Sholeh Quinn

Overall a slim but informative volume. It is structured both chronologically and thematically. Shah Abbas's life is broken up into three periods: the first being his early life, accession to power and consolidation of power; the second being his moving the capital to Isfahan, his building projects in that city, his instituting new economic policies, his engagement with the religious authorities, and his major military campaigns to retake territory from the Uzbeks in the east and the Ottomans in the west; and the third being his final years where he continued to campaign in Georgia, committing atrocities there in 1615 with the massacre of 70,000 people, developed further political and commercial ties with European powers, expelled the Portuguese from Hormuz, retook Qandahar in the east and Baghdad in the west, all the while mostly governing from the Caspian region, allowing the bureaucracy he had created in Isfahan to function in his absence.

Within each of these three periods of Abbas's life are thematic subdivisions dealing with all sorts of topics from art to war. My only criticism is that often these thematic chapters or sections dealt with events that happened in periods that did not correspond with the chronological division of the book in which they were contained. For example, the third section of the book deals with the period of Abbas's reign from 1612-1629. Within that division, there might be a section of a military campaign. However, the author won't confine her analysis to events that happened between 1612 and 1629, instead going much further back. Now, of course, this is often necessary for reasons of context, but this sort of lack of consistency between the three main chronological divisions of the book and the actual content of the chapters and sections made for a chaotic reading experience. Since sections were very short, often only a couple of pages, one constantly got the feeling that they were reading about a very narrow issue over a broad time period, followed by the next section dealing with another narrow issue over a broad time period, and on and on. It could get disorienting because one felt like one was constantly bouncing all over the place, chronologically, which disrupted the attempt by the author to create a chronological narrative. I think it would have been better to either stick to a strict chronological structure, or a strict thematic one; the attempt to join both of them in a mixed structure was not a great success, in my opinion.

With that said, I still felt it was a good introduction to an interesting historical figure in a time period I know very little about. The author has a clear writing style that is both engaging enough to draw in general readers but academic enough to avoid being shelved as pop history. Recommended for anyone interested in Shah Abbas, the Safavids, or Iranian history more generally.… (altro)