In Persia in Crisis, Rudi Matthee focuses on political and economic trends and events that catalyzed the downfall of the Safavid dynasty in 1722. Drawing on a lifetime of research on socioeconomic history of late Safavid Iran, this book coalesces the conclusions Matthee had already drawn in his other publications on court politics, foreign trade, and monetary system under the later Safavids. Organized into eight chapters, the book under review illuminates and discusses how political instability and administrative incompetence at court in the last two thirds of the 17th century combined with intermittent monetary crisis in the country shaped the devolution that engulfed the Safavid dynasty in the 1720s.

In the preface, Matthee, rather condescendingly to Iranians and with a tinge of ethnocentrism, laments about their overall lack of historical acumen to make sense of the magnitude of the developments that led to the fall of Isfahan in the autumn of 1722. They are portrayed as a nation of megalomaniacs, or as Matthee puts it “proud inheritors of a great civilization,” who “have been baffled at this devolution ever since” and as such indulged in “a myopic collective memory” as regards the fall of Isfahan. This is claimed to have helped Iranians externalize this monumental blow to their national pride by blaming it on “greedy and power-hungry foreigners” (pp. xviii–xix). So far as Persian historiography is concerned, this claim has no root in truth. Beginning with the anonymous author of the Mukafatnama (R. Jaʿfarian, ed. [Tehran: Sazman-i tablighat-i islami, 1993]), one of the earliest political pathologies of the fall of Isfahan “published” in 1725–27, several generations of native historians, from Mirza Mahdi Astarabadi (d. after 1747) in his Durra-yi Nadira, to the author of the Rustam al-tavarikh, Muhammad Hashim Asaf Shirazi (d. after 1834), to Riza-Quli Hidayat (d. 1871) to Muhammad Hasan Iʿtimad al-Saltana (d. 1896), all maintained that the crisis that sealed the fate of the Safavids rooted in internal causes, conflating diverse economic, social, and political issues. The three central causes singled out and discussed in the writings of one of these historians (Iʿtimad al-Saltana, Tarikh-i muntazam-i nasiri, 3 vols. [Tehran, 1881–82], 2:214–15) broadly overlap the diagnosis delineated in the book under review. Long before Matthee, this late 19th-century Iranian historian had enough intellectual insight to argue that it was the interplay of three factors—power clashes between the pillars of the state in Isfahan, the lack of centralized control over cash flow in the country, and the rise to power of the forces of sectarian bigotry—that brought about the downfall of the Safavid dynasty.

The introduction tells about why the decline paradigm should be applied to the study of late Safavid society and politics (pp. xxii–xxx). Expanding on the relativity of the notion of decline, Matthee clarifies that he has no assumption that “the entire system was drained of vitality and dynamism” (p. xxix). Even so, his account time and again underlines the civilizational, all-embracing magnitude of the crises that led to the fall of Isfahan, which, as he points out, eventually turned Iran into a “backward country of ruined towns inhabited by impoverished, ignorant people who seemed in dire need of Western tutelage” (p. xviii). This, in a sense, betrays not only the unguarded looseness of Matthee's perception of decline in this book, but also his ethnocentric, colonialist approach to the study of Iranian society and politics. At a time when decline theory has been revised and nuanced in the Mughal and Ottoman fields, with those fields moving in fascinating and new directions, Matthee's Persia in Crisis rests on a deeply biased reading of the declinist paradigm, wherein, as Cemal Kafadar has put it in his seminal article “The Question of Ottoman Decline,” the concept of decline is no more than “a linearizing and totalizing device in (a)historical narration and analysis” (Harvard Middle East and Islamic Review 4 [1997–98]: 30–75, at 34).

The first three chapters deal with the political and administrative history of late Safavid Iran. Political participation and administrative control under the later Safavids are argued to have been north-centric. The geopolitical south, or garmsirāt, is claimed to have been an “alien territory for the Safavids” (p. 5) and as such completely irrelevant to the history of the rest of the country both politically and economically, creating “a major cause of weak infrastructural state control” in Safavid Iran. Matthee's definition of garmsirāt is based on a careless, haphazard reading of Persian narrative sources, making the conclusions he draws shaky and implausible. As a geographical moniker, the term garmsirāt was applied in the Safavid historiography to two regions, the first being the coastal areas of the provinces of Fars and Kirman, which had long been integrated into the Safavid administrative system, and the second vast swathes of land stretched from Mukran to Qandahar, a hotbed of anti-Safavid dissent and Mughal intrusion, where the administrative control of the Safavid regime was inchoate and fragile all the time. So, instead of dealing with the question of Qandahar, which requires an in-depth and critical study of several Persian narrative and epistolary sources, Matthee simply chooses to overgeneralize the perceived importance of the political north, thus paying no attention to an abundance of historical evidence in these sources concerning the systematic and often successful efforts of several generations of Safavid bureaucrats and military leaders to expand the administrative hold of the crown, or khāṣṣa, sector of the bureaucracy over most of the populated areas of the garmsirāt. Matthee then shifts the focus of his attention to what he calls the economic and administrative bankruptcy and backwardness of early modern Iran, arguing that under the Safavids the country had badly suffered from a “weak infrastructural state control,” “the absence of a national market,” and a long history of political tensions between the center and the periphery (pp. 6–8).

Part of the book under review is devoted to the clashes between and inside the dargāh (the palace) and the dīvān (the state administration) over the course of the 17th century (pp. 28–33). Here Matthee's account revolves around the ghulām system, emphasizing the noninvolvement of the Qizilbash in it. Armenian, Georgian, and Circassian recruits of the Safavid army are claimed to have been the only ghulāms of the shah, exploited frequently by him to undercut the vested interests of the Qizilbash. Therefore, this book reduces the whole conflict between the ghulāms and the Qizilbash to a power clash between two ethnically distinct factions, detailing petty feuds between them in the 17th century. But the basic fact remains that in practice the ghulām system was all-inclusive and aimed to function primarily as a conduit for upward career mobility among both the Qizilbash and non-Qizilbash servitors of the throne. Upward mobility in this system was contingent on the services every ghulām (either a Qizilbash or a non-Qizilbash) rendered to the shah and the khāṣṣa sector of the administration. The introduction of the ghulām system of upward mobility entailed further depersonalization of principal dargāh and dīvān career lines, a development on which the book under review remains reticent. In a manner of speaking, Matthee's account fails to grasp the institutional and historical significance of the introduction of the ghulām system, leaving the reader in the dark over how the Safavid regime's inability to institutionalize the depersonalization of career mobility among the ghulām recruits in the last two thirds of the 17th century fueled cliquish conflicts along the dargāh and dīvān career paths in the opening quarter of the next century.

One of the major defects of Matthee's study of the Safavid decline is its failure to take into account the unprecedented rise in the number and monetary value of the waqf or religious endowments in Isfahan shortly before the downfall of the Safavid dynasty. A recently published collection of waqf documents from Isfahan in eleven volumes contains scores of the waqf deeds issued by the last two Safavid monarchs as well as by their bureaucratic underlings in Isfahan. These documents indicate that in the height of the so-called monetary crisis in Safavid Iran central authorities were busy with registering as waqf the vast swathes of agricultural land originally held as the crown and the state (khāliṣa) lands, depriving the shah and the crown sector from a key source of cash flow and taxation in Isfahan. The earliest collection of the late Safavid waqf documents was published in 1967 by ʿAbd al-Husayn Sipanta, but there is no mention of them in the book under review. The overall ignorance of major Persian historiographical and archival sources relegates Persia in Crisis to the rank of the works that offer “a relatively limited view of local history in which foreigners and their traffic predominate,” as Martin B. Dickson had once noted in his critique of Laurence Lockhart's The Fall of the Ṣafavī Dynasty (Dickson, Martin B., “The Fall of the Ṣafavi Dynasty,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 82 [1962]: 503–17, at 510; Lockhart, Laurence, The Fall of the Ṣafavī Dynasty and the Afghan Occupation of Persia. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958]).

Chapters 4, 5, and 6 bring into a sharp focus the monetary, diplomatic, and administrative predicaments and mismanagements that destabilized the Safavid regime in the latter part of the 17th century. Monetary crisis is studied in Chapter 4. Here Matthee emphasizes the minimal importance of cash in national economy. But instead of going further with his examination of internal ramifications of monetary crisis, in Chapter 5, Matthee switches his focus abruptly to the way in which the cash shortage in the country led Shah Sulayman and his advisors to desist from military action and territorial expansionism, ushering in a relatively long era of military stagnation that continued well into the closing years of the reign of Shah Sultan Husayn (1694–1722). Chapter 6 is about the process of administrative decentralization during the latter part of the 17th century. Attention has specifically been paid to trade crisis in the garmsirāt (Fars, Kirman, and Bandar Abbas), and in a tone reminiscent of the memos and dispatches of the 17th- and 18th-century Dutch and English mercantilists, Matthee claims that the trade crisis in southern Iran stemmed from “oppressive officials and [the] uncompetitive fees” imposed by them on European colonialists whose trade in Iran is implied to have had a soothing and civilizing impact (p. 172).

The religious aspects of Safavid decline are outlined in Chapter 7, which focuses on the rise to power of the forces of religious bigotry under the later Safavids with special reference to the way this development traumatized the communal life of religious minorities in the country. Here Matthee's study of religious politics in late Safavid Iran is sketchy and tells nothing about the internal crises of the Safavid religious institution, including the unprecedented intensification of hierocratic disputes under Shah Sulayman and Shah Sultan Husayn. The last chapter is dedicated to the reign of Shah Sultan Husayn and provides us with an account of court politics during Fath-ʿAli Khan Daghistani's years as grand vizier and in the run-up to the Afghan invasion of Isfahan.

Despite these issues, Persia in Crisis is an essential addition to secondary literature on social and political history of early modern Iran. The parts of the book that deal with Iran's foreign trade and monetary system in the 17th and 18th centuries should be included in any reading list covering the history of Iran under the Safavids.