The city of Isfahan holds an almost mythical place in the modern history of Iran. As the grand capital of the Safavid Dynasty, the turquoise-domed oasis city in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains and the valley of the Zāyanda Rud River was a global center of trade and exchange widely known as “half the world” (nisf-i jahān). Despite its fall in 1722 to the Ghalzai Afghans and the later movement of the capital to Tehran, Isfahan remained a key provincial center and commercial metropolis with a tendency toward provincial autonomy during the Qajar era, when Iran encountered European empires at the height of their expansion, underwent halting development projects, and saw the rise of protest movements. Due to its location and proximity to the Persian Gulf and the Karun River, the powerful developmental modern army established by Zill al-Sultan, British imperial projects to open up the city and its hinterlands, and the presence and ascent of the Bakhtiyari tribal confederation of the Zagros Mountains, Qajar Isfahan was a world apart, though still under the shadow of the imperial capital of Tehran. It is therefore surprising that until recently most studies of Isfahan's past were in the field of art history and focused on its monuments, art, and architecture, with little often being said about the city's social, economic, and political fabric.

Heidi Walcher's In the Shadow of the King: Zill al-Sultan and Isfahan under the Qajars goes a very long way to recover these histories for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book explores the history of the city during the governorship of the Qajar prince Masᶜud Mirzā Zill al-Sultān from 1874 to 1907. In this meticulously researched monograph, Walcher brings together an extraordinary array of British archival correspondence from the Foreign Office and the India Office, as well as printed Persian histories, travelogues, and newsletters from the Qajar period, in a detailed narrative that is both a biographical sketch of Zill al-Sultān and a history of Isfahan during a period of commercial opening and modern transformation in Iran during the long nineteenth century. The structure of In the Shadow of the King is chronological, and traces the career of Zill al-Sultān from his appointment as the princely governor of Isfahan in 1874, his emergence as an absolutist ruler of the southern provinces, through his demise in the Constitutional Revolution and its aftermath. The book follows Zill al-Sultān from his appointment as the governor of Isfahan through his navigation of the complexities of the city's urban elite and tribal hinterland, to command a wide expanse of territory in Iran's geographic center by the 1880s, a kingdom of its own under the “shadow” of his father, Nasir al-Din Shah (1848‒96). Through the history of Zill al-Sultān's Isfahan, Walcher examines many of the broader developments in late Qajar Iran—with chapters on the Anglo-Russian imperial rivalry; the inroads of global commerce and the cash cropping of opium, tobacco, and cotton in the country's interior; the negotiation and resistance of the Shiᶜi ulama and merchant classes; the roles of the Armenian, Baha'i, and Jewish religious communities; missionaries and the spread of the Anglican gospel; the Tobacco monopoly and boycott; and the Constitutional Revolution.

In doing so, Walcher’s In the Shadow of the King is part of a broader emerging literature in the field, which has nuanced our understanding of the history of Qajar Iran and its global interactions by providing local views from the provinces. The emergence of this provincial and local historiography represents as much a generational as a historiographical shift in the field. It was not long ago that historians of the Qajar period seemed trapped in conventional, and by now quite tired and insipid, Tehran-centered nationalist frameworks, examining such inward-looking and bureaucratic topics as “the structure of central authority in Qajar Iran,” which stood for Qajar history when in fact they were works of political science not conversant with the broader questions, methods, and complexities of history and historiography. In its exploration of the Qajar period through the lens of local and provincial history, Walcher's book marks a welcome departure from this older literature, complementing recent works such as Christoph Werner's An Iranian Town in Transition: A Social and Economic History of the Elites of Tabriz, 1747‒1848 (2000) in striving for “views from the wings,” as Charles Melville called the project of local history in his programmatic essay in this journal published in 2000.

In the Shadow of the King introduces readers not only to the larger than life figure of Zill al-Sultān, but also to an elaborate cast of other characters whose lives intersected in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Isfahan, among them: Mirzā Sulaymān Khān Rukn al-Mulk, the influential vice-governor of Isfahan; Habiballāh Khān Ansāri (Mushir al-Mulk), Zill al-Sultān’s chief vizier; Shaykh Muhammad-Taqi Isfahani (also known as Āqā Najafi), the city's leading cleric; Reverend Robert Bruce, who came to Julfa in 1865 to translate the Bible and founded the Church Missionary Society in Isfahan; Stephen Peter Aqanoor, an Armenian doctor who also served as British vice-consul and news writer; and Najaf-Quli Khān Samsām al-Saltana, the Bakhtiyari chieftain and governor of Isfahan during the Constitutional Revolution—among many other members of the city's elite. The result is a rare view of Qajar Iran from the world outside Tehran. Whereas the provinces have long had a place in Ottoman and Mughal historiography, as noted above, such de-centered accounts of Safavid and Qajar Iran had until very recently been quite rare. Walcher's In the Shadow of the King presents an innovative provincial history of late Qajar Iran and, even more importantly, charts directions beyond the provincial to the international, linking the province of Isfahan to global economic and political patterns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

At its core, In the Shadow of the King is a political and diplomatic history of late nineteenth-century Isfahan as it interacted with Qajar Iran and the modern world. This political perspective is in part a result of Walcher's reading of extensive consular reports from the British National Archives and the India Office Library to detail contacts and negotiations between the urban elite of Isfahan and the representatives of the British Empire. For an urban history of nineteenth-century Isfahan, there could have been more on the urban topography and space of the city, subjects on which Walcher has previously written (see her essay “Face of the Seven Spheres”Footnote ¹). Time and again, this designated reader was left wanting more of a sense of place from the level of the city, the life of its streets, alleys, bridges, and neighborhoods as opposed to the enclosed worlds and debates of the urban elite and the Foreign Office. But then again, to be fair, the author's intended purpose is to “trace the reverberations of high politics,” and the book admittedly “remains a history of kings, rulers, priests, merchants, and international diplomats” (p. 3). Walcher seeks to take measure of the impact of British imperial influence on Qajar Isfahan and the response of the city's elite to those encounters, and does so in convincing fashion. In the Shadow of the King presents a deeply researched analysis of imperialism in Isfahan and marks a significant contribution to the history of Qajar Iran. This intricately woven book on the politics of nineteenth-century Isfahan, along with recent publications such as Sebouh Aslanian’s From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean: The Global Trade Networks of Armenian Merchants from New Julfa (2011) on its long-distance trade diasporas in the early modern world and Sussan Babaie's Isfahan and Its Palaces: Statecraft, Shi ‘ism and the Architecture of Conviviality in Early Modern Iran (2008) on the urban space of Safavid Isfahan, have unearthed much-needed new historical perspectives on this storied city and its past.