The Introduction explains the scope of the book, briefly sketches the history of Iran’s eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, situates the book within the existing scholarly literature, and states its two main arguments: that the formation of Qajar Iran was grounded in political, social, and economic processes; and that the Qajars attempted to form an imperial system of governance modeled on earlier imperial systems. The Introduction then explains how those arguments contribute to the scholarship on Iranian history and the histories of imperial formation.