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Kirman and the Qajar Empire

Despite its apparently peripheral location in the Qajar Empire, Kirman was fre-
quently found at the center of developments reshaping Iran in the 19th century.
Over the Qajar period the region saw significant changes, as competition among
Kirmani families rapidly developed commercial cotton and opium production and
a world-renowned carpet weaving industry, as well as giving strength to radical
modernist and nationalist agitation in the years leading up to the 1906 Constitu-
tional Revolution.
Kirman and the Qajar Empire explores how these Kirmani local elites medi-
ated political, economic, and social change in their community during a signifi-
cant transitional period in Iran’s history, from the rise of the Qajar Empire to
World War I. It departs from the prevailing center–periphery models of economic
integration and Qajar provincial history, engaging with key questions over how
Iranians participated in reshaping their communities in the context of imperialism
and growing transnational connections. With rarely utilized local historical and
geographical writings, as well as a range of narrative and archival sources, this
book provides new insight into the impact of household factionalism and estate
building over four generations in the Kirman region. As well as offering the first
academic monograph on modern Kirman, it is also an important case study in
local dimensions of modernity.
This book will be of interest to students and scholars of Iranian studies and
Iranian history, as well as general Middle East studies.

James M. Gustafson is Assistant Professor of History at Indiana State Univer-

sity, specializing in the social and economic history of the modern Middle East
and Central Asia.
Iranian Studies
Edited by Homa Katouzian, University of Oxford and
Mohamad Tavakoli, University of Toronto

Since 1967 the International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS) has been a lead-
ing learned society for the advancement of new approaches in the study of Ira-
nian society, history, culture, and literature. The new ISIS Iranian Studies series
published by Routledge will provide a venue for the publication of original and
innovative scholarly works in all areas of Iranian and Persianate Studies.

1 Journalism in Iran 6 The Politics of Iranian Cinema

From mission to profession Film and society in the Islamic
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Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad
2 Sadeq Hedayat
His work and his wondrous world 7 Continuity in Iranian Identity
Edited by Homa Katouzian Resilience of a cultural heritage
Fereshteh Davaran
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and the literary origins of the analysis
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Edited by Stephanie Cronin The Qashqa’i in an era of change
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Exploring Baron Rosen’s archives 25 The Revolutionary Guards in
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Elites and shifting relations
18 Culture and Cultural Politics Bayram Sinkaya
under Reza Shah
The Pahlavi state, new bourgeoisie 26 Kirman and the Qajar Empire
and the creation of a modern Local dimensions of modernity
society in Iran in Iran, 1794–1914
Bianca Devos and Christoph Werner James M. Gustafson

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International relations and social of Iran
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Kamran Matin Fariba Adelkhah
This page intentionally left blank
Kirman and the Qajar
Empire
Local dimensions of modernity
in Iran, 1794–1914

James M. Gustafson
First published 2016
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2016 James M. Gustafson
The right of James M. Gustafson to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gustafson, James M.
Kirman and the Qajar Empire : local dimensions of modernity in Iran,
1794–1914 / James M. Gustafson.
pages cm. — (Iranian Studies)
1. Kirman (Iran)—History. 2. Kirman (Iran)—Politics and
government. 3. Economic development—Iran—Kirman (Iran)
4. Iran—History—Qajar dynasty, 1794–1925. I. Title.
DS325.K4G87 2016
955ʹ.82—dc23
2015003318
ISBN: 978-1-138-91456-8 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-69070-4 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Roman

by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents

List of illustrations x
Acknowledgments xi
Note on transliteration xii

Introduction: the politics of households in Qajar Kirman 1

Modernity and agency in Qajar Iran 6
The politics of households in Qajar Kirman 8
Analyzing Kirman’s household networks and their estates:
a note on the sources 12
An outline of the present study 16
Notes 18

PART I
Kirman and the politics of empire 23

1 Kirman and the Qajar Empire 25

A view from across the desert: geography and history in Kirman 26
Reconfiguring urban politics 31
The Ibrahimi family: reconstruction and renewal 33
Shaykhi–mutasharʿi sectarianism 35
Patterns of landownership and rural administration 37
The Mahallati revolt: networks of social power and the state 41
Conclusion 44
Notes 45

2 Local historiography and the politics of the Great Game 49

The quest for knowledge in the Great Game 51
Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri-Kirmani and his works 54
The Qajars, the British, and their local intermediaries 58
Conclusion 63
Notes 64
viii Contents
PART II
A regional political economy 67

3 Household networks and rural integration 69

Patterns of landownership in Qajar Kirman 72
Rural development and the commercialization of agriculture 75
The Vakil al-Mulki estate 78
The Kalantari estate in Sirjan 79
Rafsanjan: land investment and Shaykhi–mutasharʿi factionalism 81
The sale of crown lands 83
Rural integration and the fate of the Aqayan and tribal elites 84
Conclusion 86
Notes 87

4 From cotton to carpets: consolidating a regional economy 92

Structure and agency: global forces and local transformations 95
Weaving and craft production in Kirman 101
Cotton to carpets: Kirmani elites and the carpet boom 103
Conclusion 108
Notes 108

PART III
Patrimonialism and social change 113

5 Contesting urban patrimonialism 115

Estate building and the normative foundations of social power 116
Kirman’s rural transformation 118
The question of “tribalism” 121
Carpet capitalism, class, and labor 124
Gender and modernism 130
Conclusion 133
Notes 133

6 The household politics of revolution 137

The Ahmadi household and intellectual radicalism in Kirman 138
The 1905 Shaykhi–mutasharʿi conflicts 141
The Constitutional Revolution in Kirman 147
Containing the revolution: conflicts over the local anjumans 151
Conclusion 154
Notes 155
 Contents ix
Conclusion: mediating modernity in Kirman 158
Notes 163

Appendix: genealogical charts 164

Bibliography 170
Index 179
List of illustrations

Figures
1.1 Kirman City in the late 19th century 27
2.1 Sketch of southern Persia 51
2.2 Percy and Ella Sykes and ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farman Farma 60
4.1 Sketch showing caravan routes 95
A.1 The Ibrahimi household 165
A.2 The Vaziri household 166
A.3 The Vakil al-Mulk household 167
A.4 The Bihzadi household 168
A.5 The Ahmadi household 169

Table
6.1 Kirman’s representatives to the first Majlis-i Shawra-yi Milli,
1906–08 150
Acknowledgments

I wish to express my gratitude to the many people who offered their time, their
advice, and their support over the five years that went into writing this book. My
colleagues and friends at the University of Washington and Indiana State Univer-
sity, in particular, have bravely endured years of conversations about 19th cen-
tury opium farmers and tax collectors and offered critical feedback from the
perspective of their own areas of expertise as historians. Joanna deGroot, Florian
Schwarz, Shaun Lopez, Joel Walker, Christine Nölle-Karimi, Rudi Matthee, John
Gurney, and Lyman Stebbins all generously offered significant, formative input
on this manuscript during its cycles of deconstruction and rebirth. I am immensely
grateful for the support of this community of friends and colleagues.
I would also like to gratefully acknowledge the Iran Cultural Heritage Founda-
tion, the Roshan Cultural Heritage Institute, a University of Washington Presi-
dential Dissertation Fellowship, and a University Research Committee grant from
Indiana State University in supporting critical research and travel for the prepara-
tion of this book. A visiting professorship at the Institute for Iranian Studies at the
Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna in 2013 was also essential to completing
the final stages of this manuscript. Invitations to share my research and collaborate
with faculty and students at Yale University, Indiana University, the University of
Washington, and Portland State University provided opportunities to reflect on
and sharpen the larger underlying questions behind this work. Where there are
strengths in this book, they are from the collective guidance of this community.
My wife, Melissa Gustafson, has shown enormous patience, sticking with me
from Chicago to Seattle to Terre Haute, Indiana. In addition to her love, support,
and encouragement, she has also acted as my own personal librarian, responding
to my inane questions day and night. I dedicate this book to Melissa and our two
children, Richie and Sam, who were there with me through it all.
Finally, I wish to dedicate this book to the late Dr. Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani-
Parizi. A prominent historian of Iran, and a native of Kirman, Dr. Bastani-Parizi
dedicated his life to the study of his home province and produced numerous stud-
ies, editions, and annotations of texts critical to the completion of this book. I
dedicate this modest contribution to the historiography of Kirman to his memory.
Note on transliteration

Transliteration of Persian in this work follows the method utilized in the Cam-
bridge History of Iran with some modifications. Diacritical marks have been
omitted for the sake of clarity for the reader. The diphthongs “au” and “ai” have
been transliterated “aw” and “ay” to better reflect pronunciation. Names and ter-
minology commonly known in English have been left in their familiar forms (e.g.,
“Tehran” instead of “Tihran”), while terms common both to Arabic and Persian
have been transliterated to reflect Persian orthography (e.g., vaqf instead of waqf ).
Introduction
The politics of households in
Qajar Kirman

In the summer of 1905, a series of factional riots shook the southern Iranian city
of Kirman. The violence began in July when a relative of the town’s leading Shiʿi
cleric led a mob through the Bazar-i Shah quarter of the city wielding sticks,
clubs, and rifles. Their objective was to seize the Bazar-i Shah mosque belonging
to the local Shaykhi community, adherents to a metaphysical spiritual movement
inspired by the teachings of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsaʾi (d. 1826). After the group
took control of the Bazar-i Shah mosque, they installed a new mutasharʿi (“juris-
tic” or so-called orthodox) Shiʿi preacher and occupied the grounds to physi-
cally prevent Shaykhis from entering. The mob then turned and made its way to
lay siege to the home of the Shaykhi spiritual leader, Hajj Muhammad Rahim,
provoking a conflict with provincial troops outside the man’s home in which at
least forty people were killed.1 These tensions held through the summer and fall
of 1905, punctuated by a number of violent confrontations between Kirman’s
mutasharʿi and Shaykhi communities, including attacks on prominent Shiʿis who
dared to intervene on behalf of the provincial government.2 Although commonly
understood as a sectarian conflict between two mutually hostile religious groups,
this conflict began over the mundane issue of administrative appointments when
a new Shaykhi administration came to power by purchasing the office of pro-
vincial vazir from the Qajar court. This was but one episode in a long, ongoing
factional competition between two sets of families in Kirman over wealth, power,
and prestige.
In the midst of this mutasharʿi–Shaykhi “war” in Kirman, as it has become
known, an incident took place which is frequently recalled as a symbolic turning
point in Qajar history.3 Kirman’s governor took the unprecedented step of arrest-
ing the town’s leading cleric, Mirza Muhammad Riza Mujtahid, whose cousin led
the seizure of the Bazar-i Shah mosque, and then inflicted the bastinado on him
for his role in inciting this unrest. The violent treatment of a prominent member
of the Shiʿi ʿulamaʾ inflamed tensions with the Qajar monarchy (1795–1925) and
proved to be a key event bringing together the modernist-clerical alliance piv-
otal in Iran’s Constitutional Revolution (1906–11) the following year.4 Families
like the Ahmadis, an important mercantile, clerical, and landowning family in
the province, had deep connections to this revolution. Not only did they support
a community of radical modernist and nationalist thinkers in Kirman like Mirza
2 Introduction
Aqa Khan Kirmani, Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, and Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi, they
were also pivotal in curtailing the reach of revolutionary institutions after 1906,
like the provincial councils (anjumans) that threatened to further erode the power
of local families over administration and tax collection. Within just a few years,
when revolutionary councils were established to take control over local admin-
istration, however, the Ahmadis and other local families led the way in opposing
and marginalizing them.
Frequently the dynamics of change in regional settings far from the Qajar court
in Tehran were in fact central to shaping developments like the successes and
failures of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and the acceleration of interna-
tional trade and encroachment of British and Russian imperialism that preceded
it. These stories are too often told from the outside-in, top-down, and center-out
perspectives of Qajar chroniclers and European administrators. Given the abun-
dance of local histories, geographies, travelogues, consular works, and other such
documents produced in local and regional settings, we have a set of alternate
perspectives available on the shape of these developments beyond the orbit of
Tehran. Throughout Iran, the Qajars were but one of several outside forces whose
influence was shaped and repurposed by powerful local families during this criti-
cal transitional period in modern world history. This book will explore the dynam-
ics of political, economic, and social change in one such community as a means to
explore the local dimensions of modernity in Iran and explore the history of Qajar
Iran without the Qajars at the center.
***
There is a growing interest in local and regional histories throughout the Mid-
dle East, Central Asia, and the greater Indian Ocean world, decentering narratives
away from capitals of imperial power and exploring the great variety of local
experiences. We are also discovering that these regional developments had a pro-
found influence on changes affecting imperial centers, as in the aforementioned
1905 Shaykhi–mutasharʿi conflicts in Kirman. These local and regional histo-
ries make up a complex web of interconnected experiences which were, in many
ways, far more influential than the politics of empire in reshaping 19th century
societies from the Ottoman world to South Asia. Whereas the Kirman region was
a remote province on the margins of empire in Tehran-centric views of Qajar Iran,
it possessed its own unique set of circumstances and experiences within the con-
text of broader global transformations extending far beyond its relationship with
the Qajar Empire. Over the course of the 19th century, local merchants expanded
their networks of trade through the Persian Gulf as they found markets for locally
produced cotton, wool, and textiles in Bombay and Calcutta. With the explosion
of commercial opium and carpet production, these networks expanded through
middlemen as far as China and England. British, Russian, and Qajar competition
in Central Asia in the “Great Game” brought new patterns of political interaction
to the region, in which the Qajars appear in local sources as but one of several
external powers with whom Kirmani elites interacted. By the turn of the 20th
century, Kirmani elites had truly global networks of exchange, not only through
 Introduction 3
politics and trade, but through engagement with intellectual and cultural currents
as well. A radical intellectual community, born out of Kirman’s elite households
and inspired by the legacy of the prominent local radical Mirza Aqa Khan Kir-
mani, played a leading role in advocating constitutional limits to Qajar patrimoni-
alism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
There is a troubling tendency to compartmentalize the history of Iran more
generally within the framework of a global “periphery.” This is partially a legacy
of Immanuel Wallerstein’s famous World-Systems Theory paradigm, describ-
ing the development of capitalism as a global structural transformation centered
on Europe.5 Wallerstein positions regions like Iran, the Middle East, the Indian
Ocean world, and Africa as a global periphery caught in the orbit of a Western
“core,” placing Euro-American industrialists, merchants, and middlemen as the
primary agents of change, with non-Western societies reshaped from the outside-
in as objects of mercantile and imperial competition. Recent scholarship on Asian
commerce has demonstrated the need to recognize the activities of non-Europeans
in shaping the development of global capitalism and, in turn, its broader social
and cultural effects.6 In Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from
1500 to the Revolution, John Foran traced Iranian social history within the World-
Systems Theory paradigm, with Iran moving from an “external” to a “peripheral”
position and experiencing dependent development through external pressures.7
Foran asks important questions about the relationship between global structural
patterns and local social transformations with the rise of capitalism but at the same
time reinforces the assumption that Iranians were objects, rather than agents, of
change.
In turn, local histories are too often provincialized and placed in the service of
state-centered narratives of change which diminish a much wider range of tran-
sregional and global connections. This is particularly an issue in the case of Qajar
Iran, in which the state was a weak, ineffective façade and ultimately only one
of several external poles of power from the perspective of a place like Kirman.
Vanessa Martin described the politics of empire in 19th century Iran as “the Qajar
pact,” a careful negotiation of power between the Qajar court and the various
communities making up its periphery as provincial holdings.8 Rudi Matthee has
discussed a similar dynamic in Safavid times, in which politics involved a “bar-
gaining process in which central power and domination confronted local clout
and peripheral recalcitrance.”9 When combined with the tendency to view Iran as
a periphery in global terms, as Heidi Walcher noted in her study on Qajar Isfahan,
local histories are further marginalized as the “periphery of the periphery.”10
An alternate set of viewpoints are available in the field of local historiogra-
phy and geographical writing which flourished throughout Qajar Iran. These nar-
ratives reveal the great variety and distinctive character of regions under Qajar
rule. Local historians relate the story of their communities with great pride of
place, each possessing a unique sense of locality built over centuries of interac-
tion between physical environment and human activity. The closely related field
of local geographical writing, as well as travelogues and other such texts, pres-
ent prominent local elites, merchants, and administrators as part of the cultural
4 Introduction
landscape of their communities, not unlike their mosques, or mountains, or fine
pomegranates. Each community possessed its own colorful blend of poets and
clerics; landowners and provincial administrators; mystics and warriors. These
individuals were understood as prominent players in their societies and involved
in shaping change during this important transitional period. While shaped by
influences that were intensely local, these developments were also part of the
changing pattern of relations between Kirman and the wider world, which often
had very little to do with the Qajar state or European commerce.
In dealing with local dimensions of change, it is necessary to consider the influ-
ence of local social and cultural institutions like the elite patrilinear household,
the basic structural feature of local societies involved in mediating change and
shaping it locally. Patrilinear households were essentially locally rooted networks
of social power, built around relationships of power and prestige among promi-
nent local individuals. Kirman, like other Iranian communities under Qajar rule,
was dominated not by the state but by a handful of these prominent local house-
hold networks. Such families dominated Kirman throughout the Qajar period in
the absence of direct control by the court, skillfully adapting to changing circum-
stances and reproducing the power of their households from generation to genera-
tion. Throughout Kirman’s history under Qajar rule, a group of these households
were active in adapting to and shaping changes in their community, and did so in
an environment of intense factionalism.
Factionalism not only drove competition between local households, but was
also routinely manifested in unrest or outright violence. Indeed, the 1905 fac-
tional violence in Kirman was related to a long-standing conflict in the province
between two groups of Shaykhi and mutasharʿi households in Kirman City, who
were locked in a competition for resources.11 The initial riots were set off by the
rather mundane issue of administrative appointments. Kirman’s newly appointed
governor, Rukn al-Dawla, had taken up the increasingly common practice of
selling off administrative posts to the highest bidder. A member of the Ibrahimi
family, the heads of the local Shaykhi community, bought the office of deputy
governor (nayib al-hukuma) and used this position to appoint members of his own
family to various posts in the provincial government. This directly challenged the
power and prestige of Kirman’s mutasharʿi establishment. The Vakil al-Mulkis,
who had long dominated the provincial administration, appealed for support from
Kirman’s other leading mutasharʿi elites. Mirza Muhammad Riza Mujtahid, the
cleric arrested and beaten by the provincial government after his cousin seized
the Bazar-i Shah mosque, came from the Ahmadi family. The Ahmadis came to
prominence as landowners, making a fortune on cash cropping and international
trade, before producing Kirman’s leading religious scholars for the past three gen-
erations and holding substantial influence over the local population. Given the
Ahmadis’ centrality to the Shiʿi community, and the Ibrahimis’ Shaykhi affili-
ations, this political conflict over administrative posts ostensibly took the form
of religious sectarianism, engulfing the provincial community at large once they
called their networks of supporters to the streets. It is striking that early in the
20th century, the intense factionalism of prominent families could transform a
 Introduction 5
simple matter of administrative appointments into widespread violence spilling
far beyond its frontiers.
This study will address precisely the question of how provincial elites partici-
pated as agents of change in reshaping their communities in the Qajar period by
mediating political, economic, and social change in the context of intense fac-
tionalism and growing transnational connections. This small core of urban elite
families remained powerful intermediaries between their community and the
wider world into the 20th century, and actively shaped a series of local transfor-
mations through their estate-building practices in the context of broader global
developments and laid the foundations for a more assertive top-down transforma-
tion of Iranian society under the Pahlavi monarchy (1925–79). This process is
commonly termed the beginnings of a complicated process of “modernization”
in Iran, in which outside forces transformed and reshaped Iran into a component
of an emerging world system. Little has yet to be said, however, on the influence
Iranians themselves had in reshaping the world around them, particularly outside
of the center of Qajar power in Tehran.
A central place must be given to understanding how the normative foundations
of elite society, in becoming “modern” in its own particular way, articulated and
repurposed by elites, influenced the shape of newly emerging patterns of social,
political, economic, and cultural life alongside significant areas of actively con-
structed continuities. To maintain and reproduce social power required attention
not only to changing economic circumstances, in terms of both opportunities and
challenges, but also to maintaining the sociocultural standing of the family col-
lective and its estate. This entailed maintaining connections with Qajar appointees
to the provincial administration, regional networks of religious scholars, inter-
regional trade networks, and expatriate scholarly communities, while at the same
time maintaining the social power of their families locally through the adaptation
of their estates economically and socioculturally.12 Elite families, in a highly fac-
tionalized environment, were compelled to adapt to ever-changing circumstances
to maintain and reproduce their social power from generation to generation.
The dynamic relationship between global forces and local mediation is perhaps
nowhere more significant, nor more readily viewed, than in the survival and adap-
tation of the politics of households, a long-standing institution of social power in
the Islamic world at the heart of Iran’s modern transformation.13
This work will contribute directly not only to our understanding of social and
economic change in Qajar Iran, but also to the growing debate over the develop-
ment of global capitalism and the variety of local, contingent forms of modernity
in the non-West. This builds on the assumption, long held in sociological studies
of modernity, that social and cultural change emanates from underlying economic
transformations, while also recognizing the role of human agency in shaping those
changes in tension with the social and cultural norms they act upon. In studies of
Qajar Iran, it was long held that a dual-class system emerged in the 19th century,
highlighted by the rise of a new class of “big merchants” connected intensely
to global networks while standing aloof from their own societies.14 Scholars of
the late Ottoman Empire have long recognized the influence of local players and
6 Introduction
power structures in regional change in the 18th and 19th centuries. Most notably,
Beshara Doumani demonstrated in his groundbreaking work on Palestine how
local merchants fostered new patterns of production and exchange that bound
together regional economies through interpersonal networks.15 Michael Meeker,
too, has detailed the influence of Ottoman-era provincial elites, tied to the center
of imperial power, in the creation of “Turkish modernity” by skillfully adapting to
new forms of political life during critical transformative periods.16 In the Indian
Ocean region, too, there is a thriving field of study detailing how non-European
merchants carved out niches in the global capitalist system and in many cases
thrived, despite the impression that these communities at large were subordinate
and peripheral in the Eurocentric world system.17
This study will demonstrate, in the case of Kirman, that it was largely the
same group of elite households, engaged in landowning, administration, and con-
trol over religious institutions, that led the transformation of their communities
through the nature of their estate-building strategies in competition with other
elite households. This engages the discussion prompted by scholars of the Otto-
man and Indian Ocean worlds in exploring the entirety of the mediating influence
of local elite households in regional transformations. Rather than placing Kir-
man’s history in the framework of an expanding Eurocentric narrative of moder-
nity, this work will be concerned with the question of how Iranians shaped the
modern world for themselves at the level of a discrete community.

Modernity and agency in Qajar Iran

The terms “modern” and “modernity” are a central feature of world historiog-
raphy, covering a wide variety of developments even as there is still no com-
monly accepted definition of what these terms mean. Many historians now reject
this terminology as code for “Western” or “European,” reinforcing a Eurocentric
view of world history and denying the agency of non-Western subjects in shap-
ing change in their communities. Abandoning the term “modern” is tempting, in
that it is applied in such haphazard ways, often without interrogation, and covers
such an impossibly broad array of things as to become a meaningless abstraction.
Abandoning the term “modernity” for non-Western history would only reinforce
this implicit link in much scholarship between the modern and Western. Instead,
historians have sought to salvage this term through a search for “multiple moder-
nities,” each a part of a larger interconnected whole, with local contingent forms
shaping how becoming modern develops in various contexts.18 As a study in the
local dimensions of modernity in Iran, this book will engage with a long-ongoing
debate over how we might fruitfully apply this term to non-Western history.
Attempting to pin modernity down to one or another individual thing runs
counter to the tendency in historical studies to embrace complexity in search of
understanding, rather than constructing universal theories that can explain change
independently of context. Modernity is best understood as a complex of interre-
lated, global changes emanating from global economic integration, neither identi-
cal to European hegemony nor an objective entity with its own will or agency. The
 Introduction 7
growing interconnectivity of the global economy, the growth of transnational net-
works, cross-cultural exchange, and migration clearly form the backdrop of myr-
iad other changes taking place simultaneously and globally—including Iran—but
in a striking variety of forms all dependent upon one another. It is still common
to hear that “modernity struck Iran”19 or that the central dynamic of Iranian social
and cultural history in the past two centuries is a complicated engagement with
modernity as an external, often malignant, entity.20 In this study, rather than seek-
ing Iran within a Eurocentric story of modernity, we will be seeking modernity
within the activities of Iranians as participants in a broader, global transformation.
When combined with the outside-in, top-down, and center-out approach, seek-
ing modernity in Qajar Iran has reinforced an exaggerated focus on Tehran, the
Qajar court, and transnational networks of modernist elites. The literary and cul-
tural production of elites tied to these groups is allowed, by default, to stand in
for Iranian “national” attitudes.21 Addressing this issue requires broadening the
scope of our analysis to consider the contributions of a wide range of participants
in reshaping their communities beyond Tehran. This also presents an opportunity
to address and reconsider some of the most basic assumptions that have shaped
the field of Qajar studies in this way.
First of all, Qajar Iran was not a nation-state, nor was it a nation-state in its
infancy. The Qajars ruled a vast, loosely integrated collection of territories with
diverse, multi-ethnic, and multiconfessional populations through an imperial sys-
tem. There was certainly a growing community of nationalists among the elite
by the late 19th century that viewed themselves as “Iranians,” united by a com-
mon culture and heritage.22 The natural existence of the nation, however, was by
no means a widespread assumption, nor was it particularly salient as a political
identity even among Iranian elites or in shaping the normative basis of the Qajar
imperial system. It must be remembered that nationalism has a history and cannot
be projected back unproblematically into historical contexts where it was not a
meaningful political concept.23
By extension, it is necessary to consider the varied experiences of regional
communities and integrate those into the historiography of Qajar Iran. The
Qajars directly controlled an area extending no farther than the gates of Tehran
in any meaningful sense, and throughout the rest of their domain they held power
through a delicate negotiation of power.24 As with their predecessors, the Qajars
relied heavily on maintaining relationships with local elites who possessed local
knowledge, connections, and prestige to exercise power in the provinces. Marshall
Hodgson termed this the “aʿyan-amir system of social power,” wherein locally
rooted aʿyan (notables or elites) regulated social and political life in provincial
cities with minimal interference from the state, in negotiation with a small mili-
tary entourage headed by an amir (military appointee).25 This system provided a
degree of stability to the social, cultural, and political life in provincial communi-
ties through the dizzying rise and fall of often distant, poorly integrated dynastic
states. In Qajar Iran, the state itself functioned as a family enterprise, with net-
works of power emanating from the center organized around the Qajar royal fam-
ily and encountering local traditions of power in their engagement with provincial
8 Introduction
communities.26 The role of the state in provincial administration was restricted
primarily to the collection of taxes and the maintenance of basic order, and even
these modest goals relied almost entirely on the intermediacy of local elites.
Several recent studies have signaled a beginning in this shift in perspective,
viewing the politics of the Qajar Empire through the experiences of communi-
ties beyond Tehran. Christoph Werner’s An Iranian Town in Transition surveys
in detail changes in social, economic, and cultural institutions among the elites
of Tabriz from the mid-18th to mid-19th centuries, demonstrating, among other
things, the continuity of local history across dynastic boundaries.27 The history
of Qajar Isfahan, told through Heidi Walcher’s biographical sketch of Prince-
Governor Zill al-Sultan and his engagement with the Qajar court, British consular
officials, and Christian missionaries, similarly demonstrated the intensely local
nature of power and the importance of seeing the Qajars as one of several external
poles of power from the perspective of provincial communities.28 Several studies
on tribal communities have affirmed the usefulness of looking at the Qajar Empire
from the “margins.” Notably, the recent study of the Bakhtiyari tribe by Arash
Khazeni showed that much could be learned about the Qajar imperial project from
the experience of tribal groups and their navigation of various types of political
projects affecting their political relationship with the center.29 While this is not a
book about the Qajars but about a regional community for whom the Qajars were
one of several external reference points, the insights of these scholars in turn pro-
vide insights into considering what was “Qajar” about Qajar Kirman.
Despite the momentum toward a shift in the historiography of Qajar Iran, many
studies on social and economic history still commonly begin with the view of Iran
as a unified category of analysis possessing a common national culture emanating
from Tehran, a unified economy, and many other characteristics of the “mod-
ern” nation-state. For instance, Willem Floor’s unique contributions to the field of
Qajar studies through an oeuvre of research on social and economic institutions in
Qajar Iran, while painstakingly and minutely detailed in their empirical founda-
tions, are based on the assumption of Qajar Iran, its economy, social institutions,
and the like being, in themselves, suitable unified categories of analysis.30 Indeed,
even the studies on provincial and pastoral-nomadic, or tribal, history often give
very little context on social power beyond the center, or how it is exercised. This
book will suggest an alternative approach to integrating the varied experiences in
the social and economic history of provincial communities in the Qajar Empire
beyond simply a center–periphery approach, but through the dynamics of social
power, elite competition, and estate building. Indeed, the skillful adaptation by
elite families to changing circumstances, which were partially of their own mak-
ing, is a key feature of the social and economic history of the Qajar period and
central to how each community became modern in its own distinct way.

The politics of households in Qajar Kirman

While the nature of Qajar politics, and the delicate negotiation of power it entailed
in encounters with local elites, has been theorized from the perspective of the
 Introduction 9
center by Abrahamian, Martin, Sheikholeslami, and others, the immediate context
of the social power of the provincial elite, or aʿyan, has rarely been examined in
detail. In provincial communities, the aʿyan were often drawn from only a small
number of locally rooted households standing at the center of extended patrilinear
kinship groups (khandan, tayifa, or silsila) who were often able to reproduce the
social power of their lineage from generation to generation along common norma-
tive patterns. In Qajar Kirman, a small number of such families maintained their
status as local elites through control over three key areas of social, political, and
cultural life: (a) landholdings, which accumulated in the hands of a small number
of urban families connected to Kirman City over the course of the 19th century;
(b) religious institutions, which involved control over extensive vaqf (religious
endowment) revenues, religious ceremonies, the provision of various social ser-
vices, and opportunities for patronage; and (c) access to stipendiary administra-
tive posts.
What is most common among this group of urban elites is that they were
drawn from a small set of local households and their networks of social power.
Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri-Kirmani, a native of Kirman who produced a local his-
tory and geography of the region in the 1870s, employs the terms ʿaʾila (“fam-
ily” or “household”), khandan (often a unitary or nuclear household), and tayifa
(“tribe”) interchangeably in reference to local elites.31 These describe part or all of
an extended patrilinear kinship group, similar to tribal affiliations. Vaziri uses the
term tayifa, for example, to describe pastoral-nomadic tribal groups and urban-
centered sedentary family networks, as well as numerous shades in between.
As with tribal affiliations, the household is a socially constructed relationship
including a shared identity, and as such is an open and fluid institution. Lead-
ing families, especially those connected to Kirman City, are well documented in
Vaziri’s Geography, catalogued by their eponyms and arranged by their roles as
sociocultural categories. However, Vaziri’s sociocultural categories, like ʿulamaʾ
and administrators, overlap so heavily that they should be conceived more as
functional elements of families and their estates. These categories reflect norms
surrounding the expectations of what elites ought to involve themselves in in the
cultural performance of elite status, at least from the perspective of Vaziri, a mem-
ber of one such urban elite family in Kirman. Monetary wealth appeared to be a
secondary consideration at best. Kirman’s merchants, for instance, are listed last
by Vaziri alongside astrologers and poets. This reinforces the notion that religious
education and provincial administrative posts remained central elements of elite
sociocultural status for Kirmani families, even if these same families were build-
ing their wealth through landownership and commercial activities.
Max Weber identified some key characteristics of elite families which will,
with some significant modification to account for certain aspects of their ana-
logues in Islamicate societies, form the basis of our understanding of the fam-
ily and its estate. In Economy and Society, Weber makes reference to the social
role of the family in reference to Italian city-states, which despite his insistence
on the uniqueness of Christian European civilizational forms, bears great resem-
blance to the provincial elite families at the center of this study. To Weber, kinship
10 Introduction
relations, beyond that of a mother and child, are not simply natural but socially
constructed relationships.32 Thus he conceives of most social groups as essentially
economically determined and the family, in particular, as a “unit of economic
maintenance,” implying “solidarity in dealing with the outside and communism
of property and consumption of everyday goods within.”33 Families, then, in the
Weberian view, are essentially “collective self help” groups, based on a recog-
nized common ancestry, communal handling of property, and solidarity in their
dealings with other social groups.34
The Arabic term ʿaʾila (family), which appears frequently in Persian works,
has been applied to numerous social groups in Islamic societies sharing the basic
features of a patriarchal kinship group, from the nuclear family to an extended
tribal organization.35 There is a growing field of studies on the family in Islamic,
and especially Arab, societies that has moved away from a purely theoretical lens,
which produces an image of the family as a relatively stable institution grounded
in tribal social structures or Islamic legal norms. Margaret Meriwether, in The
Kin Who Count: Family and Society in Ottoman Aleppo, 1770–1840, explored
the dynamics of household organization, marriage, and inheritance with a par-
ticular focus on both women’s studies and the construction of gender categories.36
Ultimately, after breaking with the long-standing academic view of pre-modern
families through their normative characteristics, Meriwether concludes that the
available narrative and legal sources show the family to be an incredibly complex,
porous, and diverse institution that is difficult to pin down either in an ideal form
or in its relationship to a broader community. While this nuanced view is certainly
appropriate, one gets the sense that it was also somewhat unsatisfying to Meri-
wether. Much of the work, in fact, deals with the conversation surrounding gender
that was ultimately playing out in relation to the household and shies away from
an analysis of family structure, its broader networks, or its social significance.
An important part of the social power of the individuals in elite Kirmani society
was their claim to membership in an elite family, bearing the name of a presti-
gious eponym. More than simply blood ties, the elite family was a network of
individuals with claims to a common membership in the institution. This was, of
course, more than a social club. Bonds of kinship tied members together into an
identity group of the most fundamental kind. The focus on elite families in their
capacity as mediators between the provincial community and the wider world
requires a more defined approach to the family that highlights not only its internal
structure, but also its broader social significance. For the purpose of drawing con-
nections between the elite families of Kirman and the process of social change at
the level of a community, elite families will be viewed as collectivities based on
the principle of patrimonial kinship but ultimately connected to their communities
as networks of political, economic, social, and cultural authority.
Households operated much in the way that Michael Mann describes networks
of “social power,” as household networks provided an institutional grid through
which currents of ideological, as well as political, military, and economic power
flowed.37 Rudi Matthee applied a “Mannian approach,” as he called it, to a study
of the interaction of the Safavid court and other networks of authority in early
 Introduction 11
modern Iran when analyzing the silk trade.38 Matthee uprooted the court from
the center of analysis and contextualized its role in the overall political economy
of the Iranian plateau, describing its operation in concrete terms as one of sev-
eral interconnected networks of power. Household networks operated as the basic
framework for the exercise of social power in Iranian provincial communities and
interacted with other such networks of power, be it from the Qajar court and its
local officials, wealthy foreign firms and merchants, or representatives of Euro-
pean powers present in consular offices throughout the empire. Beshara Dou-
mani demonstrated how mercantile networks in Palestine in the late 19th century
helped consolidate a regional political economy by regularizing and institutional-
izing patterns of interaction and exchange.39 Elite household networks, when their
operation is viewed in totality as networks of social power of various interlocking
types, form the intermediate structure between changes in the global context and
their local manifestations. That is, the household network was the structural con-
text in which Iranians shaped a local, contingent form of “modernity” in their own
communities. The evolution of family estates will therefore be the analytical tool
used here to draw this relationship between Kirman’s elite families and broader
social, political, and economic change in the community at large.
Household estates in this work will include not only, strictly speaking, “eco-
nomic” resources held by a family group, but the totality of the resources at their
disposal. Sociocultural resources like authority over religious texts and religious
institutions are difficult to express quantitatively, yet clearly served as important
forms of capital for elite families. Without discarding notions of piety, religious
education should be considered a performative aspect of sociocultural elite sta-
tus, acquired through investment in cultural prestige, and was useful to maintain-
ing the family collective. Likewise, economically significant activities like land
investments and stipendiary administrative posts clearly possessed a symbolic
character that went far beyond their monetary value. Control over endowments,
stipendiary religious posts, and administrative offices tended toward hereditary
control, sometimes for centuries, as in the case of the Kalantari family, who
reportedly held the office of kalantar since the 17th century. The office confirms
and reinforces an individual’s social power, as social power itself was intimately
related to the networks of elite patriarchal families. This explains why a large
number of families adopted a nisba title based on an administrative office. Among
Kirman’s urban elite we find Vaziris, Kalantaris, Munshis, and Mustawfis. It also
helps explain why two of Kirman’s most successful merchants in the 19th cen-
tury (both named Aqa ʿAli and both from Rafsanjan) ended up investing much of
their wealth not in further mercantile activities, but in relatively less financially
enriching activities like landownership, while their descendants took up stipendi-
ary administrative and religious posts. It is therefore important while tracing the
evolution of family estates to recognize the importance of sociocultural resources
as well as, strictly speaking, economic ones.
While the state had little direct reach into the province, and almost nothing
in the way of formal institutions, its presence was nonetheless significant given
the reciprocal relationship that developed between the Qajar court and local elite
12 Introduction
households. Elites nearly monopolized access to Qajar appointees, affirming and
legitimizing their status and prestige. Local elites also aided in legitimizing Qajar
rule given their social and cultural prestige locally as landowners, administra-
tors, ʿulamaʾ, and the like. This would seem to explain why there was a dearth
of autonomous movements in Iranian cities even under the eminently unpopular
Qajars. The “art of not being governed,” as James Scott called it, would hardly
be a beneficial art to these local elites, who drew their prestige and legitimacy in
part from their relationship with the state.40 One of the more important patterns of
interaction with the outside world from the perspective of Kirman was found in
this encounter between the imperial top-down networks of power and the inter-
mediaries found amongst the local elite. Neither of these networks of power can
be effectively explained without reference to the other.

Analyzing Kirman’s household networks and their

estates: a note on the sources
A common complaint among historians of modern Iran is that appropriate source
materials do not exist or are inaccessible to researchers to explore many important
areas of social and economic change in the Qajar period. Archival sources are lim-
ited and for the most part closed to foreign researchers.41 Court chronicles deal pri-
marily with political and military developments at the center, and similarly most
of the letters, correspondence, and private papers deal with elite, and especially
modernist, circles connected to Tehran.42 The observations of British and Russian
travelers and consular officials are of limited use for the study of provincial social
history given the relatively superficial nature of their commentary.43 Analyzing
household networks and their estates along the lines elaborated above requires a
close examination of the available sources coming from provincial elites them-
selves, writings which have yet to be systematically explored by scholars. These
include a thriving tradition of local historiography, provincial geographical writ-
ings, Persian-language travelogues, the occasional administrative report (often
in the form of a travel narrative), and a few collections of private papers, vaqf
documents, and the like. These documents provide a wealth of information on the
social and economic history of Qajar Iran once attention is directed beyond the
center to incorporate the varied experiences of provincial communities.
Knowledge of communities beyond Tehran was also a concern for the Qajars
themselves. When Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96) briefly led an attempt at cen-
tralization in the effort to create a more efficient and integrated political appara-
tus out of the empire’s skeletal administrative structure, he recognized that any
significant strengthening of central authority would require additional financial
resources through more systematic taxation and a greater base of knowledge about
Qajar territorial possessions. In the 1860s, the court began a process of intel-
ligence gathering. Nasir al-Din’s travels to Mashhad in 1867 and 1870 resulted
in detailed travelogues held at court as administrative records, while a third trip
in 1882 led to the compilation of the more systematic Matlaʿal-Shams detailing
taxable properties, elite communities, and surveys of infrastructure and economic
 Introduction 13
activity throughout Khurasan. This quest for information culminated in the ambi-
tious Mirʾat al-Buldan project, an attempt to produce a detailed geographical dic-
tionary of Iran’s towns and villages. Four volumes of this work were completed
between 1876 and 1880 (two of which devolve into chronicles glorifying the reign
of Nasir al-Din) covering the first six letters of the alphabet, alif to jim, before the
project was abandoned.44 The Mirʾat al-Buldan project coincides neatly with the
resurgence of local historiographical traditions through the appearance of a series
of historical and geographical works in major urban centers. The first of these
works, the 1871 Miʿrat al-Qashan, is organized as responses to a questionnaire
sent by Nasir al-Din Shah to the elites in major provincial centers.45 Centralizing
and integrating Iran by the Qajar government through the Mirʾat al-Buldan proj-
ect was attempted through tapping into the local knowledge of provincial elites,
and the project ultimately served as the catalyst for a revival of local historical and
geographical writing in the 1870s and 1880s.46
The most significant source for the social and economic history of Qajar
Kirman was produced in line with this same project: the Jughrafiya-yi Kirman
[Geography of Kirman], a detailed geographical survey of the province written
by Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri-Kirmani between 1872 and 1874 as an introduction
to his much larger Tarikh-i Kirman [History of Kirman].47 The Tarikh-i Kirman
is a detailed political history of the province from its establishment in pre-Islamic
times to the beginning of the Qajar period, which, notably, utilizes several texts
known to the author that are now lost to historians.48 ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza
Farman Farma Salar-i Lashkar (governor of Kirman, 1891–93, 1894–95, 1905)
commissioned additions to the text to bring it up-to-date, and several copies were
compiled in 1907 under the title of the Salariyya in honor of their patron. The
treatment of the Qajar period in this work is a somewhat less reliable source than
earlier portions of the text, and in fact simply omits a number of important events
and developments.49
Vaziri’s work is essential for reconstructing Kirman’s household networks
and analyzing the management of household estates, both in terms of economic
activities and in terms of the evolution of sociocultural norms governing elite
standing. He highlights prominent members of his community in brief bio-
graphical sketches which relate each individual to the local clique of prominent
households, the administrative positions they have held, and their connections
to local mosques, madrasas, tariqahs, and shrines. Sometimes personal details
are given that offer a glimpse into individual personalities in his community and
tell us something about the qualities that, in the eyes of a member of Kirman’s
elite, make an individual “notable.” There is occasional gossip on families that
have fallen from once-lofty positions in Kirman’s elite circles, and people whose
behavior and personal habits made them disreputable in his eyes, like the two sons
of a local accountant who changed their clothes a little too often and shamelessly
called out at women from the city’s alleyways.50
This information does not lend itself to statistical analysis, given its incon-
sistency, incompleteness, and impressionistic presentation, and no such attempt
will be made in this work. It does, however, allow for a qualitative sketch of
14 Introduction
Kirman’s elite households by carefully reconstructing the primary networks of
households through kinship and discipleship, a rough idea of the scope of the
estates connected to these networks, and the ways in which these networks were
involved in the exercise of social power in their communities. Moreover, through
a comparison of Vaziri’s information in the 1870s with the comments of travel-
ers, administrators, and other local historians (including the 1907 annotation of
Vaziri’s local history), we can get some idea of how household networks and their
estates adjusted over time to changing circumstances (partially of their own cre-
ation), and what strategies elite families pursued in competition with one another
in the context of a rapidly changing relationship between their community and the
wider world.
The Farman Farma family, a branch of the Qajar royal family that dominated
the governorship of Kirman in the 1880s and 1890s, produced a number of espe-
cially significant travelogues and official reports that provide information on rural
communities, including administration, landholdings, infrastructure, and patterns
of trade. Perhaps the most important of these is the Musafaratnama-yi Kirman va
Baluchistan [Account of a Journey to Kirman and Baluchistan], written by Kir-
man’s governor ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farman Farma between December 1893
and April 1894.51 This text includes detailed information on the military elites
of Bam, records on landholdings and tax dues, relations with tribal communi-
ties, agricultural production, and trade. Also notable are three travelogues written
in the early 1880s by ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza’s father and elder brother, both of
whom were also governors of Kirman in this period.52 These, and several other
such works, have only recently become available to researchers and provide criti-
cal detail to our understanding of rural Kirmani societies and their relations with
the state and the urban center.
Several important narrative sources on the history of Qajar Kirman which give
some depth to the picture provided by Vaziri were written by two of the cen-
tral players in the modernist and constitutional movements in the first decade of
the 20th century, Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi (a Kirmani delegate to the Tehran Maj-
lis) and Mirza Muhammad Nazim al-Islam Kirmani (a founding member of the
Anjuman-i Makhfi “secret society”). Nazim al-Islam’s history of the constitutional
movement Tarikh-i Bidari Iraniyan [History of the Awakening of the Iranians]
provides detailed information on Kirman’s modernist intellectual circles and the
events surrounding the factional riots in Kirman in 1905, all from the perspec-
tive of a leading participant in the constitutional struggle.53 Nazim al-Islam also
encouraged his lifelong friend Shaykh Yahya Ahmadi, who was unable to leave
Kirman to take part in the revolutionary struggle, to write on local society and his-
tory and continue his studies in this way in Kirman. Shaykh Yahya produced two
major works dealing with Qajar Kirman as a contemporary observer: his seven-
thousand-year history of the world, Tarikh-i Yahya [Yahya’s History], covering
annual developments in Kirman alongside those of the wider world,54 and, most
importantly, a detailed history of Kirman in the Qajar period, Farmandihan-i
Kirman [The Rulers of Kirman].55 This latter work provides a critical sketch
of developments in the Qajar period, including lengthy critical commentary on
 Introduction 15
the defective sections on the Qajar period in Vaziri’s Tarikh-i Kirman. Given his
extended residence in Kirman as a member of the powerful Ahmadi family, he was
able to provide detailed information on contemporary figures and developments.
Travelogues published by numerous European visitors to Kirman over the
course of the 19th century, while certainly less reliable than the writings of native
Kirmanis, do comment on many aspects of Kirmani society evaded or taken
for granted in Persian-language accounts. Nicolas de Khanikoff in 185956 and
A. Houtum-Schindler in 187957 wrote detailed descriptions of Kirman and com-
mented heavily on productive practices in both the agricultural and handicraft
sectors. The 1872 Perso-Kalat Boundary Commission also produced a volume of
travel writings by its members, including, notably, the travelogues of Major Gen-
eral Goldsmid, and Captains Euan Smith and St. John, who left detailed accounts
of working conditions in Kirman’s shawl and carpet manufactories, an aspect of
local society completely absent from the works of local Persian writers.58 Even
more unique is Edward Browne’s memoirs of his two months in Kirman in 1888
in A Year Amongst the Persians, during which time he caroused with the locals,
smoking opium and discussing the finer points of metaphysics.59
European administrators provide us with much of the available data on eco-
nomic developments in Qajar Iran, although the statistics are, overall, considered
faulty, impressionistic, and generally unreliable by economic historians. The eco-
nomic data found in consular reports and other commissioned papers in the UK
House of Commons Parliamentary Papers and the archives of the British Foreign
Office will be explored in this book, but no quantitative analysis will be attempted,
since the data available are poorly suited to it given the above qualifications and
in any case would not contribute significantly to the goals of the present work.
The Parliamentary Papers provide annual economic reports which give the best
available picture of the intensification of Iran’s connections to global economic
structures as a producer of raw materials. The Foreign Office archives contain
detailed reports by British consular officials on local developments throughout
Iran and reports on numerous diplomatic issues. Critical for the study of Qajar
Kirman are the reports on journeys to the province by Keith Abbott (1850),60 John
Richard Preece (1894),61 and A. H. Gleadowe-Neucomen (1904),62 as well as the
memos on the progress of commercial agriculture in the province by Lucas63 and
Baring.64 In 1894, the British government opened a consulate in Kirman City
under the direction of Percy Sykes, who, unlike many of his diplomatic colleagues
elsewhere in Iran, spoke fluent Persian and immersed himself in the study of Ira-
nian history and society.65 He later wrote a History of Persia66 and a travelogue
on his time in Iran in which Kirman factors prominently.67 Unlike the often terse
and direct letters of other consuls, Sykes’ diplomatic reports are often lengthy
and peppered with historical vignettes and references to Persian poetry. As Kir-
man was deemed significant to British interests in the context of the Great Game,
Sykes spent much of his time as consul traveling the province and dispatching
detailed reports on diplomatic and commercial matters. He developed a close per-
sonal relationship with ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farman Farma during his first jour-
ney in Kirman, which helped him acquire and hold on to control of the consulate
16 Introduction
for most of the period from 1894 to 1904 before leading the South Persia Rifles
in the First World War.
Not only are there numerous sources available for the study of provincial social
and economic history, but the available material is particularly well suited to
reconstructing household networks and analyzing the adaptive strategies of local
elites. They also demonstrate the significance of the mediating role of local elite
families in the process of reshaping Kirman over the course of the Qajar period.
In exploring the political interaction between Kirman and various imperial proj-
ects appearing on its frontiers, the consolidation of a regional economic zone in
the province with the commercialization of agriculture and craft production, and
social change related to the expansion of urban household networks both region-
ally and globally, we find Kirmanis themselves at the center of these transforma-
tions, acting to adapt their estates to take best advantage of the situation within
the context of social norms while engaged in intense factional competition with
other, like-minded families.

An outline of the present study

The present study is divided into three thematic sections covering political, eco-
nomic, and social change while progressing roughly chronologically through the
activities of four generations in Kirmani households between the Qajar conquest
in 1794 and the beginning of World War I. Part One, “Kirman and the Politics
of Empire,” discusses the concurrent rise of several prominent Kirmani house-
holds in the early 19th century – the Kalantari, Vaziri, and Ibrahimi families –
and their political relationships with external imperial projects, including, but not
limited to, the Qajar Empire. Chapter I, “Kirman and the Qajar Empire,” will
introduce the geographical and historical setting of 19th century Kirman. Rather
than viewing Kirman as a natural or integral part of an Iranian nation-state, this
chapter details the historical development of the political relationship that devel-
oped between Kirmani elites and the Qajars’ imperial project in the late 18th and
early 19th centuries, as well as the larger intermediary position that prominent
Kirmani families held between their communities and the wider world. Building
on this discussion, Chapter II, “Local Historiography and the Politics of the Great
Game,” will contextualize the major sources used for this book, a resurgence of
local historical and geographical literature that appeared throughout Iran in the
1870s. These texts will be considered as artifacts of a tension between a local his-
toriographical tradition and attempts by external imperial projects by the Qajars
and British to tap into local knowledge in their attempts to know and control the
region. Provincial histories and geographies produced by local elites represent the
type of knowledge and connections that made Kirman’s elite households useful
intermediaries for the Qajar and British Empires.
Part Two, “A Regional Political Economy,” will discuss how Kirmani house-
holds mediated economic change during the province’s greater integration into
global economic networks. A particular emphasis will be placed on the period
following the arrival of the prominent Qajar governor Muhammad Ismaʿil Khan
 Introduction 17
Vakil al-Mulk I in 1859, whose family’s private investments in Kirman’s infra-
structure were influential in transforming the province’s global trade relations.
Chapter III, “Household Networks and Rural Integration,” analyzes the dual pro-
cess of the commercialization of Kirman’s agriculture and the greater integration
of rural districts around Kirman City through the networks of elite households.
Contrary to the long-standing assumptions held by economic historians, based
on readings of European sources, that commercial agriculture was carried out
largely by foreign agents and market forces, this chapter will demonstrate through
attention to the activities of prominent Kirmani families that the commercial-
ization of agriculture was largely carried out by local initiative. Kirmani elites
actively shaped commercialization and rural integration through the dynamics
of their estate-building endeavors, in an environment of intense factionalism. As
household networks expanded their reach throughout the province in search of
landholdings, they also assumed administrative positions over those territories
at the expense of rural elites, the so-called Aqayan, who appear in sources as a
relic of a bygone age by the early 20th century. This process of regional economic
integration is the subject of Chapter IV, “From Cotton to Carpets: Consolidating a
Regional Economy,” which discusses the challenges faced by successive genera-
tions of prominent Kirmani households through waves of booms and busts in new
commodities like opium and carpet production.
Part Three, “Patrimonialism and Social Change,” will assess the wider social
and cultural dimensions of change in Qajar Kirman, in tension with the norms
and institutions created by elite intermediaries. Chapter V, “Contesting Urban
Patrimonialism,” discusses not only change, but the striking continuities through
late 19th century Kirman in norms surrounding prestige and social power. Forces
tying the provincial society together will be weighed against social movements
challenging the system of power emanating from the political center of Kirman
City. As in the Ottoman Empire and South Asia, regional political and economic
integration was also manifested ideologically and created a basis for a more con-
crete notion of “Kirman” and being “Kirmani.” The extension of urban patrimo-
nial networks formed the conduits of political and economic interconnectivity in
the province, and patrimonialism itself became the normative framework behind
it all. At the same time, both the institutions for integration created by urban elites
and discussions of the status of rural and tribal communities, gender, and labor
participated in articulating the proper social order in Kirman. The final chapter,
“The Household Politics of Revolution,” will then discuss the tension between
challenges to patrimonialism in Kirman and the struggle to impose constitutional
limits on the patrimonial rule of the Qajars. Curiously, during the Constitutional
Revolution (1906–11), we find the Ahmadi family, once at the center of a Kirmani
network of radical intellectuals involved in the revolution, as agitators against the
revolution once the new parliament introduces a provincial anjuman (council)
that threatened the interests of their estate by usurping the administrative role of
their household and their broader networks of support. In each case, the regional
dynamics of factionalism and estate building were central in creating a distinctly
Kirmani version of becoming modern. At the same time, Kirmanis were active
18 Introduction
participants not only in mediating modernity in their own community, but also
in shaping (in their own modest ways) imperial competition, global economic
integration, and their sociocultural effects in the wider overlapping spheres of the
Middle East, Central Asia, and Indian Ocean world.

Notes
1 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari-i Iraniyan (Tehran 1967), I: 312.
2 In August, when a member of an important mutasharʿi family (the Vakil al-Mulkis)
assisted in clearing the occupants of the Bazar-i Shah mosque in hopes of bringing an
end to the crisis, a group of mutasharʿis formed a mob to attack his home as well, driv-
ing the unfortunate man to flee in terror over his rooftop and across a latrine to seek
refuge in the citadel across town. FO 248/846, “Diary for Week Ending 31st August
1905.” Documents from the UK Foreign Office archives are cited hereafter as FO.
3 Gianroberto Scarcia, “Kerman 1905: La ‘Guerra Tra Šeihi e Balasari’,” Annali, Istituto
Orientale Di Napoli N.S., no. 13 (1963). “Balasari” was a term used pejoratively by
Shaykhis in reference to the mutasharʿi Shiʿi community.
4 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari, 316. This event is widely regarded as “the
spark that first set the fire of the Constitutional Revolution.” Mangol Bayat, Mysticism
and Dissent: Socioreligious Thought in Qajar Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univer-
sity Press, 1982), 183.
5 Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expan-
sion of the Capitalist World-Economy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
6 Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of
Sind from Bukhara to Panama (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
7 John Foran, Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revo-
lution (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1993).
8 Vanessa Martin, The Qajar Pact: Bargaining, Protest and the State in Nineteenth-
Century Persia (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2005).
9 Rudolph Matthee, The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600–1730
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 62.
10 Heidi A. Walcher, In the Shadow of the King: Zill al-Sultan and Isfahan under the
Qajars (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2008).
11 FO 248/846. “Week Ending 23 July 1905.”
12 This is, partially, to draw a distinction from newly emerging “big merchants,” who
maintained these broader connections but whose activities left them outside the norma-
tive framework for inclusion among the “notables,” or aʿyan.
13 Boaz Shoshan, “The ʿPolitics of Notables’ in Medieval Islam,” Asian and African Stud-
ies (Israel) 20 (1986).
14 Gad G. Gilbar, “The Muslim Big Merchant-Entrepreneurs of the Middle East, 1860–
1914,” Die Welt des Islams 43, no. 1 (2003); Ahmad Ashraf, “The Roots of Emerging
Dual Class Structure in Nineteenth-Century Iran,” Iranian Studies 14, no. 1/2 (1981).
15 Beshara Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus,
1700–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).
16 Michael E. Meeker, A Nation of Empire: The Ottoman Legacy of Turkish Modernity
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
17 Markovits, Global World of Indian Merchants.
18 S. N. Eisenstadt, Multiple Modernities (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers,
2002).
19 Farzin Vahdat, God and Juggernaut: Iran’s Intellectual Encounter with Modernity
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2002), 27.
20 See, for example, Hamid Dabashi, Iran: A People Interrupted (New York: New Press,
2007); Ramin Jahanbegloo, Iran: Between Tradition and Modernity (Lanham, Md.:
 Introduction 19
Lexington Books, 2004); Ali Mirsepassi, Intellectual Discourse and the Politics of
Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000).
21 Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and His-
toriography (New York: Palgrave, 2001). A similar approach is taken to the study of
gender and sexuality in Qajar Iran in Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women with Mustaches and
Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2005).
22 Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2008), 40.
23 See discussion in John Alexander Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
24 Martin, Qajar Pact.
25 Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World
Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), II: 64–69.
26 Ervand Abrahamian, “Oriental Despotism: The Case of Qajar Iran,” International
Journal of Middle East Studies 5, no. 1 (1974).
27 Christoph Werner, An Iranian Town in Transition: A Social and Economic History of
the Elites of Tabriz, 1747–1848 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2000).
28 Walcher, Shadow of the King.
29 A. Khazeni, “On the Eastern Borderlands of Iran: The Baluch in Nineteenth-Century
Persian Travel Books,” History Compass 5, no. 4 (2007).
30 Willem M. Floor, Agriculture in Qajar Iran (Washington, DC: Mage Publishers,
2003); Labour Unions, Law, and Conditions in Iran (1900–1941) (Durham, England:
University of Durham, 1985); Labor & Industry in Iran, 1850–1941 (Washington, DC:
Mage Publishers, 2009); Industrialization in Iran, 1900–1941 (Durham, England: Uni-
versity of Durham, 1984); A Fiscal History of Iran in the Safavid and Qajar Periods,
1500–1925 (New York: Bibliotheca Persica Press, 1998); Traditional Crafts in Qajar
Iran (1800–1925) (Costa Mesa, Calif.: Mazda Publishers, 2003); The Persian Textile
Industry in Historical Perspective, 1500–1925 (Paris: Harmattan, 1999).
31 Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri, Jughrafiya-yi Kirman (Tehran: Ibn Sina, 1974). Vaziri wrote
this local geography as an introduction to a lengthy local history: Tarikh-i Kirman
(Tehran: Nashr-i ʿIlm, 2006). Their composition, contents, and usages will be consid-
ered in depth in Chapter II.
32 Max Weber, Guenther Roth, and Claus Wittich, Economy and Society: An Outline of
Interpretive Sociology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 357.
33 Ibid., 357–59.
34 Ibid., 366.
35 J. LeCerf, “Aʿila,” in Encyclopaedia of Islam.
36 A similar set of principles is applied in an excellent collection of works on the family,
Beshara Doumani, Family History in the Middle East: Household, Property, and Gen-
der (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).
37 Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, 4 vols. (New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2012).
38 Matthee, Politics of Trade.
39 Doumani, Rediscovering Palestine.
40 On autonomous movements in the highlands of inner Asia, see James C. Scott, The
Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009). The reciprocal relationship between state
and local elites and the relative lack of local autonomous movements in the Islamic
world are noted by Albert Hourani, “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables,” in
Beginnings of Modernization in the Middle East: The Nineteenth Century, ed. Richard
L. Chambers and William R. Polk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
41 A. Reza Sheikholeslami, The Structure of Central Authority in Qajar Iran, 1871–1896
(Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1997).
20 Introduction
42 Hafez F. Farmayan, “Observations on Sources for the Study of Nineteenth- and
Twentieth-Century Iranian History,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 5,
no. 1 (1974).
43 Many of the consular documents from southern Iran in the Qajar period are housed
among the Foreign Office documents in the UK National Archives in Kew. Annual
consular reports delivered to parliament are available in the UK Parliamentary Papers
database.
44 Muhammad Hasan Khan and Muhammad Ali Nuri Ala Partaw Sipanlu, Mirʾat al-Buldan
(Tehran: Nashr-i Asfar, 1985).
45 This work has now been edited and published as Abd al-Rahim Salih Allahyar Kalantar
Zarrabi and Iraj Afshar, Tarikh-i Kashan (Tehran: Muassasah-i Intisharat-i Amir Kabir,
1999).
46 In addition to the work on Kashan, see Husayn ibn Muhammad Ibrahim Tahvildar
Isfahani and Manuchihr Sutudah, Jughrafiya-yi Isfahan: Jughrafiya-yi Tabiʾi va Insani
va Amar-i Asnaf-i Shahr (Tehran: Intisharat-i Muassisa-yi Mutaliʿat va Tahqiqat-i
Ijtimaʾi, 1963); Ghulam Husayn Afzal al-Mulk, Tarikh va Jughrafiya-yi Qum (Tehran:
Vahid, 1976). The notable exception to this is the Jughrafiya-yi Tabriz, written by a
Qajar notable, as Tabriz was normally governed by the Qajar crown prince and thus
was more closely tied to the court than other cities. Nadir Mirza and Abd al-Husayn
Lisan al-Mulk, Tarikh va Jughrafiya-yi Dar al-Saltana-yi Tabriz: bi-Zamima-yi Sharh
Hal-i Buzurgan (Tehran: Iqbal, 1972).
47 Vaziri, Jughrafiya; Tarikh. For a brief summary of the geographical portion of this work,
see Heribert Busse, “Kerman im 19. Jahrhundert nach der Geographie des Waziri,” Der
Islam 50 (1973).
48 Vaziri, Tarikh.
49 Most notably, a significant revolt by the Ismaʿili imam Aqa Khan Mahallati in 1844 is
given only passing reference; Hafez Farman-Farmaian, “Introduction to First Edition”
in ibid., 1–7.
50 Jughrafiya, 76–77.
51 ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza Farmanfarma and Iraj Afshar, Musafaratnama-yi Kirman va
Baluchistan : Buluk-Gardisi bih Muddat-i Sih Mah: 21 Gumadi at-Tani ta 25 Rama-
dan 1311 Qamari; Nusha-yi Hatti-i Mikht 853 dar Kitabhana-i Milli-i Utris (Öster-
reichische Nationalbibliothek) (Tehran: Intisharat-i Asatir, 2003).
52 ʿAbd al-Husayn Mirza’s father was Nusrat al-Dawla Firuz Mirza Farman Farma, a
son of the renowned Qajar Prince ʿAbbas Mirza (d. 1833). Firuz Mirza served as gov-
ernor of Kirman twice, 1837–39 and again as an old man in 1878. He authored two
travelogues in the early 1880s: Firuz Mirza Farmanfarma and Mansura Ittihadiyya,
Safarnama-yi Kirman va Balucistan (Tehran: Babak, 1981), from his first trip in 1880;
and “Safarnama-yi Firuz Mirza Farmanfarma – 1297AH / Kirman” in Firuz Mirza
Farmanfarma et al., Mallahan-i Khak va Sayyahan-i Aflak: Safarnama-yi Firuz Mirza
Farmanfarma, Kirman 1289 Hijri Qamari; va, Safarnama-yi Mirza Riza Muhandis,
Kirman, Yazd, Shiraz, Bushihr 1322 Hijri Qamari (Kirman: Markaz-i Kirmanshinasi,
2007), from a trip the following year in 1881. Firuz Mirza’s eldest son, and ʿAbd
al-Husayn Mirza’s elder brother, was Sultan ʿAbd al-Hamid Mirza Farman Farma,
who governed Kirman from 1881 to his death in 1891. At some time between 1882
and 1886 he traveled to Baluchistan and compiled a report published as Muhammad
R. Daryagast, Safarnama-yi Baluchistan: az Mahan ta Chahbahar (Kirman: Markaz-i
Kirmanshinasi, 1991).
53 Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tarikh-i Bidari.
54 Yahya Ahmadi, Tarikh-i Yahya: Salshumar-i Tarikh-i Iran va-Jihan az Khilqat-i ʿAlam
ta Sal-i 1336 Hijri Qamari (Kirman: Danishgah-i Shahid Bahunar-i Kirman, 2007).
55 Farmandihan-i Kirman (Tehran: Danish, 1975).
56 Nicolas de Khanikoff, Memoire sur la Partie Meridionale de l’Asie Centrale (Paris: L.
Martinet, 1861).
 Introduction 21
57 Albert Houtum Schindler and Heinrich Kiepert, Reisen im Südlichen Persien 1879
(Berlin 1881).
58 India–Persian Boundary Commission et al., Eastern Persia: An Account of the Jour-
neys of the Persian Boundary Commission, 1870–71–72 (London: Macmillan and Co.,
1876).
59 Edward Granville Browne, A Year Amongst the Persians: Impressions as to the Life,
Character, and Thought of the Persian People (London: Kegan Paul, 2002).
60 Keith Abbott’s reports have been edited and published as Keith Edward Abbott and
Abbas Amanat, Cities & Trade: Consul Abbott on the Economy and Society of Iran,
1847–1866 (London: Ithaca Press, 1983).
61 J. R. Preece, “Report of a Journey made to Yezd, Kerman, and Shiraz, and on the Trade,
&c., of the Consular District of Ispahan, 27 Feb 1894” (27 Feb 1894) in Reports from
H.M. Diplomatic and Consular Officers Abroad on Trade and Finance [C.7293] (Cam-
bridge, UK: Chadwyck-Healey, 2005).
62 A. H. Gleadowe-Neucomen, “Report on the Commercial Mission to South-Eastern
Persia During 1904–1905,” in FO 368/38. An account of this mission by Neuco-
men’s Iranian guide and translator was also recently published in Farmanfarma et al.,
Mallahan-i Khak.
63 G. Lucas, “Memorandum on the Cultivation and Exportation of Opium in Persia,
23 Jan 1875” (23 Jan 1875) in Reports from Her Majesty’s Consuls on the Manufac-
tures, Commerce, &c., of their Consular Districts. Part II [C.2529] (Cambridge, UK:
Chadwyck-Healey, 2005).
64 Walter Baring, “Report by Mr. Baring on Trade and Cultivation of Opium in Persia,
23 Sept 1881” (23 Sept 1881) in Reports by Her Majesty’s Secretaries of Embassy and
Legation on the Manufactures, Commerce, &c., of the Countries in which they Reside.
Part I [C.3103] (Cambridge, UK: Chadwyck-Healey, 2005).
65 For a recent and accessible biography on Percy Sykes, see Antony Wynn, Persia in the
Great Game: Sir Percy Sykes, Explorer, Consul, Soldier, Spy (London: John Murray,
2003).
66 Percy Molesworth Sykes, A History of Persia (London: Macmillan and Co., 1921).
67 Ten Thousand Miles in Persia; or, Eight Years in Iran (London: J. Murray, 1902).
This page intentionally left blank
Part I

Kirman and the politics

of empire
This page intentionally left blank
1 Kirman and the Qajar Empire

In 1794, Kirman was in a dangerous predicament, caught between the imperial

ambitions of two rival warlords from the Zand and Qajar dynasties. In his effort
to consolidate Qajar control over the Iranian plateau, Aqa Muhammad Khan Qajar
(d. 1797) tracked the last prominent Zand prince, Lutf ʿAli Khan (d. 1794), to the
remote city of Kirman in southern Iran. He was aided by one of Kirman’s leading
landowners, Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi, who had been recently relieved of his wealth and
properties in the city by the Zand prince. Lutf ʿAli Khan used these and whatever
resources he could pull together to build a base of support among regional tribal
groups to make a stand in Kirman City and restore Zand rule. A lengthy siege of
Kirman City by Qajar troops ensued, in which as many as a third of the city’s
population died from famine; and two successive waves of refugees, number-
ing as many as 22,000 men, women, and children, were sent out from the city.1
By fall 1794, a group of riflemen from Jupar responsible for guarding a section
of the city’s defensive walls decided they had seen enough and, on October 4,
opened a gate to allow Qajar forces to enter the city.2 Lutf ʿAli Khan managed
to flee the city in the midst of the fighting, cross a ditch along the defensive wall
on an improvised bridge, and flee to the Citadel of Bam with three of his sup-
porters, leaving Kirman’s inhabitants at the mercy of Aqa Muhammad Khan. He
was eventually betrayed at Bam and captured by Qajar troops, who gouged out
his eyes before sending him off to Tehran, where he was later strangled to death
in prison.
For three nights following the Qajar conquest of Kirman City, Aqa Muham-
mad Khan’s army plundered and destroyed much of the city. The Qajar ruler also
reportedly ordered his troops to present him with a pile of eyeballs by blinding
thousands of Kirmani men, and to massacre the others, for their tacit support of
the Zand prince. The women and children of the town were handed over to the
Qajar soldiers, and many were subsequently taken away as slaves.3 Lieutenant
Henry Pottinger also attested to seeing a pyramid of heads belonging to Zand sup-
porters in Bam in 1810, constructed at the approximate site of Lutf ʿAli Khan’s
arrest.4
With this ugly scene, Kirman witnessed the demise of the last serious chal-
lenge to the rise of the Qajar Empire. Curiously, these acts of brutality ultimately
restored political stability to the Iranian plateau after more than seventy years of
26 Kirman and the politics of empire
intermittent warfare that followed the fall of the Safavid Empire (1501–1722).
The Qajars quite fluidly assumed political power along a long-standing model
in the Islamic world, ruling indirectly from their new capital at Tehran through
a careful negotiation of power with local intermediaries throughout the empire.5
The Qajar presence in communities they controlled was generally limited to a
governor (normally a member of the Qajar royal family) and a modest entourage,
who administered territories indirectly through the intermediacy of local elites.
The developing Qajar imperial system reinforced the influence of a small group
of locally rooted households, like the Shamaʾis (later known as the Vaziris), who
would continue to dominate social, political, and economic life in Kirman with
remarkably little interference from the central government throughout the nine-
teenth century.6 This intermediacy extended far beyond imperial politics, encom-
passing much of Kirman’s interaction with the wider world.
The active intermediary role of local elite families in Kirman developed paral-
lel to the rise of Qajar central authority. Between the conquest of the city in 1794
and the arrival of the important transitional figure Vakil al-Mulk as de facto gov-
ernor in 1859, there was a significant realignment of social forces in Kirman. With
the physical reconstruction of the city also came the practical reconstruction of
normative patterns surrounding social power, with areas of strong continuity with
the past. The primary feature of this was the dominance of a small group of promi-
nent elite families in Kirman City and larger villages throughout the countryside,
standing at the center of wide-reaching networks of social power built around their
wealth and prestige. Land, stipendiary administrative posts, and control over local
religious institutions formed the core of family estates, granting steady access not
only to wealth, but also to Qajar governors, prestige in the eyes of the community,
and a means of reproducing their power in successive generations. Competition
among Kirman’s elites was fierce, even violent, yet integral to shaping the sweep-
ing changes that reoriented Kirman’s economy, politics, and social structure over
the coming century. The story of Kirman and the Qajar Empire is more than that
of a center dominating a periphery. Rather, we find a fascinating story of regional
change developing alongside the rise of Qajar power in Tehran as but one of sev-
eral external factors exerting influences mediated locally by Kirmani elites.

A view from across the desert: geography and history

in Kirman
Kirman is situated in the vast desert landscape of southern Iran, more than eight
hundred kilometers across the Iranian plateau’s central salt desert, the Dasht-i
Kavir, from the capital of Tehran and the other major urban centers to the north
and west. Prior to industrialization and the development of a transportation and
communication infrastructure, the Dasht-i Kavir was a formidable natural barrier
slowing the passage of people, goods, and information anywhere from several
weeks to several months between Kirman and other urban centers to the north.
The historian Edward Browne described the approach to Kirman City, also known
to its inhabitants as Gavashir, early one morning in June 1888.7 He observed the
 Kirman and the Qajar Empire 27
plain he had followed since leaving Yazd narrow into a slender valley surrounded
by high mountains. “When the dawn began to brighten over the hills before us,
Kirman, nestling, as it seemed at the very foot of their black cliffs, and wrapped
like one of her own daughters in a thin white mantle of mist and smoke, gladdened
our straining eyes.”8 As Nicolas de Khanikoff had noted in his memoir ten years
prior, “this city is perhaps the least well known of all the cities of Persia; very few
Europeans have been there.”9 Indeed, Browne and Khanikoff each made quite a
diversion to reach Kirman, some four to eight weeks from the usual itinerary of
northern towns. As late as the 1890s, Percy Sykes, the first British consul at Kir-
man and later the commander of the South Persia Rifles in World War I, noted
frequently during his explorations that he felt himself walking in the footsteps of
Alexander the Great and Marco Polo as the first European since their times to step
foot in this remote corner of the world.10 Unlike larger and more heavily traveled
towns like Isfahan, which European travelers felt were adequately documented in
their former glory in the Safavid era (1501–1722), Kirman’s few visitors often felt
compelled to write vivid accounts of Kirman City and the surrounding province.11
Kirman’s few European visitors were usually disappointed in what they found
here. Dwellings were primarily mud brick, with a few monumental works and
government buildings constructed of stone or ornamented with tile work. A dis-
tinctive feature of many structures in southern Iran were large wind towers pro-
truding from the rooftops, capturing and directing the heavy winds down to cool
the interior, necessary relief in the arid climate. While considered today a great
contribution to Iran’s architectural and cultural heritage, these local curiosities
did little to impress 19th century visitors.12 St. John, visiting in 1872, noted that
“there is not a single building of beauty or importance in the town.”13 Preece, too,

Figure 1.1 Kirman City in the late 19th century

28 Kirman and the politics of empire
in 1894 writes of “the town of Kerman having no public buildings of prominence
or beauty, the only exception being the Kabba-i Sabz [the “green dome,” which
was actually blue] which lifts its head above the mounds of mud which cover the
habitations of the people.”14 Perhaps for the sake of consistency, this singular
display of beauty was destroyed in an earthquake that struck the city two years
later in 1896.15
Several contemporary Kirmani writers gave their own descriptions of their
community, with a much greater appreciation for the nuances of place, commu-
nity, and identity, as will be discussed in some detail in the following chapter. The
writings of local elites describe Kirman City as a regional hub, yet a city of rela-
tively modest size throughout the Qajar period. Vaziri, the author of a local geog-
raphy in the 1870s, stated that the city was “cucumber-shaped, approximately
one farsakh (3 miles) in circumference, possessing six gates [a seventh opened
in 1311/1893–94], more than a dozen major mosques [and some seventy others],
six active madrasas, fifty one bathhouses, and eight large caravansarai.”16 It fol-
lowed a common developmental pattern with other major cities on the Iranian pla-
teau, with urban space oriented around an imposing citadel, a central bazaar along
the town’s east-west thoroughfare, internally homogenous (or relatively homog-
enous) walled districts (mahallat), and a central complex of religious institutions
centered on two communal Friday Mosques built by the Saljuqs and Muzaffarids
and frequently repaired by Kirman’s rulers.17 Although population figures for Ira-
nian cities at the time are notoriously haphazard approximations, British travel-
ers consistently cite a figure of around 30,000 throughout the mid- to late 19th
century. Vaziri cites a census conducted by Kirman City’s kadkhudas (headmen
of the city quarters) in the 1870s, who counted a known population of 40,227, and
estimated that an additional 60,000 people resided in the outlying villages within
three farsakhs (roughly nine miles) of the urban center.18 Population growth over
the Qajar period was slow and offset by periodic plagues and famines.
The administrative zone controlled by Kirman City and its officials extended
north to the rich plains of Rafsanjan, west beyond the settlements of Sirjan, south
to the coastal mountains separating the province from the Persian Gulf ports, and
the east to frontiers of the tribal lands of Sistan and Baluchistan. This region was
divided by local geographers into two zones: the garmsir, or warm regions bor-
dering the deserts, making up some three quarters of the province, and the sardsir,
or cold mountainous regions cutting through the province northwest to southeast.
Its settlements consisted of a patchwork of scattered oases reliant on artificial irri-
gation. A diverse array of nomadic tribal communities carried on regular migra-
tions throughout the province and regular interaction with settled communities,
paying taxes, buying and selling goods, and at times cutting off roads and harass-
ing caravans.
Paul Ward English, who conducted extensive fieldwork in Kirman in the 1960s,
connected the scarcity of water to the sparse settlement pattern in the region and
the strong ties that existed between village communities and the urban hub. Many
of Kirman’s settlements relied on qanats, a form of subterranean water channel
constructed by hand by local experts known as muqannis, a major achievement
 Kirman and the Qajar Empire 29
of pre-industrial engineering in Iran.19 Without literally mining water from the
highlands at enormous expense, agriculture, the basis of Kirman’s provincial
economy, could hardly exist in this rugged, arid terrain. Lieutenant Pottinger, who
passed through Kirman in 1810, described the province as “barren and waste”
with “extensive desolate plains,” such that without the abundance of painstak-
ingly constructed underground aqueducts, “the natives could not possibly exist.”20
To English, this signaled the necessity of an integrated regional society, not the
separate, cohabitating worlds of urbanites, villagers, and tribesmen in classical
anthropological descriptions of Iran and the Near East. He argues that only input
from urban groups with capital, technical knowledge, and the ability to recruit
labor could have been responsible.21 Marxist scholars in turn theorized that the
high degree of organization and stratification required to construct qanats must
have come from urban centers and supported a peculiar form of “hydraulic despo-
tism,” which filtered into politics at higher levels.22 The debate over regional inte-
gration is a critical one, which will be taken up in due course, but suffice it to say
that regional integration was not a zero sum scenario; the degree of urban–rural
integration became significantly more marked over the 19th century with changes
in the social, political, and economic environment.
The staple crops produced in Kirman’s villages with the use of these qanats
were primarily wheat and barley, supplemented by dried fruit and nuts from local
orchards; Rafsanjan’s pistachios, in particular, were considered locally to be the
finest in the world. After the division of the crop, much of the surplus made its
way in the hands of landowners to the bazars in the larger towns. A considerable
surplus from Kirman also made its way to Yazd and Khurasan. Over the course of
the 19th century, trade through the Persian Gulf with India intensified as demand
for raw materials and foodstuffs during the Industrial Revolution drove prices up
sharply on the international market. Commercial agriculture blossomed beginning
in about the 1840s, as producers replaced or augmented food production with cash
crops like cotton and especially opium, which fetched high prices in India, China,
and western Europe. As a result, local production became ever more sensitive to
international fluctuations, marking Kirman’s integration into the global economy
as a producer of raw materials.
Kirman was remote from the various external poles of power like the Qajar
court in Tehran, the major Shiʿi centers and shrine towns in the Ottoman Empire
and Khurasan, and trade partners in Indian Ocean ports, East Asia, and western
Europe. Yet Kirman’s population was also quite diverse and eclectic. The prov-
ince’s mountainous terrain formed a series of natural barriers that contributed to
a great range of diversity among the village and pastoral nomadic populations.
Vaziri notes some twenty Arab families amongst a branch of the Afshars in Jiruft
who, despite reportedly migrating to the province as early as the first Islamic
century, continued to be Arabic speakers as a consequence of their physical isola-
tion.23 There were a large number of at least partially nomadic Turkic “tribes” in
Kirman of Central Asian origin. The distinction between sedentary and nomadic,
family and tribe, was not often made by local chroniclers. These groups are often
described by local writers in the same terms as settled families (ta’ifa or silsila)
30 Kirman and the politics of empire
and often contained a large number of sedentary people among their number. Sev-
eral of these semi-nomadic groups were significantly more extensive in num-
ber, however. The Afshars, for instance, numbered some 9,300 people in at least
thirteen subtribal groups.24 The overall pastoral nomadic community in Kirman
was quite diverse. Many of the tribes in the eastern portion of the province were
branches of the Persianate Baluchis, who, unlike most of the settled population,
were primarily Sunnis. The ʿAtaʾ Allahi tribesmen in Sirjan and Shahrbabak, in
the west of Kirman, were Ismaʿili loyalists and a key base of support for Kirman’s
dynasty of Ismaʿili imams.25
In line with the overall pattern in Islamic societies historically, Kirman’s
nomads engaged in regular economic exchange with settled populations, selling
animal products, including the fine local goat’s wool known as kurk, in Kirman
City to purchase food and other necessities from the bazars.26 Nomadic groups
also performed other services to merchants and the provincial government based
on their resources and abilities. The Afshars, for example, employed pack ani-
mals to carry loads for merchants to the Persian Gulf port of Bandar ʿAbbas from
Kirman City and Yazd. They were also renowned warriors, including some 700
experienced riflemen who could be called on as auxiliary troops for the provin-
cial armies in times of necessity and good relations. Conversely, when they were
under pressure or the central government appeared weak, they would use their
military strength to cut off roads and attack caravans to augment their wealth.27
A sizable Zoroastrian community resided on the outskirts of Kirman City and
held strong ties to the more numerous and well-organized Zoroastrian population
residing in the next major town to the northwest of Yazd. A small but active group
of Hindu traders connected to a broader regional mercantile network centered on
Sind were present in Kirman City as well.28 A number of religious movements that
developed from within Islamic thought and practice thrived in Qajar Kirman as
well, most notably the Ismaʿilis and Shaykhis. The Ismaʿili imamate resurfaced in
Kirman in the 18th century after several centuries of obscurity, where it remained
until an ill-conceived revolt by the Ismaʿili imam Aqa Khan Mahallati in the
1840s failed and led to his removal to India. Kirman also proved fertile ground
for the growth of a branch of the Shaykhi movement in the 19th century. Rooted
in the teachings of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsaʾi (d. 1826), the Kirmani branch of
Shaykhism was founded by Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan, the son of Kirman’s
first Qajar prince-governor. The connections, status, and resources of the Shaykhi
community, tied as it was to a branch of the Qajar elite, not only made them a
major sociopolitical force throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries in Kirman,
but also brought them into violent conflict with the mutasharʿi Shiʿi community
on several occasions.
Even Kirman’s majority mutasharʿi Shiʿi community was considered relatively
liberal by European travelers. As Nicolas de Khanikoff wrote in his account of a
voyage to Kirman in 1859, this liberal atmosphere was apparent even in the graf-
fiti etched into the postal stations throughout the province. Unlike in the rest of
Iran, he says, where one found philosophy, Quranic verses or political statements
against local rulers, throughout Kirman one found long rhymes on the beauty
 Kirman and the Qajar Empire 31
of women and the quality of the wine; “one should not believe however that the
Kirmani thinks only of the material pleasures of this life, he is very inclined to
theological extravagance.”29 While not quite “cosmopolitan,” at least in the early
to mid-19th century, the image of a remote, isolated, and homogenous population
breaks down very quickly on investigation. In fact, the diversity of Kirmani fami-
lies and the global connections tied in to their networks was a critical component
shaping the many changes and continuities there throughout the Qajar period.

Reconfiguring urban politics

This geographical insularity granted local elites a certain degree of autonomy
from the state, which likewise had very little influence on social and economic
change. While distant from the center of Qajar power in Tehran, Kirman was
on the front lines of pressures related to global economic integration emanating
from the booming Persian Gulf trade and the Great Game on its eastern frontiers
in Central Asia over the course of the 19th century. Kirman in the Qajar period
thus represented its own discrete geographical entity with its own particular set
of historical, social, and political circumstances within the wider sphere of the
Iranian plateau. The Qajar court ruled a very lightly integrated land empire and
held a very loose grip on regions like Kirman. Governors acted as proxies of the
Shah, and in theory were quite powerful figures. Abrahamian has described the
Qajar Shahs themselves as “despots without the instruments of despotism,” and
their representatives suffered the same difficulties.30 Instead, the Qajar governors
had a limited range of responsibilities, namely collecting taxes and maintaining
basic order, and accomplished these tasks through the influence of local house-
holds. The most prominent households in Kirman, in turn, were able to bargain
using their social power to impose certain limits on the exercise of power by Qajar
appointees.31 Provincial elites eagerly participated in this political arrangement as
the state legitimized and sanctioned their own exercise of power and extractive
practices.32 Thus while the Qajar Empire was an exterior and extractive network
of power in its relationship with Kirman, it was operating under significant limita-
tions. In effect, it was largely superficial, like a façade.
At the onset of the Qajar period, there was very little to actually extract from
Kirman following the devastating conquest of the city. In 1794, after seizing Kir-
man, Aqa Muhammad Khan appointed a local notable named Aqa Muhammad
Taqi to, as one early 20th century Kirmani historian put it, “govern the rubble.”33
Aqa Muhammad Taqi was the son of Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi, perhaps the wealthiest
landholder in Kirman. According to a brief biographical sketch from his great
grandson, Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi resisted Lutf ʿAli Khan Zand during his brief reign in
Kirman and as a result saw his cash and properties in the city confiscated, mem-
bers of his family arrested, and his daughters married off to Lutf ʿAli Khan and his
uncle Nasr Allah Khan. In response, Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi fled the city and contacted
the Qajar camp, encouraging Aqa Muhammad Khan to take the city.34 For his loy-
alty, Aqa ʿAli had his wealth restored to him, and he maintained control over his
extensive landholdings around Kirman. The 12,000 or so refugees who took bast
32 Kirman and the politics of empire
(sanctuary) in his properties were reportedly the only people in the city spared the
mass blindings, executions, and enslavements that accompanied the conquests.
Aqa ʿAli’s family, the Vaziris, developed a mutually beneficial relationship
with the Qajars. As prominent players among the local elite, they were in a posi-
tion to legitimize the very tenuous Qajar grip on the province. Aqa Muhammad
Khan, soon to become Aqa Muhammad Shah, also helped to reinforce Aqa ʿAli
and his family’s position among the local elite through critical appointments
within the provincial administration. Aqa ʿAli’s family became known as the
“Vaziris” after his younger son Mirza Husayn, who was appointed the vazir of
Kirman alongside his brother, the governor. The Vaziri family remained one of the
most prominent players in Kirmani politics into the 20th century. Aqa ʿAli’s great
grandson, Ahmad ʿAli Khan Vaziri Kirmani, the author of the Tarikh-i Kirman and
Jughrafiya-yi Kirman, two of the most important sources for the history of Qajar
Kirman, noted that even in the 1870s when composing his works, his connections
to the Vaziri household afforded him a governmental stipend that allowed him to
concentrate wholly on his studies of local history.
The Vaziris are but one example of the significant continuities crossing the
dynastic threshold with the rise of Qajar rule, not only in the shape of political
power, but also in the very actors themselves. Another notable example is the
Kalantari household, who had been a fixture in the politics of Kirman City since
the Safavid period (1501–1722) and remained perhaps the most powerful urban
bureaucratic household in Qajar Kirman after the Vaziris. The Kalantari name
came from the family’s de facto hereditary control over the office of kalantar
(chief magistrate), the highest post in Kirman’s urban administration.35 Similar to
the employees of the divan, the kalantar was appointed by the Shah in the major
cities of the Qajar state, but for the appointee to be effective, he needed to be a
person of high standing locally. This, again, highlights the importance of socio-
cultural prestige, and the norms that govern it, in our understanding of the makeup
of the provincial elite.
These households stood at the center of regional networks of social power, not
only in terms of their connections to members of their own families residing in
rural districts, but also in their relationships with other notable families. These
connections were often tied closely to religious institutions. The Kalantaris, for
example, developed strong connections to the Niʿmat Allahi Sufi brotherhood,
based in the village of Mahan just east of Kirman City, and the head of the Kalan-
tari family is named as a disciple of the head of the order, Niʿmat ʿAli Shah, in
the 1870s.
Interhousehold networks can also appear as patron–client relationships, often
tied into control over administrative offices. There was, for example, a certain
Mirza Khalil, mentioned as an orphan from Kirman City who came to enter the
entourage of the kalantar in the late 18th or early 19th century. Through his con-
nections with the Kalantaris, Mirza Khalil was eventually appointed as a kad-
khuda, or headman of a city quarter, in Kirman City. He and his sons entered
Kirman’s elite as essentially clients of the Kalantaris. His two sons then entered
the service of Mirza Husayn Vazir and thus further built up the profile of their
 Kirman and the Qajar Empire 33
line through connections with the Vaziris as well.36 Later in the 19th century,
Hadi Khan, the great-grandson of Mirza Khalil, was well placed in the provincial
divan, as well holding the title of “head kadkhuda” as a hereditary right from his
father, although Vaziri noted, “he has no authority over the other kadkhudas of the
quarters.”37 It seems even the descendants of an orphan could attain a measure of
power within Kirman when connections to the networks of prominent households
were procured.
The ability of urban households like the Kalantaris and Vaziris to maintain
their place among Kirman’s elite rested not only on their ability to reproduce their
wealth and prestige from generation to generation, but, like the Vaziris, also on
their ability to maintain their usefulness both to Qajar appointees and the local
population alike. This arrangement was reciprocal. For the governor, they pro-
vided indispensable knowledge of local administrative affairs, substantial and
long-standing ties with other members of elite society, and credibility and famil-
iarity with the local population. This was especially essential in reorienting urban
politics in the early 19th century when the Qajar dynasty, recently responsible for
the near total destruction of Kirman City, attempted to establish itself at the head
of a sedentary empire.

The Ibrahimi family: reconstruction and renewal

The establishment of Qajar rule in Kirman is closely intertwined with the estab-
lishment of the Ibrahimi household, one of the region’s wealthiest and most pow-
erful families over the following century. The Ibrahimis were the descendants and
relatives of Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla (d. 1826), the first in a series of Qajar
prince-governors of Kirman. Ibrahim Khan was appointed to govern Kirman by
his uncle, the second ruler of the Qajar dynasty, Fath ʿAli Shah (r. 1797–1834), as
part of his efforts to transform Aqa Muhammad Shah’s conquests into a coherent
political entity by regularizing the relationship between Tehran and provincial
elites. Ibrahim Khan would hold this post for more than two decades, until his
death in 1826, during which time he was tasked with rebuilding and restoring
Kirman as a prosperous territory.38 In doing so, he also successfully established
himself and his family first as representatives of Qajar rule, and then as an integral
part of the local elite. He was remembered by Kirmani historians for restoring and
regularizing the provincial administration, subjugating the powerful tribal khans
in Baluchistan to the person of the governor, and reviving commerce by securing
transportation and trade routes.39 Over time, this political stability was matched
by economic prosperity as well. By the 1820s, artisans and merchants began to
make their way to Kirman from Fars and Khurasan and contributed in their own
right to Kirman’s renewed prosperity.40
The most significant legacy of Ibrahim Khan’s governorship in Kirman was
undoubtedly his campaign to rebuild and develop Kirman City after the devas-
tating Qajar conquests. One European source suggests that the governor was
permitted to appropriate Kirman’s tax revenues for the upkeep of his guard rather
than dispatch it to Tehran.41 This would have amounted to a considerable sum,
34 Kirman and the politics of empire
and it seems likely that these funds were applied at least in part to reconstruction.
Ibrahim Khan commissioned the addition of a Citadel Gate to the reconstructed
city walls, the Bagh-i Gulshan divan office on the citadel grounds, a large new
congregational mosque, a bazar complex, and numerous water reservoirs and
bathhouses.42 However, the centerpiece of the reconstructed Kirman City, built
somewhat northwest of the pre–Qajar era town, was a cluster of buildings in the
center known as the Ibrahimiyya Complex.43 Completed in 1814–15, this com-
plex was centered on the Ibrahimiyya Madrasa, supported by a vaqf endowment
which funneled in revenues from Ibrahimi landholdings, and included a mosque,
bathhouse, and bazar (qaysariyya).44
His efforts to rebuild and bring prosperity to the city cemented the legacy of
Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla for local historians, who placed him alongside the
Safavid-era governor Ganj ʿAli Khan, as one of Kirman’s most significant figures
in making the city so prosperous.45 The construction of a major center of religious
learning was a conspicuous act of public piety, performed by a ruler for the benefit
of the community and the promotion of the sharʿia. This complex quite literally
inscribed the good name of the Ibrahimi into the physical structure of Kirman
City. Ibrahim Khan’s popularity was even conceded in Pottinger’s disparaging
remarks on the governor, whom he met in Kirman during his three-week stay in
May 1810:

In private life he is considered a humane mild man, and as a governor, very

equitable and just. For a governor in Persia, perhaps he may be so, as in that
country tyranny and extortion are so habitually the attendants of authority,
that certain degrees of them are scarcely looked upon as evils.46

Most of Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla’s twenty-two sons, and an unrecorded

number of daughters, set deep roots in Kirman following this urban development
cum private estate building project. The Ibrahimis, as they were known, blurred
the line between “Qajar elites” and “local elites.” The Ibrahimis were a branch of
the Qajar royal family, as Ibrahim Khan was the brother of the late Aqa Muham-
mad Shah and the uncle of Fath ʿAli Shah. Yet the following generations appear
as prestigious Kirmani landowners, administrators, and religious leaders. The
Madrasa-yi Ibrahimiyya and the complex surrounding it held a central place in the
family estate. The pious act of opening a place of Islamic learning was of course
a prestigious act, but the family also funneled in enormous revenues through its
vaqf endowments from their rural landholdings. These funds held much of the
family’s landed properties together as part of the family estate, rather than divid-
ing them into dozens of small units through inheritance rights. This unified estate,
tied into an institution of Islamic learning, also provided material benefits through
relatively secure stipendiary posts for leading members of the Ibrahimi household
in Kirman City, opportunities for patronage and network building by controlling
the vaqf expenditures.47
That the Ibrahimis had become “local,” rather than functioning as an arm of the
Qajar state, is well illustrated by a revolt orchestrated by the head of the family
 Kirman and the Qajar Empire 35
in 1827. When Ibrahim Khan died in 1826, one of his sons, ʿAbbas Quli Mirza,
who, unlike his elder brother Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan, was mothered by
a Qajar princess, received the governorship of Kirman through his mother’s
intercession.48 The following year, however, ʿAbbas Quli Mirza conspired with
Muhammad Qasim Khan Damghani to gather a large backing from among Kir-
man’s elites and bring together a military force 20,000 men strong to lead a cam-
paign ostensibly to put down a revolt by ʿAbd al-Riza Khan Yazdi.49 Once they
reached Shams, the notables in his entourage, led by Mirza Husayn Vazir, son of
Aqa ʿAli Shamaʾi, determined the intentions of the campaign to be a revolt against
Fath ʿAli Shah and disbanded the army in the middle of the night, abandoning
ʿAbbas Quli Mirza and Muhammad Qasim Khan.50 The entire Ibrahimi household
was thus placed under a cloud of suspicion and members of the family were not
permitted to leave the city for some time without government approval. The Qajar
prince Shujaʿ al-Saltana was subsequently sent by Fath ʿAli Shah to restore order.
The elites of both Kirman and Yazd resisted the renewed attempts by the Qajars
to assert their authority and Shujaʿ al-Saltana was eventually recalled in favor
of the famed Crown Prince ʿAbbas Mirza, who arrived to personally reestablish
Qajar power. Revolts by local notables were a common occurrence in Qajar Iran,
in fact an integral part of the politics of empire, demonstrating the ability of local
notables to enforce limits on Qajar authority and, by extension, their ability to
renegotiate the relationship at will.

Shaykhi–mutasharʿi sectarianism
An important part of the Ibrahimi story, which would come to define their rela-
tionship with other elites, was this family’s intimate relationship with a thriv-
ing “Kirmani” branch of Shaykhism. Shaykhism was a theosophical movement
that coalesced around the teachings of Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsaʾi (d. 1826) and
his disciple Sayyid Kazim Rashti (d. 1844) in the early 19th century, and thus
shares a common spiritual and intellectual lineage with the later Babi and Bahaʾi
movements. In 1772–73, al-Ahsaʾi migrated from Bahrain to the ʿatabat and
was attracted to usuli jurisprudence, which was returning to prominence in the
shrine towns in the late 18th century. He received ijazas from many of the leading
ʿulamaʾ of his time, earning him strong credentials as a mutasharʿi Shiʿi scholar.
What distinguished al-Ahsaʾi from his peers was an attachment to Islamic mysti-
cism, to the extent of claiming visionary experiences in which he achieved direct
contact with the imams. This connection, he argued, allowed him to tap into a
vast reservoir of intuitive knowledge and attain a privileged understanding of the
imams’ teachings.51 Later in his life, al-Ahsaʾi was subjected to severe criticism
by usuli scholars for these claims and was repeatedly denounced as an apostate.
Al-Ahsaʾi came to Iran in 1806–07 and received patronage from members
of the Qajar household, including Fath ʿAli Shah, the future shah Muhammad
Mirza, and Kirman’s governor Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla.52 Having estab-
lished this connection, several of al-Ahsaʾi’s disciples made their way to Ibra-
him Khan’s revitalized Kirman in search of patronage and protection during the
36 Kirman and the politics of empire
Wahhabi uprisings in the 1820s. The Qajar prince’s eldest son and heir to his
estate, Muhammad Karim Khan had an encounter with one of these Shaykhi
scholars that he credited with transforming his life, which he would devote to
al-Ahsaʾi’s speculative philosophy.53
When al-Ahsaʾi died in 1826, a small but devoted following developed around
his chief disciple Sayyid Kazim Rashti, which can be said to be the origins of
Shaykhism as a school of religious thought. Rashti, like Ahsaʾi, adamantly denied
that there was any such thing as a Shaykhi school, stressing that they differed
with usuli jurisprudence not in core principles, but only in matters of subsidiary
importance ( farʿ).54 Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla himself had a close relationship
with both al-Ahsaʾi and Rashti, as both a patron and a devotee.55 Likewise, his son
Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan, when he had completed his studies locally, became
a disciple of Rashti and quickly established himself as one of his leading students,
along with Sayyid Javad’s relative, the future “Bab,” ʿAli Muhammad Shirazi.
After Rashti’s death in 1844, his disciples split, coalescing around several radi-
cally divergent interpretations of his teachings. Sayyid ʿAli Muhammad Shirazi,
who preached a radical interpretation of Shaykh Ahsaʾi’s teachings, focused on
the function of the “Perfect Shiʿa” as a living, breathing gate, or bab, through
which he connected the community with the imams. As an intermediary between
humanity and the imams, he claimed he was granted privileged access to divine
knowledge and guidance.56 This was an extension of al-Ahsaʾi’s and Rashti’s own
claims to visionary experiences and access to intuitive knowledge of the imam,
for which they were also heavily criticized. Al-Ahsaʾi and Rashti both insinuated
to their followers that they represented the figure of the Perfect Shiʿa, but never
as explicitly as Sayyid ʿAli Muhammad Shirazi. In 1844, he took the pulpit and
openly declared himself to be the Bab, or “gate” to divine knowledge, which
raised considerable ire among the mutasharʿi ʿulamaʾ, leading to his public exe-
cution as an apostate in 1850.
Following the revolt of his younger brother, ʿAbbas Quli Mirza, the Ibrahimi
family were not allowed to travel outside of Kirman without explicit government
consent. Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan decided to flee the city secretly in order
to continue his studies in the ʿatabat with Sayyid Kazim Rashti.57 In his absence,
his claims to administer the endowments of the Ibrahimiyya Madrasa were put in
peril. In fact, Muhammad Karim Khan’s control over the entire Ibrahimi estate
was soon challenged by one of Sayyid ʿAli Muhammad’s (the Bab) relatives, a
man named Aqa Sayyid Javad Shirazi (d. 1287/1870–71). Attracted to the newly
flourishing climate of religious learning in Kirman, he accepted an invitation from
Kirman’s governor, Hulaku Mirza (the son of Shujaʿ al-Saltana) to come to the
city in 1246/1830.58 Around the time of his arrival in Kirman, Shaykh Niʿmat
Allah Bahrayni, the Imam Jumʿa, died, and Sayyid Javad was appointed to take
his place.59 This provided Aqa Sayyid Javad an opportunity to assert his authority
as the city’s leading religious authority, which he then attempted to parlay into
control over the vast wealth and prestige of the Ibrahimi estate in Muhammad
Karim Khan’s absence. He shrewdly attached himself to the Ibrahimi family by
marrying a daughter of Ibrahim Khan Zahir al-Dawla and installed himself as the
 Kirman and the Qajar Empire 37
head of the Ibrahimiyya Madrasa along with a group of his loyal students, subse-
quently claiming control over its endowments.60
Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan was forced to return to Kirman to reassert him-
self as the head of the Ibrahimi household. The conflict between Hajj Muhammad
Karim Khan and Sayyid Javad would center on the Ibrahimiyya Madrasa. It was
not only a major endowed institution, control of which thus involved the control of
vast financial resources, but also the Ibrahimi household’s chief statement of their
cultural standing and charitable contributions to religious education. According to
the Shaykhi account, Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan returned to Kirman shortly
after Sayyid Javad’s arrival in the city, in 1830, to find the madrasa already occu-
pied by Sayyid Javad’s students, who stubbornly refused to leave. The dispute
erupted into a violent factional dispute, with Sayyid Javad’s students eventually
being driven out forcibly by a group of lutis loyal to Muhammad Karim Khan.61
This was the first in a series of major outbursts of Shaykhi–mutasharʿi violence
that would occur in Kirman in the Qajar period. In each case, political and eco-
nomic issues related to family estates, rather than religious sensibilities, were the
key factor.
It was out of this context that a markedly more conservative branch of the
Shaykhi movement developed around Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan and his dis-
ciples, closely connected with the legacy and the prestige of the Ibrahimi house-
hold. Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan interpreted Ahsaʿi’s doctrine of the Perfect
Shiʿa and recourse to divine knowledge through direct communication with the
imam as an advocation generally for a strong sociopolitical role for the ʿulamaʾ.62
Following the Bab’s radical declarations and subsequent execution, Hajj Muham-
mad Karim Khan then made explicit his rejection of the Bab’s claim to prophetic
renewal. Thus while conducting a feud with one of the Bab’s relatives, he also
drew an explicit distinction between the Bab’s challenge to the authority of the
Shiʿi ʿulamaʾ and his own attempts to reconcile Shaykhi teachings with the major-
ity usuli position, if only as a necessity for survival.63 The Kirmani branch of
Shaykhism was therefore manifested as a conservative, and largely elite, cultural
phenomenon strongly identified with the Ibrahimi household.
After the execution of his cousin, the Bab, Sayyid Javad was rumored to be
a Babi himself, which in most cases would have been met with severe conse-
quences.64 Having been ousted from the Ibrahimiyya Madrasa in 1830, Sayyid
Javad nonetheless remained a central figure in the mutasharʿi Shiʿi community
in Kirman until his death in 1871.65 Apart from his role as Imam Jumʿa, Sayyid
Javad, as well as his descendants, became associated with two other prominent
local madrasas, the Madrasa-yi Quli Bik and the Madrasa-yi Muhammad.66 His
status within the Shiʿi community in Kirman was perhaps the only thing that
saved him from further persecution during the ensuing Babi witch hunt.

Patterns of landownership and rural administration

As factional politics coalesced around prominent urban households like the
Vaziris, Kalantaris, and Ibrahimis in Kirman City, their rivalries also extended
Exploring the Variety of Random
Documents with Different Content
liberty of waiting on Mr. Johnson at his chambers in the Temple. He
said I certainly might, and that Mr. Johnson would take it as a
compliment. His chambers were on the first floor of No. 1, Inner
Temple Lane, and I entered them with an impression given me by
the Rev. Dr. Blair of Edinburgh, who described his having ' found the
giant in his den.' He received me very courteously ; but, it must be
confessed, that his apartment and furniture, and morning dress,
were suflSciently uncouth. His brown suit of clothes looked veiy
rusty; he had on a little old shrivelled unpowdered wig, which was
too small for his head ; his shirt neck and knees of his breeches
were loose ; his black worsted stockings ill drawn up ; and he had a
pair of unbuckled shoes by way of slippers. But all these slovenly
particulars were forgotten the moment that he began to
tal^."~Boswdl.
 INNER TEMPLE LANE. 246 INNS OF COURT. " ■\Vlion
Madam de Boufflers was lir.st in England (said Beauclerk), she was
desirous to see Jolinson. I accordingly went with her to his cliambers
in the Temple, where she was entertained with his conversation for
some time. When our visit was over, she and I left him, and were
got into Inner Temple Lane, when all at once I heard a noise like
thunder. This was occasioned by Johnson, who, it seems, upon a
little recollection, had taken it into his head that he ought to have
done the honours of his literary residence to a foreign lady of quality,
and eager to show himself a man of gallantry, was hurrying down
the staircase in violent agitation. He overtook us before we reached
the Temple Gate, and breaking in between me and Madam de
IJoufflers, seized her hand, and conducted her to her coach. His
dress was a i-usty brown morning suit, a pair of old shoes by way of
slippers, a little shrivelled wig sticking on the top of his head, and
the sleeves of his shirt and tlie knees of his breeches hanging loose.
A considerable crowd of people gathered round, and were not a little
stnick by this singular appearance."— Boswell. James Boswell, the
bion;raphei' of Johnson, in the chambers of the Rev. Mr. Temple, in
what was once called " Farrar's Buildings," "at the bottom of Inner
Temple Lane." " I found them," he says, " particularly convenient for
me, as they were so near Dr. Johnson's."* — Charles Lamb in No. 4.
" I have been turned out of my ch.imbers in the Temple by a
landlord who wanted them for himself, but I have got others at No.
4, Inner Temple Lane, far more commodious and roomy. I have tn'o
rooms on the third floor, and five rooms above, with an inner
staircase to myself, and all new painted, &c., for 30Z. a-year. The
rooms are delicious, and the best look backwards into Hare Court,
where there is a pump always going ; just now it is dry. Hare Court's
trees come in at the window, so that it's like living in a garden." —
Lamb to Coleridge, {Final Memorials, i. 171). Barometers were first
sold in London by Jones, a clock-maker in Inner-Templc-lane. "
Because the instruments were rai'e, and confined to the cabinets of
the virtuosi ; and one was not to be had but by means of some of
them. Therefore his lordship [Lord Keeper Guildford] thought fit to
put some ordinary tradesmen upon making and selling them in their
shops ; and, accordingly, he sent for Jones, the clockmaker, in the
Inner Temple Lane, and having shown him the fabric, and given him
proper cautions in the erecting of them, recommended the setting
them forth for sale in his shop ; and, it being a new thing, he would
certainly find customers. He did so, and was the first person that
exposed the instniment to sale publicly in London." — KortKs Lives
of the Norths, 8vo ed., 1826, ii. 203. * Croker's Boswell, i. 4.50.
INNHOLDEU&' llA'xJL \% ix\ Colle Street, Dowgate. INNS OF
CHANCERY. Inns, nine number, attached to the four Inns of Cou ' To
the Inner Temple belonged Clifford's Ii Clement's Inn, and Lyon's Inn
; to 1 Middle Temple, New Inn and Strand In to Lincoln's Iini,
Furnival's Inn, and Tl vies' Inn ; and to Gray's Inn, Staple I and
Barnai'd's Inn. [See these names.] INNS OF COURT (The), " the nobl
nurseries of Humanity and Liberty in 1 kingdom," * are four in
number — Jni Temple, Middle Temple, Lincoln's Inn, a Orai/'s Inn.
The question of preceder has never been settled, nor is it of mu
consequence, for each Inn is an independt body ; but their popular
peculiarities ha not been inaptly represented in the w( known lines
— " Inner Temple rich, Middle Tem])le poor ; Lincoln's Inn for
gentlemen, And Gray's Inn for a whore " They are called Inns of
Court, from bei anciently held in the " Aula Regia," Court of the
King's Palace. Their gove ment is vested in " Benchers," consisting of
" most successful and distinguished member the English Bar — a
numerous body, " cc posed of above 3080 Barristers, exclusive the
twenty-eight Serjeants-at-Law."f T number is still enlarging. The
incre from 1833 to 1844 was from 1130 to 248- 1 Mules generally
adopted hy the four Sonet' — Before any person can be admittec
member, he must furnish a statement writing, describing his age,
residence, j condition in life, and comprising a certific; of his
respectability and fitness, signed himself and a bencher of the
society, or ■ barristers. The Middle Temple requ the signatures of
two barristers of i Inn, and of a bencher , but in each of three other
Inns, the signatures of barris' of any of tlie four Inns will suffice,
person is admitted without the apprt; tion of a bencher ; or of the
bencherf council assembled. At Lincoln's Inn person can be admitted
a student, or ca to the bar, who has ever been a paid ci to a
barrister, conveyancer, special pleai or equity draftsman. The rule
observed ini * Ben Jonson dedicates his Every Man Out o Humour, "
To the Noblest Nurseries of Huma and Liberty in the Kingdom, the
Lins of Cour t Times, May 12th, 1846. J Warren, p. ,'
 INNS OF COURT. 247 INNS OF COURT. 11' Courts was so
strict at one time, tliat, as irard Leigh tells us, " gentlemen of thi-ee
scents only were admitted." This rule was served as late as the reign
of Charles I. As 3n as a person has been admitted a stunt he is
allowed free access to the librai-y the Inn to which he belongs, and
is also titled to a seat in the Tem]}le Church, or apel of his Inn,
paying only some trifling m annually by way of preachers' dues. 3 is
also entitled to have his name set wn for chambers. The applicant,
before can enter into " commons," must sign a nd with sureties
conditioned to pay the es. A student, previous to keeping any his
terms, must deposit with the treasurer the Society lOOZ., to be
returned (without terest) on its depositor being called to the r; or in
case of his death, to his personal presentative. But this deposit is not
quired on the part of persons who shall oduce a certificate of having
kept two ars' terms at the Universities of Oxfoi-d, >mbridge, or
Dublin, or of his being a 3mber of the faculty of Advocates in otland.
The Middle Temple includes the liversities of Durham and London. At
3 Ivnrr Temple, the candidate for admisin, who has not taken the
degree of B.A., passed an examination at the U^niveries of Oxford,
Cambridge, or London, is :juired to pass an examination by a barter,
appointed by the Bench for that purse, in the Greek and Latin
languages, and itory or literature in general. No person priest's or
deacon's orders can be called the bar. In the Inner Temple an
attorney ast have ceased to be on the rolls, and an tided clei'k to be
in articles, for three xrs before he can be called to the bar. ; Grays
Inn the period is only two years, ifore a gentleman can be called to
the r, he is required by the regulations of all 3 Inns to be of three
years' standing, and have kept "commons" for twelve terms dining in
the Hall at least three times in eh term. In the Middle Temple a three
ars' standing, and twelve commons kept, ffice to entitle a gentleman
to be called to e bar, provided he is above twenty-three p,rs of age.
No person can be called to e bar at any of the Inns of Court before I
is twenty-one years of age, and a standj of Jive years is understood
to be required every member before being called. The jmbers of the
several Universities, &c., iy be called after tliree years' standing, ly
person wishing to be called to the bar ast make application to a
Master of the Bench, to move that he be so called. The call is by an
act of the benchers in council or parliament assembled, and the
name and description of every candidate must be hung up in the
Hall for a fortnight before. Applications for admission to be made to
the treasurer of the Inn, at his ofHce, and all necessary information
will be instantly afforded. In Lincoln's Inn, a person wishing to be
called to the bar must read his exercises at the bar-table, and the
barristers at that table have a power of rejection, subject to an
appeal to the benchers. If not rejected by the bar-table, it is still
necessary that he should be approved by the Bench. The reading of
exercises is a mere form, but preserved for the purpose of
compelling the personal appearance, before the bar-table, at dinner-
time, of the candidate for admission. The entrance expenses of each
Inn average about 'dbl., the great j bulk of which is for stamps, i. e.,
251. for admission, and 1/. 15s. for a bond. At Gray's Inn the bond
is only II. The stamp required for a call to the bar costs 50^. The
additional charges amount to between 20^. and 30/. Every student
may, if he choose, dine in the Hall every day during term. A bottle of
wine is allowed to each mess of four. His commons' bill, if he dine
the whole of each term, will be about lOl. or 12/. annually. " With us
a sufficient knowledge of jurisprudence is supposed to be gained by
eating a certain number of dinners in the Hall of one of the Inns of
Court, whereby men are often called to the bar wholly ignorant of
their profession; and being pushed on by favour or accident, or
native vigour of mind, they are sometimes placed in high judicial
situations, having no acquaintance with law beyond what they may
have picked up as practitioners at the bar." — Lord CampbelVs Lives
of the Chancellors, 2nd ed., i. 514. " The discipline of these societies
was, till within these eighty years, (1760j, veiy strict. The students
appeared upon all occasions, and in all places, in their proper habits
; and for neglecting to appear in such habit, or for want of decency
in it, they were punished by being put two years backward in their
standing. This habit was discontinued because the Templars, having
been guilty of riots in some parts of the town, being known by their
habits to be such, a reproach was thereby reflected on the society
for want of discipline." — Pegge's Curialia Misc., p. 324. King James
I. declares, in one of his printed speeches in the Star Chamber, that
there were only three classes of people who had any right to settle
in London — the courtiers, the citizens, and the gentlemen of the
Inns of Court. When the King
 INSOLVENT DEBTORS' COURT. 248 IRONMONGERS' UALL.
delivered this opinion, each Inn of Court consisted of about twenty
readers, sixty utter barristers, and lf]() socii, or "fellows" who spent
their time in the study of the law, and commendable exercises fit for
gentlemen. A student of an Inn of Chamrnj became an inner
barrister of an Inn of Court soon after his admission, and after seven
years he proceeded an utter or outer barrister, and was then said to
have been called to the bar. Readers, or, as they are now called,
benchers, were men of at least twelve years' standing as utter
barristers. INSOLVENT DEBTORS (COURT FOR THE RELIEF OF), 33,
Li.ncoln's Inn Fields — entrance. No. 5, Portufjal-street. The
unclaimed monies arising from insolvent estates is laid out in
Exchequer Bills ; the interest on which is now applicable to the
expenses of obtaining the discharge of poor prisoners, pursuant to 1
1 }ith sect, of Act 1 & 2 Vict., c. 1 1 0. The fii-st Commissioner has
2000/. a-year ; the three other Commissioners 1,560Z. each.
INSTITUTE OF BRITISH ARCHITECTS (ROYAL), IG, Lower Grosvenor
Street, Grosve.nor Square. Founded 1 !i34 for the advancement of
architecture, and incorporated by royal charter, Jan. Utli, 1837.
Thei'e are three classes of members : — \. Fellows : architects
engaged as principals for at least seven years in the practice of civil
architecture. 2. Associates : jiersons engaged in the study of civil
architecture, or in practice less than seven years, and who have
attained the age of twenty-one. 3. Honorary Fellows. The meetings
are held every alternate Monday at 8 p.m., from the first Monday in
November till the end of June inclusive. Associate's admission fee, 1
guinea ; Fellow's admission fee, 5 guineas. There is a good library of
books on ai'chitecture. INSTITUTION (ROYAL). [See Royal
Institution.] INSTITUTION OF CIVIL ENGINEERS, 25, Great George
Street, WestMi.NSTER. Established 1818 ; incorporated by royal
charter June 3rd, 1828. The Institution consists of Members resident
in London paying 4 guineas annually, and ]\Iembers not resident 3
guineas annually ; of Associates resident in London paying 3 guineas
annually, and Associates not resident '2\ guineas ; of Graduates
resident in London paying 2^ guineas annually, and Graduates not
resident 2 guineas ; and of Honorary Members. The ordinary General
Meetings are held every Tuesday at 8 y.m from the second Tuesday
in January to lli end of June. The first president was Thonia Telford,
(1820—34) ; the second, Jame Walker, (183.5 — 1.5) ; the third. Sir
Johi Rennie ; and the present one, Joshua Field Esq. Obmrre. —
Portrait of Thomas Tel ford, engineer of the Menai Bridge, and I're
sident of the Institution for fourteen years. IRELAND YARD, on the
west side o St. A.ndrew's Hill, and in the parish o St. An.ne,
Blackfriars. Here stood th house which Shakspeare bought in I'ili I
and bequeathed by will to his dauglitei j Susanna Hall. In the deed
of conveyanc ] to the poet, the house is described a j " abutting
upon a street leading down t Puddle Wharf," and " now or late in th
tenure or occupacon of one William Ireland, [hence, Ireland-yanl] "
part of which sal' j tenement is erected over a great gate, lead ing to
a capital messuage, which some tim was in the tenure of William
Bhickwel Ksquire, deceased, and since that in th tenure or
occupacon of the Right Honorabl Henry, now Earl of
Northumberland." Th original deed of conveyance is shown i: the
City of London Library, at Guildhal under a handsome glass case.
The stree leading down to Puddle-wharf is noi called St. Andrew's-
hill, from the church c St. Andrew-in-thc-Wardrohe : the old an'
proper name is Puddle-Dock-hill. IRONGATE STAIRS, Lower Tua.me
Street. " Then towards the East is a great and stron gate, commonly
called the Iron gate, but not usuall k opened." — Stow, p. 19.
IRONMONGERS' HALL, on the nort side of Fenchurch'Sfreet — the
Hall of th Ironmongers, the tenth on the list of th Twelve Great
Companies. The preser.t Ha was ei'ected by Thomas Holden, architec
whose name with the date 1748 appears o the front. The
Ironmongers were incoi;^ porated for the first time in 1464 — 3rd (
Edward IV. OJserw.^ For trait of Admiritie Lord Viscount Hood, by
Gainsboroughi »! presented by Lord Hood, on his admissio into this
Company in 1783, after the freedoi of the City had been conferred
upon him fo his eminent naval services. The great bar. quetting hall
has recently been decorated i the Elizabethan style, by Jackson and
Soni in papier mache and carton pierre. IRONMONGER LANE,
Cheapside. " Kest beyond the Mercers' Chapel and thej
 IRONMONGER ROW. 249 ISLINGTON. lall is Ironmonger
Lane, so called of Ironmongers Iwelling there, whereof I read in the
reign of Cdward I., &c. In this lane is the small parish hurch of St.
Martin, called Pomary, upon what ecasion I certainly know not. It is
supposed to be f apples growing where houses are now lately uilt;
for myself have seen large void places 'iere."—Stow, p. 102. he
church of St. Martin was destroyed in e Great Fire, and not rebuilt,
IRONMONGER ROW, Old Street, !". Luke's, first turning east of the
chui'ch. ere, in 1763, died George Psalmanazar. He said to have
spent his evenings at a publicise in Old Street, where many persons,
eluding Dr. Johnson, went to talk with him. hen Johnson was asked
whether he ever Qtradicted Psalmanazar : " I should as •)n," said
he, " have contradicted a Bishop." ISLE OF DOGS. A low marshy
tract J the left bank of the Thames, facing iptford and Greenwich,
encircled on its it, west, and south side by a bend of the ,er, giving it
the form of a peninsula, but iverted into an island within the present
^tury by the West India Bock Canal, ich cuts across it from
Limehouse to ickwall. In 1830 it was nearly uninpited ; since that
time it has been graduassuming the aspect of a great colony
manufactures. Several large iron-shipIders' yai-ds, chemical works,
&c., have n erected on it. A low marshy ground near Blackwall, so
led, as is reported, for that a waterman carried bau into this marsh
and there murthered him. le man having a dog with him he would
not ve his master; but hunger forced him many les to swim over the
Thames to Greenwich; ich the watermen who plied at the bridge
pier] observing, followed the dog over, and by t means the
murthered man was discovered. )n after the dog swimming over to
Greenwich dge, where there was a waterman seated, at the dog
snarled and would not be beat off; ich the other watermen
perceiving, (and knowof the murther), apprehended this strange
erman ; who confessed the fact, and was conined and executed."—
ij. 5., in Strype, vol. i, 3. The fertile soil of the Marsh, usually known
he Isle of Dogs, was so called because when former princes made
Greenwich their country ;, and used it for hunting, (they say), the
mels for their Dogs were kept on this Marsh ; ch usually making a
great noise, the seamen and !rs thereupon called the place the Isle
of Dogs : igh it is not an Isle, indeed scarce a Peninsula le neck
being about a mile in length." — Dr. idward, in Strype, Circuit Walk,
p. 102. " The Isle of Dogs— a fine rich level for fattening of cattle.
Eight oxen fed here of late were sold for 3U. a-piece : and a Hog fed
here was sold for 201. and Qd."— Strype, B. iv., p. 44. " Bawdber.
Where could I wish myself now ? In the Isle of Dogs, so I might
'scape scratching." —Beaumont and Fletcher, Thierry and Theodoret,
Act iii., so. 2. " Moll Cutpurse. O Sir, he hath been brought up in the
Isle of Dogs, and can both fawn like a spaniel and bite like a mastiff
as he finds occasion." —Middleton andDekker, TheBoaring
Girl,^to,lQn. I find it described in Norden's map of Middlesex, (4to,
1593), as "Isle of Dogs Ferme." Nash wrote a play called The Isle of
Dogs, for which, in 1398, he was imprisoned in the Fleet. Mr. Dyce is
of opinion that it was a place where persons took refuge from their
creditors and the officers of justice. * But this I doubt. ISLINGTON.
A village, which was originally considered remote from London ; but,
like Chelsea, on the other side, it is now a part of this great and inci-
easiug metropolis—" the monster London " of Cowley's poem upon "
Solitude." " Let but thy wicked men from out thee go, And all the
fools that crowd thee so. Even thou, who dost thy millions boast, A
village less than Islington wilt grow, A solitude nXmost."— Cowley. "
Not only London echoes with thy fame, But also Islington has heard
the same." Dryden(f)t The origin of the name is unknown. In ancient
records it is written Isendune, Isendon, Iseldon, Yseldon, and
Eyseldon. The church is dedicated to St. Mary. This village, originally
famous for its duckingponds, its cheesecakes and custards, is still
celebrated for its cowkeepers. The wells were first discovered in
1683. [See Sadler's Wells.] " Master Step?ten. What do you talk on it
? Because I dwell at Hogsden, I shall keep company with none but
the archers of Finsbury or the citizens that come ducking to Islington
Ponds."— £era Jonson, Every Man in his Humour. " 27 March, 1664.
Walked through the Ducking Pond Fields; but they are so altered
since my father used to carry us to Islington, to the old man's, at the
King's Head, to eat cakes and ale (his name was Pitts), that I did not
know which was the Ducking Pond [see Ball's Pond], nor where I
was." — Pepys. * Middleton's Works, ii. 535. t A couplet fathered on
Di-yden, in the Wliig Examiner, by Addison. It is as good as anything
in I the Bathos.
 ISLINGTON. 250 IVY LANE. " Audacious and
unconscionable Islington! Was it not enough that thou hast, time out
of mind, been the Metropolitan Mart of Cakes, Custards, and Stewed
Pruans ? The chief place of entertainment for Suburb Bawds, and
Loitering Prentices? Famous for Bottl'd Ale that Begins the Huzza !
before one drinks the Health, and Statutable Cans, nine at least to a
Quart. People may talk of Epsom Wells, Of Tuubridge Springs which
most escells, I '11 tell you by my ten years' practice Plainly what the
matter of fact is : Those are but good for one disease, To all
distempers this gives ease."— ^ Morning RamUe ; or, Islington Wells
Burhsqt. London : Printed by George Croom, for the Author, 1684.
[Single half-sheet.]* " Islington, as famous for cakes as Stepney or
Chelsea is for buns."— Z>r. King's Journey to London, A.D.17— ,
(Works, i. 193). " A man who gives the natural history of the cow is
not to tell how many cows are milked at Islington."— Jo/j»iso«, in
Bosuidl, by Croker, p. 587. Observe.— 'No. 41, Cross-street. The
ceiling of a back room on the first floor has the arms of England, the
initials E. R., (Elizabetha Regina), and the date, 1595, in stucco ;
also the mitials t^i (Thomas and Jane Fowler), fleur-de-lys,
medallions, &c. The Fowlers were Lords of the Manor of Barnsbury ;
hence Barnsbury Park, Islington. — In a large room in the first floor
of the Old Parr's Head, John Henderson is said to have made his first
essay in acting.— St. Peter's Church, by Barry, R.A. : cost 3407Z. 2s.
Id. : consecrated July 14th, 1835. Eminent InJiabitants. — Sir Walter
Raleigh. " There is a house no farther from London than Islington,
about a bow's shot oh this side the church, which, tbo' I think it has
no such evidences remaining upon its walls, cielings or windows,
that will prove him [Raleigh] to have been its owner, the arms that
are seen there, above a hundred years old, being of a succeeding
inhabitant ; is yet popularly reported to have been a villa of his . . . .
As for the house, it is and has been, for many years, an inn" [the
Pied Bnll'j.— Oldys's Life of Raleigh, fc. Ixxiv. William Collins, the
poet. " After his return from France, the writer of this character paid
him a visit at Islington, where he was waiting for his sister, whom he
had directed to meet him. There was then nothing of disorder
discernible in bis mind by any but himself; but he had withdrawn
from study, and travelled with no other book than an English
Testament, such as children carry to the school : when his friend
took it in his hand, out of curiosity to see what companion a Man of
Letters had chosen : ' I have bi one book,' said Collins, 'but that is
the bcst.'"Johnsoii's Lives of the Poets. CoUey Gibber ; he is said to
have died in house next the Castle Tavern. — Olive Goldsmith. [See
Canonbury.] Alexande Cruden, author of the Concordance, (> 1770),
in Camden-passage, Camden-stree He was found dead on his knees
in the po ture of prayer.— John Nichols, author Nichols's Anecdotes,
in Highbury-place.Charles Lamb, in Colebrooke-ro\N', in \vh: he calls
" a detached whitish house close the New River, end of Colebrooke-
terrac left hand coming from Sadler's Wells." " When you come
Londonward, you will find i no longer in Covent Garden ; I have a
cottage Colebrook Row, Islington; a cottage, for it is c teched ; a
white house with six good rooms in i the New River (rather elderly
by this time) ru. (if a moderate walking pace can be so tenned j clc
to the foot of the house ; and behind is a spacio garden with vines,
(I assure you), pears, stra ben-ies, parsnips, leeks, carrots,
cabbages, to delig the heart of old Alcinous. You enter without pi
sage into a cheerful dining-room, all studded o\ and rough with old
books ; and above is a ligl some drawing-room, with three windows,
full choice prints. I feel like a gi'eat lord, ne^ having had a house
hefoie:'— Charles Lamb B. Barton. * See also " An Exclamation from
Tunbridge and Epsom against the new fovnd Wells at Islington."
London: Printed for J. How. [Single half-sheet]. [See Ball's Pond;
Canonbui-y; New Rivf Sadler's Wells.] IVY BRIDGE, Ivy Lane, Strand.
pier, or bridge, in the old use of the woi at the bottom of Ivy-bridge-
lane, the fi: turning west of Salisbury. street, leading the half-penny
steam-boats. " Ivie bridge in the high street, which had a n under it
leading down to the Thames, the like sometime had the Strand
bridge, is now tal down, but the lane remaineth as afore or bet' and
parteth the liberty of the Duchy and the C of Westminster on that
south side."— -S'(ow, p. 1 " Ivy Bridge now very bad, and scarce fit
use, by reason of the unpassableness of the wa —Strype, B. vi., p.
75. IVY LANE, Newgate Street. " Ivy Lane, so called of ivy gi-owing
on the w: of the Prebend houses."— Stow, p. 128. At the King's
Head (a beef-steak house this lane) a Club, of which Dr. Johnson \ a
member, met every Tuesday eveni When Johnson, the year before
his dea endeavoured to re-assemble as many of Club as were left,
he found, to his regret he writes to Hawkins, that Horseman,
landlord, was dead, aud the house shut u
 JAMAICA COFFEE HOUSE. 251 JAMES'S (ST.) CHAPEL. J-
AMAICA COFFEE HOUSE. [See St. t Michael's Alley.] JA.AIES STREET,
Buckingham Gate. mment InhahHcmts.—Glover, the author of
|eoiiidas, an epic poem at No. 11. Pye, le Poet Laureate, at No. 2, in
the years 799 and 1800.* Gifford, editor of the ,uarterly Review, and
author of the Baviad -id Maiviad, &c., at No. 6 ; he died here f 1 8-
26, and was buried in Westminster bbey. " He [Gifford] was a little
mandumpled up togeher, and so ill-made as to seem almost
deformed, ut with a singular expression of talent in his ountenance.
He had one singular custom. He _sed always to have a duenna of a
housekeeper to it in his study with him while he wrote. This female
companion died when I was in London, and tis distress was extreme.
I afterwards heard he Jot her place supplied. I believe there was no
k;andal in all this."— ,S'!> Walter Scott's Dinrij. yO. 17 was the
residence of Colonel VVardle, Jio brought the accusations against the
|uke of York, which led to the duke's Isigning his office of
Commander-in-chief, plonel Wardle was living here while the larges
were examined into at the bar of e House of Commons. IJAMES
STREET, Covent Garden. lilt cu'c. lG37,t and so called in compliant to
James, Duke of York, afterwards fmes II. Y'ork- street, in the same
parish, pserves a compliment of the same kind. The other evening,
passing along near Covent arden, I was jogged on the elbow, as I
turned to the Piazza, on the right hand coming out of imes Street, by
a slim young girl of seventeen, to with a pert air asked me if I was
for a pint of ine. I do not know but I should have indulged y curiosity
in having some chat with her, but at I am informed the man of the
Bumper knows ir, and it would have made a story for him not ry
agreeable to some part of my writings."— TAe lectator, No. 266.
Unent Inhabitants. — Sir Henry Herbert, ather of Lord Herbert of
Cherbury, and' , George Herbert, and the last Master of i Revels,
hved and died on the west side this street, in the red-brick house,
the 't but one before the street abuts upon ^/i-t-street.X Sir James
Thornhill, the inter, on the east side ; " the back-offices i painting-
room abutted upon LangPinkerton's Cor., ii. 48, and Court Guide for
)• t Eate-books of St. Martin's. X Rate-books of Covent Garden.
ford's (then Cock's) Auction-room, in tlie Piazza.* No. 27 was the
residence of Charles Grignion, (d. 1810), the engraver after Gravelot,
Haymau, Wale, (fccf" JAMES STREET, Haymarket, has a stone
inscribed on one of the h(juses, " James Street, 1673." " James Sti-
eet comes out of the Haymarket and falleth into Hedge Lane, of
chief note for its Tennis Court, which takes up the south side of the
street : the north side being but ordinarily inhabited."— Strype, B.
vi., p. 68. The Tennis-court, still standing on the south side, was
originally a part of Piccadilly Hall or Gaming-house. [See Piccadilly.]
JAMES'S (ST.), Beemondsey. The altar-piece, « The Ascension," by J.
Wood, was painted in 1844, Mr. Harcourt bequeathing the sum of
500^. for that purpose, and stipulating, at the same time, that the
picture should be made the subject of competition. Eighty pictures
were sent in, and the prize was assigned to Mr. Wood by the judges,
Eastlake and Haydon. JAMES'S (ST.) CHAPEL, Hampstead Road. On
the east side of the road, a httle above the north end of Tottenham-
Courtroad ; a chapel-of-ease to St. James's, Westminster. Eminent
Persons buried in th
 JAMES'S (ST.) CHAPEL. JiK 'S (ST.), DUKE'S PLACE. one, as
I suspect, in a different part of the same building),* Holbein painted
" Lazarus rising from the dead," long since destroyed. " I confess I
remember to have dressed for St. James's Chapel with the same
thouglits yimr daughters will have at the Opera." — Lady M. ]V.
Montague to Countess of Bute, {Works, iii. 105). Bishop Burnet
complained to the Princess Anne (afterwards Queen) of the ogling
and sighing in St. James's Chapel, and, to prevent such scenes in
future, aslved her permission to have the pews raised higher. The
Bishop's application made some stir among the fair sex, and
occasioned a ballad, which, Dryden informs Mrs. Steward, " is by
some said to be by Mr. Maynwaring, or my Lord Peterborough." "
When Burnet perceivM tliat tlio beautiful dames, Who flock'd to the
Chiip.l nf hilly St. James, On their lovers the kiiulcst "f looks did
bestow. And smil'd not on him while lie belluw'd below; To the
Princess he went, With pious intent The dangerous ill in the Church
to preventThen pray condescend Such disorders to end, And from
the ripe vineyard such labourers send ; Or build up the seats, that
the beauties may see The face of no brawny pretender but me. The
Princess, by rude importunity press'd, Though she laughed at his
reasons, allow'd his request; And now Britain's dames, in a
Protestant reign. Are lock'd up at prayers like the Virgins in Spain ;
And all are undone, As sure as a gun. Whenever a woman is kept
like a nun. If any kind man from bondage will save her, The lass will
in gratitude grant him the favour." State Poems. " Another time in a
conference with the late Queen Caroline [George II.'s Queen] Her
Majesty observed that she well knew in general the people's
freedom in passing their censures upon the Court, and asking him
what particular fault they found in her conduct, Mr. Whiston replied,
the fault most complained of was that of her talking at Chapel. She
promised amendment, but proceeding to ask what other faults were
objected to her. He replied, 'When your Majesty has amended this I
'11 tell you of the next."— ^?-«. " Whiston," in Bio. Brit., vi. 4214.
Prince George of Denmark and the Princess Anne, Frederick Prince
of Wales and the daughter of the Duke of Saxe Gotha, * The large
window to the street is a recent insertion ; there were before two
old, small, and I think, irregular windows. George IV. and v^i,. nvard
room in ■ ' • •■ present Majesty and Prince iuuert, were ali married
in this chapel. I may add, tha the register records the marriage of Sii
Christopher Wren and Madam Jane Fitz Williams, Feb. 24th, 1676.
This was th( great architect's second marriage. Tin Royal family used
formerly to attend thji chapel (which communicates by a privafc
gallery with the State apartments), bu her present Majesty has had a
chapel con< structed in Buckingham Palace. ThenJ are seats
appropriated to the nobility The Duke of Wellington, when in towni
invariably attends the morning service iij this chapel. Service is
performed at ft a.irl and 12 noon. Admittance 2s.! The servic is
chaunted by the boys of the Cliapt Royal. Dr. John Bull, the
comjioser of th' music of " God Save the King," was organie of the
Chapel Royal in 1591. JAMES'S (ST.) CHURCH, Piccadilu or, St.
Jamess, Westminster. Built l)y Si Ciiristopher Wi-en ; consecrated,
Sundaj July 1 3th, 1684, and erected at the expens of Henry Jermyn,
Earl of St. Alban, th patron of Cowley, and the husband, it i said, of
Henrietta Maria, the widow ( Charles I. The parish was taken out (
St. Martin' s-in-the- Fields. The first rectc was Dr. Tenison, and the
second Di Wake, both successively Archbisliops ( Canterbui'y. A third
eminent rector wf Samuel Clarke, author of The Attribute of the
Deity, who lived in the old re( brick rectory-house, on the site of th
present, No. 146, Piccadilly. He dislike going out, and yet was fond
of exercise so he amused and exercised himself ! home with leaping
over forms, and chair and tables. The exterior of the church of red
brick with stone quoins, and is mea and ugly in the extreme. The
interior is masterpiece, light, airy, elegant, and cap! cious — well
worthy the study of an arch tect. It is Wren's chef d'ceuvre — and
esp' cially adapted to the Protestant Churc service. " I can hardly
think it practicable to make single room so capacious, with pews and
gallerit as to hold above 2000 persons, and all to hear tl| service,
and both to hear distinctly and see t| preacher. I endeavoured to
effect this in buildii( ^ the parish church of St. James, Westminstti .,
which I presume is the most capacious with theij" qualifications that
hath yet been built ; and yet , / a solemn time when the church was
much crowd , ^ I could not discern from a gallery that 2000 persoj
were present in this church I mention, though ve
 JAMES'S (ST.) FAIR„H. 253 JAMES'S (ST.), CLERKENWELL. r
4 A/rT?,c;'S (ST.) F --'P-'P- And yet, as there •e no walls ui a, second
order, nor lantern, nor ittresses, but the whole roof rests upon the
pillars, i do also the galleries, I think it may he found jautifiil and
convenient, and as such the cheapest rm of any I conldinyent."— Sir
Christopher Wren. le marble font, a very beautiful one, is the )rk of
Grinling Gibbons. The missing ver (represented in Vertue's
engraving) is stolen, and, it is said, subsequently mg as a kind of
sign at a spirit-shop in e immediate neighbourhood of the church.*
le beautiful foliage over the altar is also mi his hand. The organ, a
very fine one, 15 made for James II., and designed for 3 popish
chapel at Whitehall. His daught", Queen Mary, gave it to the church.
16 painted window at the east end of the ancel, by Wailes of
Newcastle, was erected 1846. " Another foolish thing that was done
by the \me advice, as I suppose, was sending to the linister of St.
James's Church, where the Princess Jueen Anne afterwards] used to
go, (while she ved at Berkeley House), to forbid them to lay the ixt
upon her cushion, or take any more notice of er than other people.
But the minister refiising to bey without some order from the Crown
in writig, which they did not care to give, that noble esign dropt." —
An Account of the Coiiduct of the >oicager Duchess of Marlborough,
p. 100. " Berinthia. Pray which church does your lordiip most oblige
with your presence ? " Lord Foppingtnn. Oh ! St. James's, madam :
— lere 's much the best company. j " Amanda. Is there good
preaching too ? I " Lord Foppington. Why, faith, madam — I can't
^,11. A man must have very little to do there that In give an
account of the sermon." — Vanbrugh, "he Belapse; or, Virtue in
Danger, 4to. " Lucinda. For my part I hate solitude, churches, id
prayers. " Belliza. So do I directly; for except St. James's mrch, one
scarce sees a well drest man, or ever fceives a bow from anything
above one's mercer." Ilrs. Centlivre, Love's Contrivance, 4to. "
Colonel Woodvil. You will find we go to chui'ch orderl)' as the rest of
our neighbours. " Sir John Woodvil. Ay! to what church ? " CoL St.
James's Church — the Establish'd burch." — Gibber, The Nonjuror,
8vo. " St. James's Church is also worth seeing, more pecially on a
Holiday or Sunday, when the fine sembly of beauties and quality
come there. But is one great fault in the churches here, and at is,
that a stranger cannot have a convenient at without paying for it ;
and particularly at this James's, whei'e it costs one almost as dear as
to e a play." — De Foe, A Journey through England, 'o, 1722, i. 305.
Brayley's Londiuiana, ii. 282. The parish contains 168 streets and
alleys, of which number 58 are totally without sewei's.* Eminent
Persons interred in. — Charles Cotton, Izaak Walton's associate in
The Complete Angler, d. 1686-7.— Dr. Sydenham, the physician, ■' in
the south aisle, near the south door." There is a recentlyerected
tablet to his memory. He lived and died (1689) in Pall Mall.— Ja,mes
Huysman, the painter, (d. 1696). He lived in Jermyn-street. — The
elder and younger Vandervelde. On a grave-stone in the church is,
or was, this inscription : " Mr. William Vandervelde, senior, late
painter of sea-fights to their Majesties King Charles II. and king
James, dyed 1693." — Michael Dahl, the painter, (d. 1743).— Tom
d'Urfey, the dramatist, (d. 1 723). There is a tablet to his memory on
the outer south wall of the tower of the church. The inscription is
simple enough : " Tom d'Urfey, dyed February 26, 1723."— Heni-y
Sydney, Earl of Romney, the handsome Sydney of De Grammont's
Memoirs, (d. 1704). There is a monument to his memory in the
chancel. He lived and died in Romney House, St. James's-square,
now the site of the Erectheum Club.— Dr. Arbuthnot, (d. 1734-5),
the friend of Pope, Swift, and Gay. — Mark Akenside, M.D., author of
The Pleasures of Imagination. He died in Old Burlingtonstreet, and,
leaving by will his body to be buried at the discretion of his executor,
was interred in the church of the parish in which he died. — James
Dodsley, " many years an eminent bookseller in Pall Mall," (d. 1797).
He was the brother of R. Dodsley. There is a tablet to his memory. —
The Duke of Queensbury, (old Q, as he was called), in a vault under
the communion-table. He lived in Piccadilly, and died in 1810. —
James Gillray, the caricaturist ; in the churchyard, beneath a flat
stone on the west side of the rectory. He died in 1815, aged 58.
[See St. James's Street.]— Sir John Malcolm, the eminent soldier
and diplomatist.— The register records the baptisms of the polite
Earl of Chesterfield and the great Earl of Chatham. The portraits of
the rectors in the vestry are worth seeing. JAMES'S (ST.),
Clerkenwell. A church on Clerkenwell-green, near the Sessions
House, occupying the site of a much older church to the same saint ;
originally the choir of a Benedictine Nunnery, founded circ. 1100,
and of which the last ladyThe Times, Jan. 2Sth, 1848.
 JAMES'S (ST.) COFFEE HOUSE. 'ji JAME'.S (ST.), DUKE'S
PLACE prioress was Isabel Sackville, (d. 1570), youngest daughter of
Sir Richard Sackville, ancestor of the Earls and Dukes of Dorset. The
first stone of the present building was laid Dec. 17th, 1788, and the
church consecrated July 10th, 17.92. In the vaults are preserved the
tombs of Prior Weston, the last Prior of the Hospital of St. John of
Jerusalem, (d. 1540), and the Lady Elizabeth Berkeley, (d. 15i)5),
from whom Berkeley-street adjoining derives its name, second wife
to Sir Maurice Berkeley, standardbearer to Henry VIII., Edward VI.,
and Queen Elizabeth. At the east end is a pile of coffins from the old
church, and in this pile rest the remains of the celebrated Bi.shop
Burnet, who died in St. John' s-sqv are, Mai-ch 1 7th, 1714-15. His
grave-stone was cut by " Mr. Stanton, a stone-cutter, next door to St.
Andrew's Church, in Holborn."* John Weaver, author of the folio
volume of Funeral Monuments, and Richard Perkins and John
Summer, celebrated actors before the Restoration, were buried in
the burialground belonging to this church. Weaver dates his epistle
before his Funeral Monuments, " from my house in Clerkenwellclose,
this •28th of May, 1631." JAMES'S (ST.) COFFEE HOUSE, St. James's
Street, (no longer standing). A Whig coffee-house from the time of
Queen Anne till late in the reign of George III., the last house but
one on the south-west corner of St. James's-street, frequented by
Addison and Steele, and occasionally attended by Goldsmith and
Garrick. When Swift frequented it, it was kept by a person of the
name of Elliott, t " Foreign and Domestic News you will have from
St. James's Coffee House."— Ta^Zer, No. 1. " Advertisement.— To
prevent all mistakes that may happen among gentlemen of the other
end of the Town, who come hut once a week to St. James's Coffee
House, either by mis-calling the ser\-ants, or requiring such things
from them as are not properly within their respective Provinces ; tWs
is to give notice that Kidney, Keeper of the Book-Debts of the
outlying customers, and observer of those who go off without
paying, having resigned that employment, is succeeded by John
Sowton; to whose Place of Enterer of Messages and first Coffee-
Grinder William Bird is promoted; and Samuel Burdock comes as
Shoe-Cleaner in the room of the said Bird."— TAe Spectator, No. 24.
" That I might begin as near the fountain-head as possible, I first of
all called in at St. James's, where I found the wifo-3 onvard room
in-. ,\ iMzif politics. The speculations were but very Indiffei'et)
towards the door, but grew finer as you advance < towards the
upper end of the room, and were s very much improved by a knot of
theorists, wh' sat in the inner room, within the steams nf th' Coffef-
l'ot, that I there heard the whole Siiaiiis Monarchy disposed of, and
all the line cf I'.ciurbo pruviilud for in less than a quarter of an
hour."The Spectator, No. 403. " He will begin to be in pain next Irish
poB^ except he sees M.D.'s little handwriting in th^ glass frame at
the bar of St. James's Coffee 1 louse. — Swift, Journal to Stella,
{Works, by Scott, ii. 149) " I met Mr. Harley, and he asked me how
Ion I had learnt the trick of writing to myself? H had seen your letter
through the glass case at th coffee house, and would swear it was
my hand."Sioift, Journal to Stella, (Scott, ii. 166). " I must not forget
to tell you, that the Partid have their different places, where however
stranger is always well received; but a Whig wi no more go to the
Cocoa Tree or Ozinda's, than Tory will be seen at the Coffee House
of St. James's — De Foe, A Journey through England, 8vo, 172' p.
168. " Upon reading them [the Town Eclogues] ovu at St. James's
Coffee House, they were attriljut< by the general voice to the
productions of a Lady Quality. When I produced them at Button's, tl
poetical jury there brought in a different verdi( and the foreman
strenuously insisted that Mr. Gi was the man." — Advertisement
before 1st Edition Lady Mary Wortley Montague^ s Town Eclogues,
171' " An ardor for military knowledge was a pr minent feature in the
family character ; and it Vf: no uncommon circumstance to see Dr.
[Josep Warton at Breakfast in the St. James's Coffi House,
suiTounded by officers of the Guards, wli listened with the utmost
attention and pleasure I his remarks." — WooTs Life of Warton, p.
389. Goldsmith's Retaliation had its origin : this coffee-house.
"Goldsmith's 'Retaliation' was written in I bruary, 1774, but was not
pulilished until after t author's decease. It arose not from a scene at
tj Literary Club in Gerard Street, as sometimes sa:, hut fi-om a more
miscellaneous meeting, consisti', of a few of its members and their
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