The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran
Silk for Silver, 1600-1730

This book considers the economic, social and political importance of the silk trade in Safavid Iran.

Using a wide range of archival and written sources, Rudi Matthee considers the economic, social and political networks established between Iran, its neighbours and the world at large, through the prism of the late Safavid silk trade. In so doing, he demonstrates how silk, a resource crucial to state revenue and the only commodity to span Iran's entire economic activity, was integral to aspects of late Safavid society, including its approach to commerce, export routes and, importantly, to the political and economic problems which contributed to its collapse in the early 1700s. In a challenge to traditional scholarship, the author argues that despite the introduction of a maritime, western-dominated channel, Iran's traditional land-based silk export continued to expand right up to the end of the seventeenth century. The book makes a major theoretical contribution to the debates on the social and economic history of the pre-modern world.

Preface
Acknowledgements
Notes on transliteration
List of abbreviations
Maps
Introduction
1. The Iranian silk trade: from the Silk Road to the Safavids
2. Procedures, logistics, finances
3. Shah 'Abbas I and the Safavid political economy: territorial expansion, anti-Ottoman diplomacy, and the politics of silk
4. Government control and growing competition: the silk export monopoly and the advent of the European maritime companies
5. The complications of privatization: from the abolition of the silk export monopoly to the peace of Zuhab, 1629-1639
6. Conflict and reorientation: silk to silver, 1640-1667
7. Renewed regulation and the rise of the Russian connection, 1660s-1690s
8. Contraction and continuity, 1690-1730

Conclusion
Appendix
Glossary
Bibliography
Index.