This is among the first books to study the formation of Qajar Iran. It draws on a wide array of unpublished and published primary sources and adopts a socially oriented approach to political history – an approach that examines the discourse and political practices, and the centers and peripheries, of empire. Each chapter focuses on a particular practice that was at the heart of Qajar governance – land administration, gift-giving, marriage, political correspondence, provincial diplomacy, and territorial conquest and tribal relations. Together, the book highlights three closely related themes. The first is that the Qajars were part of a long historical tradition of imperial rule in the Iranian world. The second is of early Qajar governance practices being shaped by the historical circumstances of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And the third theme is of a dynamic and evolving empire being made and remade. This is a book not of imperial structures, but of a process of imperial formation.