These essays examine Iran’s place in the world--its relations and cultural interactions with its immediate neighbors and with empires and superpowers from the

A boom in the production and export of cotton turned Iran into the richest region of the Islamic caliphate in the ninth and tenth centuries. Yet in the eleventh

After the invasion of France in 1940 a junior Iranian diplomat, the aristocratic Abdol-Hossein Sardari, found himself in charge of Iran's legation in Paris, and

A masterfully researched and compelling history of Iran from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first

A convergence of land and language (3500-550 BCE) -- Iran and the Greeks (550-247 BCE) -- Parthians, Sasanian and Sogdians (247 BCE-651 CE) -- The Iranization o