The Afghan Occupation of Safavid Persia 1771-1729.

• Author: Matthee, Rudi
• Position: Reviews of Books

The Afghan Occupation of Safavid Persia 1771-1729. Compiled, annotated, and translated by WILLEM FLOOR. Les Cahiers de Studia Iranica, 19. Paris: ASSOCIATION POUR L'AVANCEMENT DES ETUDES IRANIENNES, 1998. Pp. 389.

Willem Floor has long been actively making the information on Iran in the Dutch national archives available to a larger audience. This collection of reports of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in the dying days of the Safavid era is an example of that endeavor. The book came about in a roundabout fashion, for its English text served as the original for a Persian translation that was published in 1986-87, as Bar oftadan-e Safaviyan, bar amadan-e Mahmud Afghan (revayat-e shahedan-i holandi) (The fall of the Safavids and the rise of Mahmud the Afghan, as told by Dutch witnesses), translated by Abu'l Qasem Serri (Tehran: Entesharat-e Tus, 1365). That version has served mostly Iranian historians, who have used it as a source for the history of the demise of the Safavid dynasty in 1722 and the events surrounding the short-lived rule of the Afghans, a period that is poorly covered by Persian and European eyewitness accounts alike. The present text is likely to do the same for all those without access to the Dutch archives or unable to read Persian.

As Floor states in his preface, The Afghan Occupation of Safavid Persia is less a source publication than a summary of the writings of the VOC agents during the tumultuous period when Afghan invaders overran Iran and dealt the death-blow to the Safavid state. The only exception is the diary of the siege of Isfahan in 1722 preceding the final collapse of central Safavid authority, and certain sections of the Dutch diaries of Gombroon (Bandar [Abbas.contains.c] which are translated in full. Aside from listing the names of numerous officials who are otherwise undocumented, these diaries offer a great deal of information about the desperate circumstances in Isfahan during the siege of the city, with a court frantically trying to stave off doom by rotating officials on a daily basis. The diaries and summaries of reports similarly provide many details about the southern part of the country and especially about cities for which we otherwise have little or no other source material, much less eyewitness reports, such as Kerman, Lar, and Shiraz. The appendices provide useful information about the physical appearance of the fortifications on the isle of Hormuz, where the Dutch intended to take refuge...