This article collects and analyses passages about male and female domestic slaves in the Persian Rivāyats. The Rivāyats consist of correspondence between Iranian and Indian Zoroastrians (Parsis) from the late fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries ce. In these letters, Parsis sought the opinions of Iranian Zoroastrians on various doctrinal and ritual issues. The passages in question cover a range of subjects, including the issue of converting household slaves to Zoroastrianism, their participation in domestic religious ceremonies, the exposure of their dead bodies in the towers of silence, and marrying female slaves. These references to slaves challenge the conventional narrative that pre-modern Zoroastrians were oppressed, marginalized, and poor communities. This narrative has overshadowed these pieces of evidence and has caused them not to be studied seriously. This paper seeks to go beyond this traditional reconstruction by examining these texts based on their context. The passages reflect the actual socio-religious issues of Zoroastrians, especially Parsis, and demonstrate their participation in the slave-owning milieu of late medieval and early modern Gujarat and Iran rather than mere anachronistic elements or rhetorical tools reflecting a scholastic treatment of a defunct legal question.

For a century following the opening of the Suez Canal, the scale and scope of global capital and information flows was predicated on a chain of imperial outposts like Aden, where ships could replenish their fuel supplies while shorefront godowns and telegraph stations gathered commodities and information to be received, processed, and relayed; by the 1950s, over 5,000 vessels called on the harbour annually, making Aden the second busiest port in the world after New York. This article explores the role of Indian-Zoroastrian (Parsi) capital in shaping the material and institutional development of the port of Aden. Parsi firms mediated between international shipping and the hostile environment of the desert colony, supplying provisions and providing brokerage and agency, or dubash services, literally meaning ‘translator’ in the vernacular. More than a particularly successful comprador community, however, Aden Parsis developed an elaborate transoceanic trade predicated on self-financed, capital-intensive infrastructure projects. Tracing the outsourcing of imperial statecraft to dubashes in Aden allows us to provincialize the making of first-wave globalization, as it was predominantly Parsi capitalists rather than European businessmen who were the driving forces of Aden’s development.

This is a review article of a three-volume book in Persian by Ali Akbar Tashakori on the social history of Yazdi Zoroastrians in medieval and modern times.1 The work goes beyond the history of the Yazdi community, encompassing the broader history of Iranian Zoroastrians. Despite certain novelties, the volumes largely rely on a conventional reconstruction of the history of Iranian Zoroastrians in the second millennium CE. The foundational elements of this reconstruction include the gradual Islamization of Iran and the subsequent “retreat” of Zoroastrians to the “marginal” regions of Yazd and Kerman, the challenging conditions faced by Zoroastrians in medieval and early modern times, the beginning of Iranian Zoroastrians’ social and intellectual “emancipation” in the nineteenth century with Parsi assistance, the community's increasing political and economic influence in the late Qajar and early Pahlavi eras, and the Pahlavis’ exceptional role in elevating the status of Zoroastrians within wider Iranian society. Tashakori's extensive reliance on these narratives offers an opportunity to not only review his own new interpretations, but also to reassess these long-standing assumptions. Additionally, the article highlights neglected primary sources pertaining to the Yazdi community.

This article brings a new perspective to Parsi philanthropy in late Qajar Iran by exploring its British imperial dimensions. It examines how Parsis leveraged British diplomatic heft in their amelioration of Iranian Zoroastrians and how imperial connections helped Parsis translate charity into political and economic power. This was a mutually beneficial process: British diplomats identified strategic value in Parsi philanthropy for Iranian Zoroastrians. It was particularly useful in Great Game rivalries against Russia, as Britain attempted to cultivate Iranian Zoroastrians to shore up its influence in southern Iran. Interactions between Parsis, Iranian Zoroastrians, and British diplomats neatly illustrate the extraordinary influence which small minorities could wield in imperial politics.

This article investigates the history of economic relations between Iran and the Parsi community of India during the Reza Shah period. Encouraged by the policies of the new Pahlavi state, Parsi entrepreneurs began a serious effort to investigate the possibilities of economic investment in Iran. The article details three Parsi economic missions that were conducted in Iran during this period, and analyzes their assessments of Iran's potential for development in fields such as energy, textile manufacturing, commercial agriculture, and modern transportation systems. As the article argues, while these Parsi-led initiatives were part of a larger history of renewed engagement between Parsis and Iranians, for a variety of political and economic reasons, by the outbreak of World War II few of the Parsi plans for investment in Iran had come to fruition. While remaining largely forestalled in the interwar period, the article also suggests that Parsi economic assessments foreshadowed many of the planning strategies carried out in Iran's post–World War II history of economic development.

This article rethinks the relationship between trade and industry in the development of Indian capitalism, focusing on Tata, pioneers in textile and steel production. It shows how two little-known affiliated trading companies, R.D. Tata & Co. in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Kobe, and Tata Limited in London, played a crucial intermediary role in securing financing and market access for the parent firm in Bombay while simultaneously increasing its exposure to the effects of global crises. Tata's ultimately dominant position in a protected national economy was due to the contingent failure of these trading companies rather than a foregone conclusion.