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Tobacco, Eurasian Trade, and the Early Modern Iranian Economy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Ranin Kazemi
Ranin Kazemi*
Affiliation:
International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam and Kansas State University
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Abstract

This article focuses on the development of the tobacco industry in Iran during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It uses this discussion as an entry point to inquire about the early modern Iranian economy. Using a wide range of primary and secondary sources, it makes several historiographical interventions. In explaining what the development of a completely new agrarian industry means in Iranian society, the paper suggests that innovation and intensification may not have been completely absent in agriculture and that in contrast to the way some of the available literature tends to argue, the Iranian economy may not have experienced continuous decline in all sectors throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, this article contends that the tobacco industry helped bring about the rise of merchants and landowners in Iranian society, and with that the further development of mass consumption and ever-increasing cycles of production and accumulation that expanded the commercialization of agriculture, domestic and international trade networks, and Iran’s agrarian economy.

Keywords

CapitalismCommercialized AgricultureCommodification of TobaccoCoffeeRecreational DrugsSafavid EconomyMass Consumerism
Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 49 , Issue 4 , July 2016 , pp. 613 - 633
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2015

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Footnotes

Ranin Kazemi is grateful to Kioumars Ghereghlou, Stephen F. Dale, Abbas Amanat, Alan Mikhail, Robert Harms, Navid Fozi, Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan, Homa Katouzian, and the anonymous reviewers at Iranian Studies for their comments on the earlier drafts of this paper. Support was provided in the writing of this article by the Prince Dr. Sabbar Farman-Farmaian Research Project Fellowship at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam. Particular thanks are due to Touraj Atabaki.

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