Iran's Cultural Borderlands

This panel will critically examine some controversial historical narratives about Iran’s borderlands in light of new archival findings as a means of challenging and complementing traditional historical narratives that have focused on Iran’s political center. As such, this panel will address developments and processes that go beyond Iran’s national boundaries and questions narratives based exclusively on the center. Sergey Saluschev will explore the process of cultural exchange across national boundaries. Saluschev’s paper will address the development of a shared tea drinking culture between Russia and Iran by tracing the introduction and diffusion of the Russian Samovar in Iranian culture and society in the first half of the nineteenth century, as well as the Samovar’s role in subverting the coffee drinking culture in Iran. Eric Massie will focus on slave trading patterns and practices in Iran’s south and southeast borders, which differed significantly both in terms of slave demography and the process of abolition from the north. His paper will examine how the slave trade in southern Iran was an integral part of a broader Indian Ocean network of slave trading that persisted in places well into the twentieth century due to the weakness of Iran’s central government and the persistence of other forms of illicit trade such as the arms trade. Lastly, Massie’s paper will also examine Great Britain’s assumed right to unilaterally manumit slaves in the broader context of Britain’s capitulatory agreements with Iran. Elham Malekzadeh’s paper will address the Soviet Union’s role in causing widespread famine in northern Iran as a result of Soviet military incursions and occupation after 1917. In addition to examining Soviet policies that led to the suffering and death of untold numbers in northern Iran, Malekzadeh will address the silence of leftist Iranian historians who have ignored the Soviet Union’s role in these atrocities. Derek Mancini-Lander’s paper focuses on transregional Persianate communities through a study of biographical and historical texts centering on the town of Shustar as a means of exploring how members of the eminent Nuri sayyids reconciled local and transregional senses of belonging and identity as they moved between Khuzestan, the Deccan, and the shrine cities of Iraq.


Presentations

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Русский самовар, or the Russian samovar in English, has long been recognized as a distinctive symbol of authentic Russian identity and an integral part of Russian cultural heritage and tea-drinking tradition. One might be surprised to discover, however, that Russians are not the only nation that celebrates and cherishes samovar as a beloved artifact of national cultural heritage. Iran became another country where the Russian samovar left a prominent cultural mark and significantly influenced the patterns of tea consumption. This paper attempts to illuminate still opaque moments in the journey of the Russian samovar from its native birthplace and into the distant and unfamiliar lands of Qajar Iran in the first half of the XIX century. In addition, the chief premise of this paper is centered on the contention that introduction and virtually immediate popularity of samovars in Iran is correlated with a steep increase in the consumption of tea and parallel decline in the consumption of coffee in the country. The paper concludes that despite samovar’s colonial credentials, the affection for and popularity of the Russian samovar on Iranian markets illustrate the intricacies and diversity of a myriad of cultural and intellectual exchanges that transpired between the two nations.

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Recent scholarship on connected histories in the early modern Persianate world has worked to reconstruct fluid, transregional networks of highly mobile merchants, scholars, and poets who circulated between Iran and South Asia. This work has demonstrated that while the net flow of movement was from Northwest to Southeast, migrants and their descendants moved in both directions, maintaining connections with their cities-of-origin. This paper builds on this study of cosmopolitan Persianate communities by examining a tangle of biographical and historical texts that center on Shushtar, a city most often studied for its ancient dams and hydraulic systems. These writings comprise a corpus of texts, composed by members of the Nuri family of Shushtari sayyids, who moved between Khuzistan, the Deccan, and the shrine-towns of Iraq, and whose writings spanned four generations. These works also encompassed a variety of genres, including local history, self-narrative, travel-writing, and jurisprudence. Furthermore, the texts of this corpus are deeply entangled; they preserve a set of intertextual dialogues between generations of family members, penned in various far-flung places within the Persianate cosmopolis. As such, the corpus consists of the authors’ deliberate engagements with their relatives’ memories of home and family.

Although some writers lived at a great distance from Shushtar, in their works they struggled to cultivate a sense of family solidarity and rootedness in the city. Doing so involved attempting to resolve a tension between competing cosmopolitan and vernacular sensibilities of belonging. As many scholars have shown, cosmopolitan cultures that encompass extensive transregional communities tend to engender this sort of tension by destabilizing discrete, local notions of place and, thereby, rendering the boundaries between home and abroad fluid and elastic. For the mobile Nuri sayyids, this displacement had the effect of upsetting familiar senses of belonging and orientation. Consequently, one can discern in this corpus the authors’ implicit attempts to negotiate these apparently contradictory cosmopolitan and vernacular strategies of orientation. I argue that we can identify a blueprint for understanding these writers’ processes of negotiation in the very dialogic and intertextual nature of the corpus. The logic by which these authors negotiated these fluid, cultural borderlands becomes more comprehensible when we focus on these textual confluences that correspond with them. Moreover, by observing the historically contingent variations in strategy through which these successive writers emplotted Shushtar’s history, I trace their development diachronically, alongside social transformations in this family’s communal networks.

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This paper will focus on slave trading patterns and practices in Iran’s southern and southeastern border regions, which differed significantly both in terms of slave demography and the process of abolition from Iran’s north, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This paper is intended as a corrective of recent scholarship that has either privileged the study of slavery in Iran’s north or in the Arab regions of the Persian Gulf and the “Arab slave trade.” This paper will examine how the slave trade in southern Iran was an integral part of a broader Indian Ocean network of slave trading that persisted in places well into the twentieth century. While the slave trade at Iran’s southern ports was abolished in 1848, followed by the abolition of slavery as an institution in 1929, the slave trade nevertheless continued to affect Iran’s south and the slave trade continued in greatly reduced numbers in areas where central government control was weakest, particularly along the Makran Coast. While slaves were increasingly difficult to sell openly during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, the slave trade nevertheless overlapped with other forms of illicit trade, such as arms smuggling, which provided tribes with a bartering currency in bullets and rifles as well as the means to capture new slaves through raiding. The intersection of the slave trade and arms smuggling thereby fueled tribal warfare and strengthened the ability of tribes along Iran’s southern periphery to challenge the authority of the central government. This paper will also explore Great Britain’s assumed right to unilaterally manumit slaves in Iran’s south within the context of Great Britain’s capitulatory agreements with Iran and Iran’s indigenous sanctuary traditions (bast). In doing so, this paper will consider the question of whether Britain’s assumed right to unilaterally manumit slavery throughout the Persian Gulf and wider Middle East developed in isolation of British experiences in Iran, or if the established practice of offering sanctuary to a wide range of Iranians in British consulates and embassies provided an example that Great Britain applied to slaves elsewhere.

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During the First World War, British policies in central and southern Iran dragged the nation into a destructive and unwanted war. But the same would happen in the north. There forces of Tsarist Russia, which had occupied parts of Iran since 1909, engaged in an even more aggressive and highly destructive set of policies. Russian forces plundered farmlands, destroyed homes, brutally mistreated and raped the population and starved the public. Their goal was to intimidate the population and provide Russian troops with food and other necessities of life. Their actions caused severe disruption in the daily lives of the people who resided in the east, north, and northwestern parts of the country and eventually brought about a widespread famine. What has not been explored in any detail until now is that this pillage and plunder continued after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and under the new Soviet regime, even though the USSR officially withdrew from the war. This great historical omission might be due to the fact that there was great sympathy for the Soviet Union among Iranian intellectuals, including many leftist historians of the 20th century, and hence reluctance to divulge the atrocities that were committed under the Soviet regime, known as a “friend” of the Iranian people, while there was no such hesitance to speak of plunders committed under the Tsarist regime, long known as an enemy of Iran. The present study is based on unpublished documents located at the Iranian National Archives, the Archives of the Iranian Foreign Ministry, and the Archives of the Iranian parliament for the years 1914-1921. The paper examines how the Tsarist regime and the Soviet Union contributed to a large-scale famine in the nation and caused great devastation. Ultimately the paper also tries to explain the relative ease with which the Iranian nation accepted the subsequent military regime, which brought a modicum of security to the nation in the years 1921-24.