2022 Ann Lambton Memorial Lecture
Unequal Treaties and the Question of Sovereignty in Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran
With Professor Ali Gheissari
Hosted by Duraham University, the event is jointly organised by BIPS and IMeEIS (Durham University).
This presentation will offer an overview of the Russian and British leverage in Iran during the Qajar and early Pahlavi periods through unequal treaties as one channel of extending their imperial influence and counterbalancing each other’s rival presence. Although Iran was never directly colonized, its sovereignty was frequently compromised by competing foreign interests as reflected in several unequal treaties and concessionary agreements which, in effect, created a semicolonial situation for the country during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The paper will address certain aspects of these points in three interrelated sections. The first section will provide a general discussion on unequal treaties, notably the Golestan Treaty of 1813 and the Turkmenchay Treaty of 1828 between Russia and Iran, and their implications. Subsequently, the Qajar state’s traditional perspective on sovereignty, in terms of the guarded domain, and its ways of maintaining it and Iran’s semicolonial condition in the 19th and the early 20th centuries will be discussed in the second section. However, by building on modern requisites of sovereignty based on the paradigm of nation-state and introducing a set of corresponding legal and administrative reforms that were adopted in late 1920s and early 1930s, the early Pahlavi state set out to remove hitherto capitulatory agreements, a topic that will be addressed in the last section.
About the speaker:
Ali Gheissari (Ph.D, University of Oxford, History) is Adjunct Professor of History at the University of San Diego, College of Art and Sciences. Gheissari has research interest in the intellectual history and politics of modern Iran and has published broadly in English and Persian on modern Iranian history and also on modern philosophy and social theory. His publications include Illuminationist Texts and Textual Studies: Essays in Memory of Hossein Ziai (co-eds., Brill, 2017); Contemporary Iran: Economy, Society, Politics (ed., Oxford University Press, 2009); Tabriz and Rasht in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (ed., Tehran, 2008); Democracy in Iran: History and the Quest for Liberty (co-author, Oxford University Press, 2006; 2009); Iranian Intellectuals in the Twentieth Century (University of Texas Press, 1998; 2008); Persian translation of Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Ethics (with Hamid Enayat, Tehran, 1991; new edition, 2015); Manfred Frings et al., Max Scheler and Phenomenology (tr., Tehran, 2015); Kant on Time and Other Essays (authored, Tehran, 2018).
He has held visiting appointments at the University of Tehran, the Iranian Institute of Philosophy, UCLA, Brown University, St. Antony’s College at the University of Oxford, and the Middle East Institute at the National University of Singapore. His current research focuses on legal and constitutional history of modern Iran. Professor Gheissari serves on the Board of Directors of the Persian Heritage Foundation (PHF), the Editorial Board of the Iran Studies series published by Brill (Leiden), and is also Editor-in-Chief of the journal Iranian Studies.
Registration is not required, Please join the webinar on the day at this link.
Top left: Qum (Iran): Hazrat-i Ma’suma Shrine Complex and Islamic Cemetery in the Foreground. Photograph by Antoin Sevruguin, Smithsonian Institution.