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Nader Shah and Persian Naval Expansion in the Persian Gulf, 1700–1747

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2011

MICHAEL AXWORTHY
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Abstract

The purpose of this article is to relate a remarkable episode involving Nader Shah's navy and to connect it directly to the wider aims and projects of his regime (notably his ambitions in India), and the central events of his reign. In this way his Persian Gulf policy may emerge not as the oddity it might at first appear, but rather as a consistent element in a coherent larger whole.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , January 2011 , pp. 31 - 39
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Asiatic Society 2011

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References

1 Of the contemporary chronicles of Nader's life, the most important is that of his official historian, Mirza Mohammad Mahdi Astarabadi - his Tarikh-e Jahangusha-ye Naderi (JN); translated into French by Jones, Sir William as the Histoire de Nader Chah, (London, 1770)Google Scholar; Persian, original text (ed.) Anvar, Abdollah, (Anjoman Asar va Mafakher-e Farhangi) (Tehran, 1377/1998)Google Scholar.

2 ‘The Navy of Nadir Shah’ in Proceedings of the Iran Society Vol. 1 Part 1, pp 3–18, (London, 1936).

3 Lockhart, Laurence, Nadir Shah (London, 1938)Google Scholar.

4 Willem Floor, ‘The Iranian Navy in the Gulf during the Eighteenth Century’ in Iranian Studies, 20, 1987. Like Willem Floor's other publications translating and summarising evidence from the records of the Dutch East India Company, this article conveys a wealth of new primary source material. I am grateful to Willem for commenting on this article before submission (which produced a number of amendments): he and I have discussed the Military Revolution thesis at length without (so far) reaching full agreement.

5 Floor 1987, pp. 34–37.

6 The best detailed overall account in English of the Afghan revolt and the fall of the Safavid monarchy is still Laurence Lockhart's The Fall of the Safavi Dynasty and the Afghan Occupation of Persia (Cambridge, 1958) – though important additional source material has become available since that time.

7 Nader came from the Turkic Afshar tribe of northern Khorasan.

8 The argument is developed at greater length in my article ‘The Army of Nader Shah’ in Iranian Studies, December 2000, pp. 635–646. It is not an absolute argument, but one of degree: not one of whether the Safavids had or used gunpowder weapons or not (obviously, they did) but of the extent, by comparison with their neighbours and others, to which previous patterns of warfare and military practice were changed by the introduction of firearms.

9 Hodgson, Marshall G. S., The Venture of Islam [especially Vol. 3, ‘The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times’] (Chicago, 1974)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 ‘Unwalled Cities and Restless Nomads: Firearms and Artillery in Safavid Iran’ in Melville, Charles (ed.) Safavid Persia: The History and Politics of an Islamic Society (London, 1996), pp. 389–416Google Scholar.

11 Parker, Geoffrey, The Military Revolution (Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar.

12 Gombroon diary (the records of the British East India Company (EIC) at Bandar Abbas, drawing on letters from their traders in Isfahan, Kerman and elsewhere – held in the India Office Collection of the British Library, classmark G/29/ vols 3–6 and 16) for 24 December 1729/4th January 1730; Ali Hazin, Sheikh Mohammad, (ed.) and (trans.) Belfour, F. C. as The Life of Shaikh Mohammed Ali Hazin (London, 1830), pp. 200–202Google Scholar.

13 Not to detract from the significance of his defeat by guerrilla tactics in Daghestan in 1742.

14 Willem Floor, ‘The Revolt of Shaikh Ahmad Madani in Laristan and the Garmsirat (1730–1733)’, in Studia Iranica 12, 1983.

15 Gombroon diary, 2nd/13th May 1734 (not the entry for 7th/18th May as Lockhart has it – Nadir Shah p. 78); Floor 1987, p. 39.

16 Mohammad Khan was captured by mid-June 1734. He was sent to Isfahan, where he was blinded as punishment. He died shortly afterwards (JN Vol. 1, p. 193; Floor 1983, pp. 90–91; Gombroon diary 8th/19th May 1734).

17 The Dutch, who had effectively refused to help the Persians acquire ships for themselves, later ruefully alleged that the English made a 200% profit on the deal (Floor 1987, pp. 38–39 and p. 41).

18 Gombroon diary, 7th/18th May 1734.

19 An Englishman, John Elton, was also involved in the establishment of a small fleet for Nader on the Caspian Sea. But that story is outside the scope of this study.

20 Gombroon diary, 18th/29th June 1735; Floor 1987, pp. 39–40. According to the Dutch, Nader removed Latif Khan from his post after this failure, but reinstated him within a year.

21 But only temporarily – Sheikh Jabbara and the Huwalas returned in 1737 and the Persian forces were too busy elsewhere to uphold their control of the island. The fort at Manama fell in the summer of 1738. Floor, Willem, The Persian Gulf: The Rise of the Gulf Arabs – The Politics of Trade on the Persian Littoral 1747–1792 (Washington DC, 2007), pp. 241–242Google Scholar.

22 Floor 1987, pp. 41–42.

23 Floor 1987, pp. 46–47; also Floor's article in Iran and Iranian Studies: Essays in Honor of Iraj Afshar, (ed.) Kambiz Eslami (Princeton, 1998); Gombroon diary entries for October and November 1739; Lockhart 1936, p. 11.

24 For the preceding paragraphs see: Lockhart 1938, pp. 182–184 and 212–216; and Floor 1987, pp. 43–49. For the suffering caused by Nader's orders for timber to be brought from Mazanderan, see: Père Louis Bazin ‘Memoires sur les dernieres annees du regne de Thamas Kouli-Kan et sa mort tragique, contenus dans un lettre du Frere Bazin’ in Lettres Edifiantes et Curieuses Ecrites des Missions Etrangeres; Vol. IV, (Paris, 1780) [the letter was written in 1751] – p. 319.

25 Floor 1987, p. 51.

26 Lockhart 1936, pp. 12–14; Floor 1987, pp. 51–53.

27 Gombroon Diary, 5th/16th February 1740; Floor, Willem, ‘Dutch Trade in Afsharid Persia’, Studia Iranica 34 (2005) – reprinted in FloorCrossRefGoogle Scholar, The Rise and Fall of Nader Shah: Dutch East India Company Reports 1730–1747, (London, 2009). For Nader Shah's plans for India and a compelling counterfactual thought experiment on what could have happened if he had established an Irano-Indian Empire, see: Subrahmanyam, S. ‘Un Grand Derangement: Dreaming an Indo-Persian Empire in South Asia, 1740–1800’ Journal of Early Modern History, Vol. IV, (Leiden, 2000)Google Scholar.

28 In his later years Nader showed some awareness of the need to protect merchants and their trading, but his rapacity in the quest for cash to pay his huge armies devastated the economy of his territories. His grand schemes of empire could not have been sustained without a drastic re-alignment of policy in favour of economic development. Some contemporaries believed that his son Reza Qoli, had he not been blinded, would have governed more wisely.

29 Notably Floor, in the various works cited, but also Thomas M. Ricks in a presentation to the annual Gulf conference at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies, University of Exeter, July 2006.