Persian recreations: Theatricality in Anglo-Persian diplomatic history, 1599-1828

This dissertation analyzes British overtures to Persia in two periods---initial contacts at the start of the seventeenth century, and the re-establishment of diplomatic relations at the beginning of the nineteenth. It argues that the performative nature of British diplomacy in Persia challenges Edward Said's reading of Orientalism as a fixed and repressive discourse. This study thus complicates the power/discourse paradigm, which claims that European representations of the Orient are not neutral depictions but exercises in power, by considering the theatricality of Empire building and the perplexities which underscored Oriental masquerades. Citing the works of Clifford Geertz, Tzvetan Todorov, and Stephen Greenblatt, it argues that any articulation of Orientalism needs "thick description," not macro-historiography. Hence this essay reads the refraction of British eyewitness accounts across genres in diaries, correspondences, pamphlets, plays, and novels.; After a brief summary of Elizabethan knowledge of Persia, chapter one analyzes Anthony Sherley's mission to Persia (1599) and how recreating the Persian became an exercise in self-fashioning for the amateur diplomat in his apologia, Sir Anthony Sherley His Relation of His Travels in Persia (1613), and in other English texts which celebrated him. The second chapter, in considering the two missions of Robert Sherley to England on behalf of Shah Abbas (1613; 1624), investigates the perception of the Persian ambassador in John Day's play, The Travails of the Three English Brothers (1607), as well as in official and private documents. In its discussion of the resumption of Anglo-Persian diplomatic relations (1800--1810), chapter three probes the Persian impersonations of John Malcolm and Harford Jones as recounted in their respective travelogues Sketches of Persia (1828) and An Account of The Transactions... (1834). Chapter four examines representations of Abul Hassan Khan Shirazi, Persian ambassador to the court of George III and the prototype for the protagonist of James Morier's novels The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824) and The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan in England (1828), a figure in which the English author and his Persian subject merge. The diplomatic perils the British envoys encountered in Persia led them to masquerade and play; such theatricality suggests the inadequacy of seeing Orientalism as merely a discourse of domination.