazd before making his way to the shrine towns of Karbala and Najaf, acquiring ijāzas from some of the most prominent scholars of the day.Footnote ⁷⁷ Upon his return to Kirman, he acquired a stipendiary post at Kirman City's Maʿsum Bik Madrasa, one of the city's leading institutions of religious education, and became recognized as Kirman's leading mujtāhid (Shiʿi jurisprudent).Footnote ⁷⁸ In one generation, the Ahmadi line had been transformed from part of a rural mercantile elite to a leading urban household with ties to one of the great institutions of sociocultural prestige in the city.

The Ahmadi landholdings, centered on Rafsanjan, were extensive and enormously profitable. The village of Husayniyyah was perhaps the most lucrative piece of agricultural land in Kirman, said to be worth over 50,000 tumans in the 1870s.Footnote ⁷⁹ When Hajj Aqa Ahmad died in 1878, his sons inherited considerable wealth and prestige.Footnote ⁸⁰ His son and leading student, Abu Jaʿfar, replaced him as Kirman's leading mujtāhid and lived comfortably from his inheritance, such that he even declined to administer vaqf properties.Footnote ⁸¹ A younger son, Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi, lived on the revenues of his landholdings and spent his time writing numerous treatises, including Farmandihan-i Kirman and Tarikh-i Yahya and later represented Kirman in the first national majlis (parliament).

The Ibrahimi household had a long-established presence in Rafsanjan, reaching back far before the boom in commercial agriculture in the 1860s and 1870s began attracting the attention of other urban households. The Ibrahimis were the descendants of Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawlah (d. 1826), the Qajar prince-governor of Kirman charged with reconstructing the province following the 1794 Qajar siege of the city and its subsequent destruction along with the massacre, blinding, or enslavement of much of its population. During his years as governor from 1803 to 1826, Ibrahim Khan reconstructed Kirman City around a cluster of institutions known as the Ibrahimiyyah Complex, with the Ibrahimiyyah Madrasa at its center.Footnote ⁸² In addition, Ibrahim Khan and his twenty-two sons, as well as an unknown number of daughters, became major landholders throughout the province through purchase, the revival of qanāts, which gave them rights to newly cultivated lands, and intermarriage with elite landholding families. Their landholdings were extensive throughout the province, but were concentrated in Isfandiqa and Jiruft to the south of Kirman City, and especially in the flourishing agriculture center to the west in Rafsanjan.Footnote ⁸³

Ibrahim Khan's eldest son, Muhammad Karim Khan, not only became the head of the Ibrahimi household after his father's death in 1826 but was also the originator of the Kirmani Shaykhi movement after his return to the city in 1830, having spent much of his early life studying with Shaykhi leader Kazim Rashti.Footnote ⁸⁴ Muhammad Karim Khan transformed the Ibrahimiyyah Madrasa into the chief center of the Shaykhi community that grew under the spiritual leadership, patronage, and familial networks of the Ibrahimis. The Ibrahimiyyah Complex in Kirman City was supported throughout the 19th century by a series of vaqf endowments originating with the Ibrahimi family, which bequeathed portions of its extensive landholdings in the province.Footnote ⁸⁵

Economic competition was fierce between two blocs of households in Rafsanjan, the Ibrahimi-Shaykhi community on the one hand and the mutasharʿī or bālāsarī Shiʿi faction connected to the Vakilis and Ahmadis on the other hand, each built around the sociocultural and economic resources of Kirman's religious institutions and their endowments, and, increasingly, the profits from land investments. Following a series of droughts resulting in food shortages in the 1870s, this economic competition devolved into factional violence. In 1878, the first in a series of violent incidents took place, which were recalled by a member of the Ahmadi family as sectarian riots in the tradition of Haydari-Niʿmati lūṭī factionalism, now under the guise of Shaykhi-mutasharʿī sectarianism.Footnote ⁸⁶ Underlying these conflicts was a competition over resources, both economic and sociocultural, between two expanding networks of elite Kirmani households.

The tense atmosphere in Rafsanjan is perhaps best expressed through the story of another major merchant from this district who, like Aqa Ahmad's father, appears in sources under the generic name of Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani. This Aqa ʿAli began as a peddler and worked his way to becoming Kirman's wealthiest merchant in the 1870s. He made his money through the boom in commercial agriculture in Rafsanjan, purchasing goods in his home district and transporting them to market in Kirman City, a pattern which over time he expanded into a vast trade network on an international scale. With his profits from international trade, Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani invested heavily in landed properties in Rafsanjan and came to own a collection of villages estimated to be worth 100,000 tūmāns.Footnote ⁸⁷ Unlike the Ahmadis, Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani associated himself with the Shaykhi community, and founded the leading Shaykhi mosque in Kirman City, the Chihil Sutun. He was primarily a merchant and despite his wealth appears to have failed to establish himself among the sociocultural elite of Kirman City. His investments in Shaykhi institutions, most notably the Chihil Sutoun mosque, did little to endear him to the mutasharʿī elite. His inheritance scheme, which favored his Shaykhi son, from a Shaykhi mother, over an older mutasharʿī son, from a mutasharʿī mother, resulted in an intra-family conflict and was challenged in the local shariʿa courts. After the Shaykhi branch of his family appealed to the provincial government, the mutasharʿī son approached the Qajar court with an enormous bribe, which resulted in Aqa ʿAli's estate being dismantled and partially sold off.Footnote ⁸⁸ This demonstrates yet again that even with the appearance of merchants with great monetary wealth, sociocultural prestige was crucial in reproducing and transmitting elite status from generation to generation. The failure of Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani to navigate Kirman's sociocultural politics left his estate effectively dismantled after his death.

THE SALE OF CROWN LANDS

By the late 1880s, the Qajar state was burdened with debt from its attempts to keep pace with militarily and technologically advanced European states. The need for cash to pay foreign loans led the state to look for new ways to raise capital, including the sale of offices and the granting of concessions to foreign nationals. Nasir al-Din Shah's courtiers and advisors urged him to privatize the state's notoriously unproductive khalīṣah crown lands as another means of raising capital.Footnote ⁸⁹ This resulted in a farmān issued in 1889–90 by Nasir al-Din Shah that ordered the sale of khalīṣah lands in the provinces to private individuals. Peasants on khalīṣah lands normally produced grains such as wheat and barley to pay their dues to the government in kind. This was then held in governmental granaries and sold at market to pay salaries and stipends to state and military officials. The former khalīṣah lands, once in private hands, were in many cases utilized instead for commercial agricultural production destined for international trade.

Khalīṣah lands were quite extensive in Kirman and, as elsewhere in the Qajar domains, they were bought up by urban elites, being the only group with the capital to afford them.Footnote ⁹⁰ This further accelerated the accumulation of rural properties in the hands of elite urban households. Mirza Riza Muhandis, traveling with Neucomen's 1904 Commercial Mission to Southern Iran, noted that the conversion of these lands to private property had the effect of raising prices on grain, which government granaries often sold at a discounted rate to hold down food prices.Footnote ⁹¹ This suggests that the transfer of khalīṣah lands to private ownership was a widespread phenomenon. Among the notable properties sold were Kabutar Khan and Baghayn, the latter then becoming a major producer of opium.Footnote ⁹²

The distortion of the local agricultural market with the gradual, but significant, rise in prices internationally of opium, cotton, and henna seriously altered the relationship between urban and rural communities, to the benefit of the former. The production of these high-value cash crops required large inputs of land. The realization of enormous profits from agriculture thus drove up the price of land over a very short period of time beginning in the 1840s. During the governorship of Vakil al-Mulk I, who improved both transportation and irrigation works throughout the province and cleared the way for the revival of the Indian trade through the Persian Gulf, land values are said to have increased tenfold in some parts of the province.Footnote ⁹³ This peaked during the enormously profitable opium and henna booms of the 1880s and 1890s. The meteoric rise in land prices accompanying the cotton and henna export trade, and accelerated by the opium boom, was nothing less than catastrophic for rural elites, who were subjected to greater competition than ever before from wealthier and better connected urban elites. Landed properties, the basis of the social and economic resources of elite culture, became concentrated in the hands of a small core of relatively wealthier and better connected urban elite households.

RURAL INTEGRATION AND THE FATE OF THE AQAYAN AND TRIBAL ELITES

As urban elites began accumulating more and more land in Kirman's rural agricultural districts, they gradually pushed out and usurped the social and political roles of rural households. As John Foran has pointed out, much of the scholarship on the economic history of late 19th-century Iran has attempted to characterize the period as either the first stage of modernization and development or an era of abject economic decline.Footnote ⁹⁴ It is clear from a closer look at the experience of the elite households of Kirman that this transformation of the regional economy produced both winners and losers. Those households that were able to invest capital in land during the early expansion of commercial agriculture benefited enormously from the production of cotton, dyes, and opium. In contrast, with the growth of urban estates and their unprecedented spread into the countryside, there is also evidence of the displacement of rural elites. Some of these rural households had held land and administrative posts, and the financial and sociocultural resources associated with them, for many generations, but were unable to compete with relatively wealthier and better connected urban notables as land prices began to rise markedly and control of administrative posts such as tax collection became more and more lucrative. Once the norm, rural landlords based in the larger villages and administrative centers of the districts had declined by the end of the 19th century in favor of their urban counterparts.

One notable example is the case of Anar, a district northwest of Kirman City along the route between Bahramabad and Yazd. Anar was once dominated by a household known as the Aqayan-i Anar, reputed to have held control of administrative posts in the district since the time of Timur. By the 1870s however, the Aqayan-i Anar were “less than one hundred individuals ruined and living in poverty.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Vakil al-Mulk established his influence in Anar by appointing a new administrator, a local kadkhuda named Abu al-Hasan Khan Anari. The connection between Vakil al-Mulk and Abu al-Hasan Khan can be characterized as a clientele relationship, utilized by the Vakili household to expand its interests in the northern districts of Kirman.

Abu al-Hasan Khan was then granted the lucrative office of ʿamil of Rafsanjan, a position which was open to some contestation.Footnote ⁹⁶ Like Anar, Rafsanjan had recently been governed by a rural household with landholdings in the district. According to Vaziri, this household, known as the Aqayan-i Rafsanjan, had declined severely over the previous generations and, by the 1870s, “the number of men in that line has fallen below five hundred and both the rich and poor are abundant.”Footnote ⁹⁷ As one of the more profitable agricultural districts, Rafsanjan had been carved up by urban elites like the Ibrahimis and Vaziris early in the 19th century, then further by the Vakilis as well as by two local mercantile households, the Ahmadis and the household of Aqa ʿAli Rafsanjani, during the cotton boom. By granting the position of ʿamil to Abu al-Hasan Khan, the reach of Vakilis was extended and the position was withheld from powerful rivals.

Only a handful of tribal military households, in particular the Rudbaris and Liks, remained important players in the elite in the tribal lands south and east of Kirman City throughout the late 19th century. These did so through their ability to command and mobilize large military followings and by cultivating connections to landownership and administration. In districts of marginal agricultural value such as Jirfut and Rudbar, where there was little competition from urban elites, tribal elites like the Rudbaris and Liks remained the dominant social force. The Rudbari Khans owned extensive property in these areas, and the headman Nur al-Din was among the wealthiest men in the province in the 1870s.Footnote ⁹⁸ Members of the Lik tribe, who also resided in Jiruft and Rudbar, worked under the Vakili governors as commanders and secretaries in the provincial military forces.Footnote ⁹⁹ But most other tribal groups were on the decline. According to Vaziri, the once powerful Mihni tribe was under “constant pressure from the central government” and saw their population drop severely. By the mid-19th century, they had intermarried with the Vakili household, which then came into possession of much of their property.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Another significant exception is the Bihzadi household of Bam. In Bam, the famed mud brick citadel garrisoned a provincial army responsible for patrolling its eastern tribal frontiers. In the politics of the “Great Game” in Central Asia, the Qajar state was compelled to maintain a presence along its ill-defined boundaries with the Khanate of Kalat to obviate any British encroachments in these territories. After several unsuccessful attempts by Qajar notables to subjugate the Baluchi tribes, the head of the local Bihzadi household, Ibrahim Khan Saʿd al-Dawlah (d. 1884), who had previously served as deputy governor of Bam under Vakil al-Mulk's brother, was charged with the task. Ibrahim Khan succeeded quickly in organizing much of Bam's military elite through intermarriage and alliance and in establishing his military authority over the Baluchi tribes, extending Qajar military control (and taxation) deep into Baluchistan.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In the process, the Bihzadis managed to wrest control over most high administrative as well as military posts in Bam from the longstanding “civilian” elites, particularly an administrative family known as the Mirzaʿi household.Footnote ¹⁰² For his success in reestablishing Qajar control over Baluchistan, Ibrahim Khan was granted the courtly title of Saʿd al-Dawlah, extensive tax-free land grants, and the rights to a portion of the taxes in Baluchistan. By the time of Qajar Prince Governor Husayn ʿAli Mirza Farman Farma's travels through Bam in 1894, for which he compiled a detailed report on Bam's elites, members of the Bihzadi household dominated landholdings in the nearby district of Narmashir, which yielded the most lucrative henna crop in the province, while maintaining their military preeminence in Baluchistan under Qajar directives.Footnote ¹⁰³ Through the skillful manipulation of external forces, in this case political rather than economic in origin, the Bihzadis integrated a vast tribal territory through its household networks into Kirman's newly emerging regional political economy.