ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines a basis for answering Montesquieu's question through a look at the social structure of Iran in the first half of the seventeenth century. The date, "circa 1630," derives its significance from the fact that the Safavid Empire is generally acknowledged to have reached its peak under Shah 'Abbas, who ruled Iran from 1587 to 1629. The Safavid state can be analyzed in terms of three key institutions—the central bureaucracy, the provincial government, and the army. England invested this income wisely in a vast fleet which would later bring it rich dividends. Pastoralism constituted the economic basis of nomadic tribal life. In seventeenth-century Iran, these centered on the religious and political claims of the Safavid shahs, the embryonic oppositional element in the Shi'a political culture of the time, and the other manifestations of popular consciousness that can be discerned in the population.
