Rudi Matthee
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 503128 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Rudi Matthee |
| NOMBRES | Rudi |
| APELLIDO | Matthee |
| FIRMA | MATTHEE R |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Delaware |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1336-210X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 64 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 84 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 61 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 2 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1989 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Making and Remaking Empire in Early Qajar Iran , by Assef Ashraf
Mehmandari
This essay considers the institution of mehmandari, the practice of having foreigners visiting in an official capacity welcomed, accompanied, and provided for by the host country. It discusses its historical roots and engages in a comparative analysis, to find that mehmandari was most prominently practised in early modern Iran. It examines the responsibilities of the officer in charge, the mehmandar, and his supervisor, the mehmandar-bashi, argui…
Empire of Contingency
Shah ‘Abbās I
This essay considers the “great” status of Shah ‘Abbās I, the most consequential Safavid ruler, by comparing European descriptions to his portrayal in the Persian-language sources. While both depict him as energetic, resolute, and unadorned in attire and demeanor, European sources present him primarily as an empire builder while Persian-language works focus on his role as a warrior on horseback, fighting external enemies and putting down domestic…
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Peter Andreas. Killer High
Journal Article Peter Andreas. Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs. Get access Peter Andreas. Killer High: A History of War in Six Drugs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. 352. Cloth $31.99. Rudi Matthee Rudi Matthee University of Delaware, US Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 129, Issue 1, March 2024, Pages 318–319, https://doi.o…
Angels Tapping at the Wine-Shop's Door
Alcohol in the Early Modern Islamic Empires
Chapter Four investigates the drinking of rulers and commoners in the Ottoman Empire and in Mughal India, showing how they were influenced by the habits of their forebears, the Turkic steppe people of Central Asia. Rulers alternated between abstemiousness and raging alcoholism. They might ban alcohol depending on personal predilection, to propitiate the divine or in the face of imminent war, but anti-alcohol campaigns were typically half-hearted …
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The wrath of God or national hero? Nader Shah in European and Iranian historiography
This article examines the way in which Iran's eighteenth-century ruler Nader Shah was portrayed in contemporary Europe as well as in Iran, and how the resulting image—half national hero, half ruthless warlord—has resonated until today. In an age short on ‘great’ leaders, Nader spoke to the imagination like no other contemporary ruler, Western or Asian. Nader's subsequent record can be read as a palimpsest, a layered series of images of multiple w…
Writing Capitalism into Iranian History
Capitalism used to be a singular term, but, like many keywords in English, now is often presented and discussed as a plural: capitalisms. Whereas capitalism formerly stood for what today is called industrial capitalism, scholars currently talk about varieties of capitalism: commercial capitalism, industrial capitalism, financial capitalism, and neoliberal capitalism, to name but the most prominent historical variants. Given this proliferation, an…
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Introduction
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Neither Eastern nor Western, Iranian”
This essay identifies an historically-enduring Iranian insistence on self-sufficiency—which can be summed up, in a superordinate manner, as the idea that the world needs Iran more than Iran needs the world. Economically, this insistence is reflected in a (rhetorical) quest for self-reliance in production; politically, it tends to be articulated in an instinctive anti-(neo)colonial, often defiant stance vis-à-vis the world; and culturally, it is o…
Safavid Iran and the “Turkish Question” or How to Avoid a War on Multiple Fronts
This essay parts with the compartmentalized way in which scholarship tends to view Iran’s military predicament in the Safavid era by examining the perennial threat the Ottomans posed to the country largely in isolation from the recurring conflict between the Safavids and their other main adversaries, the Mughals and Uzbeks, respectively. The security dilemma facing Safavid Iran, it is argued here, was acute as well as multifaceted, and should be …
Russians in Iran
Russians in Iran seeks to challenge the traditional narrative regarding Russian involvement Iran and to show that whilst Russia’s historical involvement in Iran is longstanding it is nonetheless much misunderstood. Russia’s influence in Iran between 1800 and the middle of the twentieth century is not simply a story of inexorable intrusion and domination: rather, it is a complex and interactive process of mostly indirect control and constructive e…
From Splendour and Admiration to Ruin and Condescension
This essay charts Western perceptions of Iran between 1600 and 1900 through the prism of ruins. It distinguishes three periods: the reign of the Safavids, when Iran's many ruins hardly undermined the admiration Europeans expressed for the country's vibrant present; the three-quarters of a century following the fall of the Safavids in 1722, when the few who still visited saw in the many ruins they encountered the foreordained fate of a decadent ci…
A Comment on Kioumars Ghereghlou's Review of Rudi Matthee, Persia in Crisis
Criticism arising from disagreement is what advances debate, making scholarship progress. A critical review therefore should leave an author unperturbed—as long as it is honest and fair. Kioumars Ghereghlou's review of my book Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan is neither. Rather than engaging in a serious and substantive discussion of the book's content and argument, it offers a string of innuendo-filled swipes and tendent…
Transforming Dangerous Nomads into Useful Artisans, Technicians, Agriculturists
The Reza Shah period (1921–1941) continues to be one of the most understudied as well as controversial episodes in Iran's modern history. Assessments of the period tend to be politically charged and reflect the widely diverging opinions about the extent and quality of its transformative nature. They rarely involve an appreciation of the effectiveness of the measures taken in this period in relation to stated policy objectives and allowing for the…
Between Aloofness and Fascination
Identity implies the other. As there is no self-definition without a view of the Other, the process whereby the “Self” discovers the “Other” is crucial to the formation of a self-image, for individuals as much as for groups of people claiming a collective identity. Historically, this process has never been more acute and intense than with the explosion of intercultural contact between Europe and the rest of the world following the so-called Age o…
Administrative Stability and Change in Late-17th-Century Iran
In June 1669 the Safavid ruler Shah Sulayman dismissed his grand vizier Mirza Muhammad Mahdi and appointed Shaykh ʿAli Khan Zanganah as his successor. Shaykh ʿAli Khan served in the exalted function of grand vizier or iʿtimad aldawla for a full twenty years and in this period grew into perhaps the most remarkable administrator of Safavid times
Alcohol in the Islamic Middle East
Journal Article Alcohol in the Islamic Middle East: Ambivalence and Ambiguity Get access Rudi Matthee Rudi Matthee Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 222, Issue suppl_9, 2014, Pages 100–125, https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtt031 Published: 19 April 2014
The Safavids under Western Eyes
This essay takes a fresh look at the voluminous yet understudied Western travel writing about 17th-century Iran. It argues that, after this material is properly subjected to close scrutiny for authorial bias, interest and intertexuality, it remains exceedingly valuable for the information it provides on Safavid Iran. Early modern European travelers to Iran brought remnants of past religious and cultural prejudice with them, yet the best explored …
Relations between the Center and the Periphery in Safavid Iran
Iran is commonly seen as having generated history's first world empire—an ideologically underpinned superstate ruling over a culturally diverse population. The Achaemenid Empire (c. 550‐330 BCE) “i
The Shah's Silk for Europe's Silver
Anti-Ottoman politics and transit rights
Rudi Matthee, Anti-Ottoman politics and transit rights : the seventeenth-century trade in silk between Safavid Iran and Muscovy. Trade relations between Russia and Iran go back to pre-Islamic times. They remained intermittent, however, until the rise of Muscovy, its annexation of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in the mid-sixteenth century, and the consolidation of Safavid rule in Iran in the same period. The backdrop to their subsequent expa…
The Career of Mohammad Beg, Grand Vizier of Shah 'Abbas II (r. 1642-1666)
La plus belle charge de la cour, c'est la faveur. Safavid historiography has oscillated between admiration and vilification in its appraisal of Shah ‘Abbas II's reign (1642-1666). In the accounts of contemporary observers—for the most part European travelers—one finds favorable descriptions of the shah and his court as part of a positive assessment of the overall state of the country. Impressed by the hospitality they enjoyed at the court of Isfa…
Rudeness and Revilement
This article examines the nature of Iranian–Russian diplomatic relations in the half century after the death of Shah cAbbas I in 1629, probing the conflicts and mutual interests that prompted the two states to exchange envoys in this period of diminishing high-level contact. In particular, it seeks to reconstruct the Russian mission that visited the court of Shah cAbbas II in 1664. By all accounts, this mission was treated in a most humiliating w…
The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj. Merchants, Rulers, and the British in the Nineteenth-Century Gulf
Was Safavid Iran an Empire
This paper examines the organizing ideological and infrastructural principles of the Safavid state structure and questions whether the Safavid state had the capacity and universality to qualify as an empire. Until now, the Safavid state has only been given equal status to the Ottoman and Mughal state as a “gunpowder empire”. But with this approach some other aspects tip the balance towards the cohesion and coherence that enabled the Safavid Empir…
Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani And The Egyptian National Debate
A remarkable man in his own lifetime, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani became a legend after his death. 1 For many people, Afghani evokes an image that combines the medieval ideal of the cosmopolitan Islamic scholar with the romantic aura of the 19th-century revolutionary. Since the late 1960s, Afghani has been the object of particular attention and controversy in both the West and the Islamic world. Iranian and Western scholars have radically reinterpret…
Introduction
Merchants in Safavid Iran
When dealing with the domestic merchants of Safavid Iran, modern scholarship has largely confined itself to Armenians. But Armenians were by no means the only indigenous traders to engage in commercial and financial transactions. This article looks at Armenians along with the other merchant groups active in Iran's domestic trade-Jews, Banians, and Muslims-from three different angles. Part one, an overview of the types of activities these groups w…
Between Venice and Surat
The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal states each in its own way reconstituted a common legacy of combined Perso-Islamic and Turco-Mongolian religious and political elements into sociopolitical structures that exhibit remarkable similarities alongside significant differences. This, as well as the myriad ways in which they interacted, culturally, politically, as well as economically, renders these three states more than simply a series of discreet and …
Neither Eastern nor Western, Iranian”
This essay identifies an historically-enduring Iranian insistence on self-sufficiency—which can be summed up, in a superordinate manner, as the idea that the world needs Iran more than Iran needs the world. Economically, this insistence is reflected in a (rhetorical) quest for self-reliance in production; politically, it tends to be articulated in an instinctive anti-(neo)colonial, often defiant stance vis-à-vis the world; and culturally, it is o…
Safavid Iran and the “Turkish Question” or How to Avoid a War on Multiple Fronts
This essay parts with the compartmentalized way in which scholarship tends to view Iran’s military predicament in the Safavid era by examining the perennial threat the Ottomans posed to the country largely in isolation from the recurring conflict between the Safavids and their other main adversaries, the Mughals and Uzbeks, respectively. The security dilemma facing Safavid Iran, it is argued here, was acute as well as multifaceted, and should be …
From Splendour and Admiration to Ruin and Condescension
This essay charts Western perceptions of Iran between 1600 and 1900 through the prism of ruins. It distinguishes three periods: the reign of the Safavids, when Iran's many ruins hardly undermined the admiration Europeans expressed for the country's vibrant present; the three-quarters of a century following the fall of the Safavids in 1722, when the few who still visited saw in the many ruins they encountered the foreordained fate of a decadent ci…
The Imaginary Realm
This essay explores the historical roots of the enigma that Iran perpetually presents to the outside world—a bleak and forbidding, deeply religious place that is also welcoming, poetic, and remarkably secular—by tracing the image European Enlightenment thinkers constructed of the country and its inhabitants. They were inspired by the lived experience of famous seventeenth-century travelers such as Jean Chardin and Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, but, wr…
Between Arabs, Turks and Iranians
Early modern Basra is often portrayed as the end of an Ottoman chain of command that grew successively weaker as it stretched from Istanbul to the Persian Gulf. This article complicates the picture of an imperial outpost over which the metropole was unable to impose effective control by discussing seventeenth-century Basra as the point of convergence of various regional and trans-regional spheres of influence and jurisdiction. Basra remained cont…
The Safavid, Afshar, and Zand Periods
IT is Not so Long Ago That the Period Between 1500 And 1800 Hardly figured in western scholarship on Iran. As recently as 1970 the number of book-length studies on aspects of Safavid Iran was limited to Lucien-Louis Bellan's study of Shah cAbbas I, Walther Hinz's book on the rise of the Safavids in the fifteenth century, Ghulam Sarwar's study of Shah Ismacil I, Vladimir Minorsky's edition of and commentary on the Tadhkirat al-Muluk, Laurence Lock…
Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani And The Egyptian National Debate
A remarkable man in his own lifetime, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani became a legend after his death. 1 For many people, Afghani evokes an image that combines the medieval ideal of the cosmopolitan Islamic scholar with the romantic aura of the 19th-century revolutionary. Since the late 1960s, Afghani has been the object of particular attention and controversy in both the West and the Islamic world. Iranian and Western scholars have radically reinterpret…
The Career of Mohammad Beg, Grand Vizier of Shah 'Abbas II (r. 1642-1666)
La plus belle charge de la cour, c'est la faveur. Safavid historiography has oscillated between admiration and vilification in its appraisal of Shah ‘Abbas II's reign (1642-1666). In the accounts of contemporary observers—for the most part European travelers—one finds favorable descriptions of the shah and his court as part of a positive assessment of the overall state of the country. Impressed by the hospitality they enjoyed at the court of Isfa…
Die persische Gesellschaft unter Nasiru'd-Din Šah (1848-1896), Heinz-Georg Migeod, Berlin
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Transforming Dangerous Nomads into Useful Artisans, Technicians, Agriculturists
The Reza Shah period (1921–1941) continues to be one of the most understudied as well as controversial episodes in Iran's modern history. Assessments of the period tend to be politically charged and reflect the widely diverging opinions about the extent and quality of its transformative nature. They rarely involve an appreciation of the effectiveness of the measures taken in this period in relation to stated policy objectives and allowing for the…
Anti-Ottoman politics and transit rights
Rudi Matthee, Anti-Ottoman politics and transit rights : the seventeenth-century trade in silk between Safavid Iran and Muscovy. Trade relations between Russia and Iran go back to pre-Islamic times. They remained intermittent, however, until the rise of Muscovy, its annexation of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan in the mid-sixteenth century, and the consolidation of Safavid rule in Iran in the same period. The backdrop to their subsequent expa…
Coffee in Safavid Iran
COFFEE IN SAFAVID IRAN: COMMERCE AND CONSUMPTION BY RUDI MATTHEE (University of Delaware) Ay s y h-r keh n m ast qahveh qatl-e naum qa eh-ye shahveh Oh blackfaced one whose name is coffee killer of sleep, destroyer of lust Persian proverb1) Introduction The introduction and popularization on a global scale of psychotropic substances such as tobacco, coffee, tea and chocolate are inextricably bound up with the trade revolution that got under way a…
Administrative Stability and Change in Late-17th-Century Iran
In June 1669 the Safavid ruler Shah Sulayman dismissed his grand vizier Mirza Muhammad Mahdi and appointed Shaykh ʿAli Khan Zanganah as his successor. Shaykh ʿAli Khan served in the exalted function of grand vizier or iʿtimad aldawla for a full twenty years and in this period grew into perhaps the most remarkable administrator of Safavid times
Changing the Mintmaster
In examining the process of modernization in Qajar Iran, modern scholarship has tended to focus either on the effects of Western exposure on Iranian intellectuals and educators, or on bureaucratic and military reforms initiated by the three major reformers of the nineteenth century, ‘Abbas Mirza, Mirza Taqi Khan (Amir Kabir), and Mirza Husayn Khan (Sipahsalar). This paper will address a different and equally important aspect of the modernization …
The Social Origins of Egyptian Expansionism During the Muhammad ʿAli Period
Between Aloofness and Fascination
Identity implies the other. As there is no self-definition without a view of the Other, the process whereby the “Self” discovers the “Other” is crucial to the formation of a self-image, for individuals as much as for groups of people claiming a collective identity. Historically, this process has never been more acute and intense than with the explosion of intercultural contact between Europe and the rest of the world following the so-called Age o…
The Safavid, Afshar, and Zand Periods
IT is Not so Long Ago That the Period Between 1500 And 1800 Hardly figured in western scholarship on Iran. As recently as 1970 the number of book-length studies on aspects of Safavid Iran was limited to Lucien-Louis Bellan's study of Shah cAbbas I, Walther Hinz's book on the rise of the Safavids in the fifteenth century, Ghulam Sarwar's study of Shah Ismacil I, Vladimir Minorsky's edition of and commentary on the Tadhkirat al-Muluk, Laurence Lock…
Introduction to “Historiography and Representation in Safavid and Afsharid Iran”
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Merchants in Safavid Iran
When dealing with the domestic merchants of Safavid Iran, modern scholarship has largely confined itself to Armenians. But Armenians were by no means the only indigenous traders to engage in commercial and financial transactions. This article looks at Armenians along with the other merchant groups active in Iran's domestic trade-Jews, Banians, and Muslims-from three different angles. Part one, an overview of the types of activities these groups w…
Belgen in Perzië 1915–1941
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Between Venice and Surat
The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal states each in its own way reconstituted a common legacy of combined Perso-Islamic and Turco-Mongolian religious and political elements into sociopolitical structures that exhibit remarkable similarities alongside significant differences. This, as well as the myriad ways in which they interacted, culturally, politically, as well as economically, renders these three states more than simply a series of discreet and …
Mint Consolidation and the Worsening of the Late Safavid Coinage
The provincial town of Huwayza in Arabistan/Khuzistan, southwestern Iran, was a minting center from the early days of the Safavid period. Huwayza became an especially productive mint in the course of the seventeenth century, issuing a silver coinage, the mahmudi, that became the most widely circulating of all currencies throughout the Persian Gulf basin. A combination of extant mahmudis and written records about these coins permits an analysis th…
The Shah's Silk for Europe's Silver
The Afghan Occupation of Safavid Persia 1771-1729
Forces of Habit
Blinded by Power
L'article offre une analyse de la vie et la carriere de Fath 'Alī Khān Dāghestānī, fonctionnaire d'origine peu prometteuse d'un grand avenir a la cour royale, qui couronna sa carriere en devenant le grand vizir de Chah Soltān-Hoseyn entre 1715 et 1720. Connu pour ses facons autoritaires et sa cupidite, il tomba victime d'intrigues orchestrees par des courtisans, perdit l'oreille du Chah, et finit par etre aveugle et renvoye, en laissant un legs p…
The Pursuit of Pleasure
From ancient times to the present day, Iranian social, political, and economic life has been dramatically influenced by psychoactive agents. This book looks at the stimulants that, as put by a longtime resident of seventeenth-century Iran, Raphaël du Mans, provided Iranians with damagh , gave them a "kick," got them into a good mood. By tracing their historical trajectory and the role they played in early modern Iranian society (1500-1900), Rudi …
Gott ist mit den Furchtlosen. Schirin Ebadi—die Friedensnobelpreisträgerin und der Kampf um die Zukunft Iran , Katajun Amirpur, Freiburg im Breisgau
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Between Arabs, Turks and Iranians
Early modern Basra is often portrayed as the end of an Ottoman chain of command that grew successively weaker as it stretched from Istanbul to the Persian Gulf. This article complicates the picture of an imperial outpost over which the metropole was unable to impose effective control by discussing seventeenth-century Basra as the point of convergence of various regional and trans-regional spheres of influence and jurisdiction. Basra remained cont…
Le dragoman Padery. Emissaire de France en Perse (1719–1725) , Anne-Marie Touzard, Paris
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The Medicinal Use of Opium in Ninth-Century Baghdad
This is a painstaking and, to all appearances, exhaustive study of the pharmacological and medicinal use of opium, papaver somniferum, in ‘Abbasid Baghdad, and as such a worthy successor to Franz Rosenthal’s classic work on hashish in early Islam, The Herb, Hashish versus Medieval Muslim Society(1971). Unlike hashish, opium was a pivotal ingredient in Islamic medicine, used as a cure-all at a time when self-medication was the norm and little else…
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