6 - A Wandering Monarch

Summary

In Chapter 6, “A Wandering Monarch,” I look closely at Naser al-Din Shah’s Safar-Nameh/Travelogue (1873). This travelogue by a sitting Qajar monarch represents the widely popular significance of travel narratives in the nineteenth century, in which the royal pen now indulges. The genre was so successful that the ruling monarch wishes to be part of it. Traveling was integral to this arguably most significant Qajar monarch. He traveled widely throughout Iran and abroad and kept diligent records of his travels. His three journeys to Europe (in 1873, 1878, 1889, successively) are integral to this peripatetic monarch. What is particular to these travels, the first of which I will discuss in detail in this chapter, is the fact that the reigning king had effectively moved the political center of gravity of his realm away from his capital of Tehran and presided over a mobile court. It is, again, important to remember that Naser al-Din Shah traveled as much in his own realm and then around the Arab and Muslim world in the Ottoman Empire as he did to Europe. He financed these trips mostly by selling off major concessions to European colonial interests. Because of the structural link between these colonial concessions and Naser al-Din Shah’s extravagant trips abroad, his widely published travelogues were paradoxically the source of much anger and frustration during the preparatory stages of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911. The famous Tobacco Revolt of 1890–1891 was in rebellious reaction to a lucrative tobacco concession the Qajar monarch had granted Major G. F. Talbot, a British colonial merchant, during one of his European trips – for a full monopoly over the production, sale, and export of tobacco for fifty years. The Tobacco Revolt was a dress rehearsal for the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911.