Empire and statehood in the Russo-Iranian encounter : 1880's to 1914

Abstract

This thesis examines the influence of the Russian Empire on centralized state authority in Iran in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It analyzes how Russian policies in Iran became effective and how they were shaped by mediating groups as well as by local resistance. I argue that the Russian Empire pursued its goals in Iran to an important extent by relying on an alliance with the Qajars, the dynasty ruling Iran throughout the nineteenth century. On different levels, Russian officials were therefore drawn into conflicts over the quality and structure of Qajar authority and had a formidable influence on its development. By demonstrating the interrelatedness of processes of imperial expansion and state building in Russia and Iran, as well as by drawing extensive comparisons between them, the thesis aims to contribute to a larger recontextualization of Russian history within a Eurasian framework. The first chapter examines the relations between the Russian and the Iranian monarchies and the cultural transformation, especially the militarization, of Iranian monarchical power under Russian influence. A second chaper focuses on the emergence of an Iranian state territory, demonstrating how the demarcation of international borders between Russia and Iran in Central Asia was connected to changes in the relationship between tribal nomads and sedentary states. The third chapter then concentrates on the turbulent urban politics of Tabriz to analyze the Russian attempt to use and at the same time limit Iranian state sovereignty through a system of consulates and trade privileges for Russian subjects. Finally, the last chapter studies the role of Caucasian revolutionaries in the Iranian Constitutional Movement (1905/1911), who transposed political practices and goals shaped by resistance to Russian colonial rule into an Iranian setting.