The question of who ran the Mongol Empire has long challenged historians, and various theories have emerged and retreated in answer to this problem. As far as the question of who ran the Persian part of the empire the answer has been made more elusive by the nature of the sources. Though excellent primary source material for this period abounds, for the most part it is written by the bureaucrats of the Il-Khanate themselves, most of whom were Persian. Very little Mongol material survives. It is this lack of Mongolian material that has prompted historians to speculate that perhaps none ever existed and thus that “the Mongols were happy to leave the tedious minutiae of government to those best qualified to cope with them.” In the case of Persia “those best qualified to cope” meant the traditional bureaucratic classes, and such individual luminaries as ᶜAta Malik Juvaini and Rashid al-Din and families such as the Qazvinis and Simnanis spring to mind.

Long before European merchants working for the Dutch and the English East India Companies sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, there were caste-based Indian family firms operating heavily-capitalized commercial institutions throughout north India. The directors of these firms enlisted many thousands of agents and placed them in markets strategic to their engagement in a variety of commercial activities, including large-scale transregional trade, brokering, money changing, and the financing of complex systems of rural credit and industrial production. Rather than triggering the decline of such indigenous commercial institutions, it is during the very period of European expansion into the Indian Ocean that the Indian family firms began to geographically diversify their portfolios by sending their agents to distant markets in port cities, villages, and major and minor urban centers as far away as Moscow.

In a recent work, Stephen Dale has uncovered the existence of an early modern Indian merchant diaspora with communities dispersed throughout Central Asia, Iran, the Caucasus and much of Russia.

The fall of Isfahan to the afghans in 1722 marked the end of effective Safavid rule over Iran, but not the disappearance of the Safavids from Persia's political scene. During the entire course of the eighteenth century, many pretenders to the Persian throne made their bids for power by trying to capitalize on their claims to Safavid origins, genuine in some cases, spurious in others. A few of them played a part in the struggle against the Afghans (for instance, Shah Tahmasp II and Mirza Sayyid Ahmad), and others managed to ascend a throne, although only as mere figureheads (like Shah ᶜAbbas III, Shah Sulayman II, and Shah Ismaᶜil III). Since the issue has already been dealt with by John R. Perry in a very detailed article, I need not elaborate further. Perry, however, devoted only a few lines to the very last of them, Abu'l-Fath Mirza b. Shah Sultan Husayn II b. Shah Tahmasp II, also known as Sultan Muhammad II, whose claims Perry dismissed as certainly spurious.

The aim of this paper is to investigate historical change that occurred in a Turkic tribal group, the Afshars in Urmiya, western Azerbaijan, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. The Afshars were important in Iranian history as part of the Qizilbash tribal confederation that contributed to the rise of the Safavids, and as the founders of the Afsharid dynasty. Their branch in Urmiya also played notable roles in the civil wars of the eighteenth century.

Numerous attempts have been made by scholars to show the political and military role of the Qizilbash in the early Safavid period. However, few studies have dealt with their later history. Recently, Kathryn Babayan argued that as a result of the centralization policy of Shah ᶜAbbas (r. 1587-1629), the Qizilbash lost their power and their political and spiritual cohesion, but after that we know little about their actual situation. More than twenty years ago, Ann Lambton pointed out that the collapse of the Safavids caused a resurgence of tribes like the Afshars and Qajars, in the eighteenth century, but the process of and reasons for this “resurgence” have never been examined.

Private life during the Qajar period is not a subject on which much primary material is available. In an earlier work I made use of material from the Mahdavi Archives in Tehran to describe the life and career of Haj Muhammad Hasan Amin al-Zarb, the first major Iranian entrepreneur. Material from the same archive and other sources allows us a glimpse into the daily life of the household of Amin al-Zarb in Tehran. A native of Isfahan, Muhammad Hasan came to Tehran from Isfahan sometime about 1853. He arrived in the capital and, in his own words, “aside from a few items of clothing and an ᶜabā, my worldly goods consisted of a box of scales and weights (miqāl), the work of Isfahan that I had bought for eleven qirāns, and one hundred riyāls in cash.” By 1863 he had begun the most extensive commercial enterprise in Iran and become the richest and most influential merchant in the country.