ABSTRACT
The ground covered so far has focused on some principal moments in the history of social change in Iran from 1500 to 1800—the seventeenth-century peak, the fall of the Safavids in 1722, and the eighteenth-century watershed. The Safavids' 222-year reign was the longest in a millennium in Iran and the durability constitutes further testimony to the political stability they enjoyed. Inter- and intra-elite struggles proved more salient in the Safavid period. After several tribal civil wars in the sixteenth century, the Safavid state temporarily succeeded in imposing its absolutist claim over the unruly tribal elite in the early seventeenth century. The Safavid dynasty lurched into an intertwined economic, political, and ideological crisis by the turn of the eighteenth century. A parallel development of import was the decoupling of the state-ulama connection that flourished under the Safavids. The Sunni Afghans and Nadir attempted to lodge Shi'ism from its position as state and national religion; Karim restored it only nominally.
