ABSTRACT
The influence of European models on nineteenth-and twentieth-century discourses of reform, state-building and modernization in Iran is universally acknowledged. This acknowledgement, however, often conceals a tendency, conscious or unconscious, towards conceptualizing Europe in an ideologically partisan way, a Europe defined by French or British templates, constitutional, liberal, secular, modern. But there were other European influences at work on modern Iran. Russian military successes in the eighteenth-century era of “enlightened absolutism” provided the early Qajar political elite with an example that was profoundly authoritarian, while Russian military assistance to the later Qajar shahs brought to Iran a political element, in the shape of a succession of Cossack officers, that was deeply and actively reactionary. Just as scholarship on Iran has tended to designate as “European” only those influences of which it approved, so it has imagined their transmission to be essentially an elite activity, operating, furthermore, in one direction only, from West to East. According to this view, the diffusion of “Europe” in Iran took place through the reception of ideas, cultural practices, technological innovations and so on by the shah himself, his ministers and officials, and the tiny literate classes. Subaltern, popular, dissident and non-literate exchanges are relegated to the margins, while any possibility of Iranian influence on the Europeans who lived and worked in the country, sometimes for very long periods, is quarantined within the phenomenon of “going native”. Finally, Europe is often posited as an unchanging and ahistorical entity, conceptualized in metaphysical terms, its impact on the wider world unrelated to and independent of the social, political and economic struggles and transformations convulsing individual European countries and the continent in general throughout the nineteenth century. Europe is, in this schema, divorced from time and space. In reality, of course, the Europe encountered by Qajar Iran was not only multifaceted but itself undergoing a continuous process of kaleidoscopic change, this process of change reproduced within and crucially determining the Iranian–Russian nexus.
