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The Ambit of Printing in Qajar Iran: Continent, Nation & Province

 Questioning the familiar correlation between the development of printing and the nation state, this panel uses a series of lesser-known printed books and magazines to explore the multiple patterns of book production and distribution in Qajar Iran. The panel draws attention to the agendas of Iranian as well as non-Iranian Persian publishers; the multiple sites of their presses inside and outside of Iran; and the transnational and provincial as no less than national audiences they addressed. By looking at three periods in the history of Persian printing – the early nineteenth, late nineteenth and early twentieth century – the panel explores the distinct moments at which these new printers and readers in their respective geographies. Paper one (Printing Persian in Saint Petersburg: Eurasian Networks of Evangelical Bible Production, c.1815-30) reconstructs the transnational operation of translation and printing, scripture and technology, surrounding the landmark publication of the Saint Petersburg Persian New Testament of 1815. Drawing on the archives of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the paper charts the role of industrialized evangelicalism in nurturing Persian printing practices in the years immediately prior to the beginning of Persian printing in Iran itself. Paper two (“Land of the Rising Sun”: Printed Geography and Natural History in Nineteenth Century Iran) examines the role of lithographed texts of geography and natural history in mapping the imperial borderlands of nineteenth century Iran. It explores how state-sponsored Iranian geographical and ethnographic projects surveyed and took measure of Iran’s untamed frontier regions, so marking in print the encounter between imperialism and the natural world. Through a reading of the Qajar frontier narrative Matla‘ al-Shams, the paper documents the role of lithography in the emergence of an encyclopedic geographical history of the physical and built environment in the eastern province of Khurasan. Paper three (Provincial Print Culture in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Iran) moves away from a Tehran-centered reading of the history of Iranian print culture by examining patrons, producers and consumers of Persian print in the provinces and their location within regional networks of print circulation that flourished beyond the purview of the nation state. It explores how with the advent of the constitutional revolution, provincial cities became major hubs for the publication of newspapers, periodicals and books that led to a more geographically diverse set of participants in the Iranian public sphere. (Panel convenor Nile Green)

Questioning the familiar correlation between the development of printing and the nation state, this panel uses a series of lesser-known printed books and magazines to explore the multiple patterns of book production and distribution in Qajar Iran. The panel draws attention to the agendas of Iranian as well as non-Iranian Persian publishers; the multiple sites of their presses inside and outside of Iran; and the transnational and provincial as no less than national audiences they addressed. By looking at three periods in the history of Persian printing – the early nineteenth, late nineteenth and early twentieth century – the panel explores the distinct moments at which these new printers and readers in their respective geographies. Paper one (Nile Green, Printing Persian in Saint Petersburg: Eurasian Networks of Evangelical Bible Production, c.1815-30) reconstructs the transnational operation of translation and printing, scripture and technology, surrounding the landmark publication of the Saint Petersburg Persian New Testament of 1815. Drawing on the archives of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the paper charts the role of industrialized evangelicalism in nurturing Persian printing practices in the years immediately prior to the beginning of Persian printing in Iran itself. Paper two (Arash Khazeni, “Land of the Rising Sun”: Printed Geography and Natural History in Nineteenth Century Iran) examines the role of lithographed texts of geography and natural history in mapping the imperial borderlands of nineteenth century Iran. It explores how state-sponsored Iranian geographical and ethnographic projects surveyed and took measure of Iran’s untamed frontier regions, so marking in print the encounter between imperialism and the natural world. Through a reading of the Qajar frontier narrative Matla‘ al-Shams, the paper documents the role of lithography in the emergence of an encyclopedic geographical history of the physical and built environment in the eastern province of Khurasan. Paper three (Farzin Vejdani, Provincial Print Culture in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Iran) moves away from a Tehran-centered reading of the history of Iranian print culture by examining patrons, producers and consumers of Persian print in the provinces and their location within regional networks of print circulation that flourished beyond the purview of the nation state. It explores how with the advent of the constitutional revolution, provincial cities became major hubs for the publication of newspapers, periodicals and books that led to a more geographically diverse set of participants in the Iranian public sphere.
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Chair
name: 
Nile Green
Institutional Affiliation : 
UCLA
Academic Bio: 
Nile Green is an Associate Professor (July 2009 Professor) in the history department at UCLA. Before coming to Los Angeles, he was Lecturer in South Asian Studies at Manchester University and Milburn Research Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University. His books include Indian Sufism since the Seventeenth Century: Saints, Books and Empires in the Muslim Deccan (Routledge, 2006; paperback 2009); Religion, Language and Power (co-edited with Mary Searle-Chatterjee, Routledge, 2008); and Islam and the Army in Colonial India: Sepoy Religion in the Service of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2009). He has written widely on the history of printing, most recently in "Journeymen, Middlemen: Trans-Culture, Travel and Technology in the Origins of Muslim Printing", International Journal of Middle East Studies 41, 2 (2009) and "Stones from Bavaria: Iranian Lithography in its Global Contexts", Iranian Studies (forthcoming).
Discussant
Name: 
Abbas Amanat
Institutional Affiliation : 
Yale
Academic Bio : 
Abbas Amanat received his B.A. from Tehran University in 1971 and D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1981. His principal publications include Pivot of the Universe: Nasir al-Din Shah and the Iranian Monarchy, 1831-1896 (1997) and Resurrection and Renewal: the Making of the Babi Movement in Iran, 1844-1850 (1989). He is the editor of Cities and Trade: Consul Abbott on the Economy and Society of Iran (1983), Crowning Anguish: Memoirs of a Persian Princess from the Harem to Modernity (1995) and coeditor of Imagining the End: Visions of Apocalypse from Ancient Middle East to Modern America (2002); Shari’a: Islamic Law in the Contemporary Context (2007); and U.S.-Middle East Historical Encounters: A Critical Survey (2007). He also edited The United States and the Middle East: Diplomatic and Economic Relations in Historical Perspective (2000) and co-edited The United States and the Middle East: Cultural Encounters (2002) and Apocalypse and Violence (2004). Currently he is writing In Search of Modern Iran: Authority, Nationhood and Culture (1501-2001), a survey of Iranian history (Yale, 2008); a study of toleration and nonconformity in the Persianate world, a biography of the Babi leader and poet Fatima Baraghani Qurrat al-'Ayn (Tahirah) and a documentary history of Qajar Iran (in Persian)
First Presenter
Name: 
Nile Green
Institutional Affiliation : 
UCLA
Academic Bio : 
see above
Concise Paper Title : 
Printing Persian in Saint Petersburg: Eurasian Networks of Evangelical Bible Production, c.1815-30
Paper Abstract (maximum of 400 words) : 
This paper reconstructs the transnational operation of translation and printing, scripture and technology, that surrounded the landmark publication of the Saint Petersburg Persian New Testament of 1815. Drawing on the archives of the British and Foreign Bible Society, the paper charts the role of industrialized evangelicalism in nurturing Persian printing practices in the years immediately prior to the beginning of Persian printing in Iran itself in 1817. The paper asks whether Leslie Howsam’s thesis in Cheap Bibles (Cambridge, 2002) that the Bible Society caused a revolution in the nineteenth century British book trade as a whole through its industrialization of Bible production can be expanded to the Bible’s role in the emergence of Persian printing. Here the larger aim is to prioritize the material and transnational dimensions of Persian book production, a sphere which has been curiously neglected in the history of Iranian printing. By focusing on the circulation of materials, machines and trained personnel between London, St Petersburg and Tabriz, the paper positions the birth of Iranian printing in the global transactions that enabled it. By exploring the practical issues of printing presses, type, print-runs, translation and distribution mechanisms for the Saint Petersburg Persian Testament, the paper sheds light on the role of the paradoxical modernity of industrialized Evangelicalism in the birth of Persian printing.
Second Presenter
Name: 
Arash Khazeni
Institutional Affiliation : 
Claremont McKenna College
Academic Bio : 
Arash Khazeni was born in Tehran, Iran. He earned a Ph.D. in Modern Middle Eastern History from Yale University (2005) and is assistant professor of history at Claremont McKenna College. His research is focused on the Islamic World since 1500, with an emphasis on the social, cultural, and environmental history of Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Eurasia. He has conducted archival research in Iran and the United Kingdom and is the author of the monograph Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran (University of Washington Press, forthcoming 2009). He is currently working on an environmental history of the city of Balkh and the steppes of Central Eurasia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Concise Paper Title : 
“Land of the Rising Sun”: Printed Geography and Natural History in Nineteenth-Century Iran
Paper Abstract (maximum of 400 words) : 
During the nineteenth century, the Qajar Dynasty (1785-1925) became increasingly engaged in efforts at the exploration, representation, and settlement of Iran’s imperial frontiers. The settlement of these frontiers was based on newfound knowledge about the lands, peoples, cultures, flora and fauna to be found at the edges of empire. Nineteenth-century Persian geographical and ethnographic projects surveyed and took measure of Iran’s untamed frontier regions, marking the encounter between imperialism and the natural world. These surveys were printed in lithographed (chap sangi) texts, including geographical histories, gazetteers, and travel narratives, which described peoples and places on the frontiers of Iran, including the unsettled eastern borderlands with Afghanistan and the steppes of Central Eurasia. Among the most important nineteenth-century sources on the geography of Qajar Iran and its borderlands is Muhammad Hasan Khan Sani’ al-Dawla I‘timad al-Saltana’s 1400 page lithographed geographical history of the eastern frontier province of Khurasan, Matla‘ al-Shams, Tarikh-i Arz-i Aqdas va Mashhad-i Muqaddas, dar Tarikh va Jughrafiya-yi Mashruh-i Balad va Imakan-i Khurasan (“The Land of the Rising Sun: History of the Sacred Land and Sacred City of Mashhad, On the Known History and Geography of the Lands of Khurasan”). I‘timad al-Saltana (1843-1896) was a graduate of the Qajar imperial school Dar al-Funun (“House of Crafts”) and Nasir al-Din Shah’s “dragoman in royal attendance” and Minister of Publications. Printed between 1882 and 1884 to commemorate Nasir al-Din Shah’s second pilgrimage to the Shia shrine city of Mashhad. Matla‘ al-Shams is an encyclopedic geographical history of the physical and built environment in the eastern province of Khurasan, detailing its rivers, mountains, deserts, mines, cities, villages, monuments, inscriptions, roads, caravanserais, mosques, and tombs. Through a reading of the Qajar frontier narrative Matla‘ al-Shams, this paper examines the role of lithographed texts of geography and natural history in mapping the imperial borderlands of nineteenth-century Iran.
Thid Presenter
Name: 
Farzin Vejdani
Institutional Affiliation : 
University of Arizona
Academic Bio : 
Farzin Vejdani received his Ph.D. in history from Yale University (2009). He is an assistant professor of modern Iranian history at the University of Arizona. His research interests include Turco-Iranian cultural relations, Iranian nationalist historiography, and the development of language policy and folklore studies in late Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran.
Concise Paper Title : 
Provincial Print Culture in late nineteenth and early twentieth century Iran
Paper Abstract (maximum of 400 words) : 
Histories of nineteenth and early twentieth century Persian printing in Iran have tended to focus on activities in the capital Tehran and to a lesser extent Tabriz. The origins and development of other provincial print centers such as Isfahan, Kirman, Rasht, Yazd and Mashhad remains somewhat obscure. With the advent of the constitutional revolution, provincial cities became major hubs for the publication of newspapers, periodicals and books. The advent of the Pahlavi regime witnessed the expansion of the secular educational system and the increased use of new print technologies, both developments that led to a more geographically diverse set of participants in the Iranian public sphere. This paper attempts to move away from a Tehran-centered reading of the history of Iranian print culture by examining provincial patrons, producers and consumers of Persian print and their location within regional networks of print circulation beyond the purview of the nation-state.
Fourth Presenter
Name: 
n/a
Academic Bio : 
n/a
Concise Paper Title : 
n/a
Paper Abstract (maximum of 400 words) : 
n/a

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