Using a wide range of archival and written sources, Rudi Matthee considers the economic, social and political networks established between Iran, its neighbours and the world at large, through the prism of the late Safavid silk trade. In so doing, he demonstrates how silk, a resource crucial to state revenue and the only commodity to span Iran's entire economic activity, was integral to aspects of late Safavid society, including its approach to commerce, export routes and, importantly, to the political and economic problems which contributed to its collapse in the early 1700s. In a challenge to traditional scholarship, the author argues that despite the introduction of a maritime, western-dominated channel, Iran's traditional land-based silk export continued to expand right up to the end of the seventeenth century. The book makes a major theoretical contribution to the debates on the social and economic history of the pre-modern world.

This book considers the economic, social and political importance of the silk trade in Safavid Iran. It focuses on four aspects of this trade: the role of silk in Iranian commercial policy, the interaction between agents of the state and foreign merchants, the routes along which silk was transported and, critically, the economic and social difficulties that contributed to the collapse of the regime in the 1720s. This represents a major contribution to the current debates on the social and economic history of the premodern world.