Anxious Onlookers: Qajar Iran and European Imperial Expansion (1797-1812) - The Gholam Reza Nikpay Annual Lecture
Speaker
Chair
We welcome you to join us for the Gholam Reza Nikpay Annual Lecture, hosted by the Iranian History Initiative in the Department of International History.
In a short span of fifteen years the lands between Nile and Ganges were invaded by three European imperial armies: Britain, France and Russia. Caught between two rival powers, Qajar Iran had little choice but to try to strike a balance between Russia in the north and Britain in the south.
In this talk Professor Abbas Amanat will argue that even the idea of a regional alliance, as proposed by Tipu Soltan of Mysore at the very end of the 18th century, could not persuade Fath Ali Shah Qajar to change course. As an anxious observer, the tragic fall of Mysore convinced him not to entertain ambitions beyond his means. Two rounds of disastrous wars with Russia further proved the point. Strategically vulnerable and with limited economic and human resources, maintaining a fragile status quo seemed to be the safest, if not the only, option for preserving Iran’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.
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Meet our speaker:
Abbas Amanat is the William Graham Sumner Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University. A graduate of Alborz high school, he received his B.A. from Tehran University in 1971 and his Doctorate of Philosophy from the School of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, in 1981. He taught at Yale University between 1983 and 2021. He has written about early modern and modern history of Iran, the Middle East, the Muslim world and the Persianate world.
Meet our chair:
Dr Roham Alvandi is Associate Professor of International History and Director of the Iranian History Initiative at LSE. He is the author of Nixon, Kissinger, and the Shah: The United States and Iran in the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2014), which was selected by the Financial Times as one of its books of year, and of a forthcoming book on human rights, Jimmy Carter, and the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
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