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IRAN
AND THE WORLD IN THE SAFAVID AGE
Abstracts
Ghazvinian, Mr. John, Oxford University, Oxford,
British Travellers to Iran, 1580-1645
In recent years,
scholars, and especially those of a literary bent, have taken
great interest in early modern encounters between Western European
travellers and the 'other'. The
studies of figures like Stephen Greenblatt and others have been
focused on untangling the complex relationships between
representation and reality, and examining the discursive power of
text in general, and travel writing in particular - often with the
aim of exposing the 'orientalist' architecture of such writing.
While such work has made an important contribution, few have
stopped to ask important 'historical' questions about the
travellers themselves, and that is what this paper aims to do.
The
period from about 1580 to the 1640s saw the birth of an important
new phenomenon in British cultural history. For the first time,
large numbers of young men began developing an interest in
travelling abroad, not to go on pilgrimages, or to be diplomats or
merchants or soldiers, but rather to see more of the world. The
overwhelming majority of such travel was undertaken on the
European continent, but significant numbers also began travelling
to Ottoman, and even Persian lands. It is only by setting British
travellers into this context that the British encounter with Iran
in the early modern period can really be understood. It is only by
learning more about the lives of the travellers themselves,
examining their motivations for travelling to Iran, and setting
them in the wider context of early modern travel, that we can even
begin to talk usefully about 'orientalism' or encounters with the
'other'.
This
paper will argue that most travellers to Iran in this period were
torn between, on the one hand, their intense curiosity about
foreign lands and their desire to see things for themselves, and
on the other hand, the constricting influences of the scholastic
education which they had received in England. The result was a
complex and often confused relationship with Safavid Iran.
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