Opening the land: Tribes, state, and ethnicity in Qajar Iran, 1800--1911

"Opening the Land" traces the history of the Bakhtiyari tribes, a pastoral nomadic people living in the Zagros Mountains of southwest Iran. Based on tribal histories and genealogies, Persian chronicles, archival collections in England, and fieldwork in the Zagros, this thesis explores the sedentarization of the Bakhtiyari during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It recounts the modern transformations that interrupted long-standing policies of indirect rule between the state and the tribes, the center and the periphery, in Iran. This study asks the question why the Bakhtiyari were unable to move "from the tent to the throne" to establish the country's next tribal dynasty? It suggests that the answer lies in the opening of the Bakhtiyari land ( Khak-i Bakhtiyari) in the years 1800 through 1911. During this time period, a shift occurred in the relations between tribal society and the state, altering the dynamics of tribal life and initiating the settlement of pastoral nomads.;This thesis is an attempt to write the history of Qajar Iran "from the edge," an alternative to a prevailing historiography which emphasizes the elite, the urban middle classes, and the ulama (theologians), leaving out social groups on the peripheries of Iran. The first part explores the construction of Bakhtiyari tribal identity and the interactions between tribes and the early modern state. The second part turns to the modern changes brought about by the building of the Bakhtiyari Road, the advent of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and the coming of the Constitutional Revolution. This study suggests that the Bakhtiyari, far from passively waiting to be modernized, played an active role in the opening of the land, as confederated tribes, as the guardians of roads, as workers in the oilfields, and as revolutionary armies. This stands in contrast to the prevailing nationalist historiography that attributes the modernization of tribes in Iran almost completely, and rather suddenly, to Riza Shah Pahlavi's policy of forced sedentarization and pacification in the 1920s and 1930s. By contrast, this study suggests that important changes were already underway in the late Qajar period and that the tribes played a part in bringing them about.