After the destructive decades following the fall of the Safavid Empire, the Qajar dynasty inherited a weakened state and the growing threat of European imperial powers, culminating in two wars with Russia. In this book, Maziar Behrooz provides a history of the Qajar dynasty’s navigation of this difficult period, beginning with the reign of Aqa Muhammad Shah and ending with that of Fath Ali Shah. Examining the key decisions taken by Qajar, Russian, British and other actors, the book argues that a reevaluation of the early-Qajar period is required, one which acknowledges the failures of its rulers, while recognising the external constraints they were under, and their successes in reuniting a formerly fragmented state in the face of overwhelming technological, economic and military firepower.

Why were left-wing politics so ineffective in Iran while socialism and communism were making great strides in the rest of the world? Why did the Left not capitalise on Iran’s brief fling with anti-western politics in the early 1950’s before the CIA and MI6 inspired military coup which restored the Shah to his throne? And above all why was the Left so crushingly defeated after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran? The author unearths new details and provides fresh insights into an enduring puzzle of modern Iranian political history, concluding that the Left’s demise came from a combination of Iran’s geopolitical setting, where both the Soviet and western worlds saw advantage in the stability of Iran during the Cold War, as well as internal factors such as splits and factionalism, and - not least - the Iranian Left’s over-enthusiastic devotion to a barren Stalinism with its poverty of philosophy and ideas. Based on primary and secondary Persian-language sources never before published in English, this book is a crucial addition to the literature on modern Iranian history and the study of communist and socialist history in general.