January 2016 | BIPS Research Grant

This BIPS-funded one-day workshop, titled Local History in the Persianate Cosmopolis, and convened on 17 December, 2016, constituted an early stage of a larger research project on local histories in transregional and cosmopolitan contexts. The workshop was designed to initiate dialogue, identify new avenues of inquiry, and open the way for future collaboration between leading scholars from European, North American, and Asian universities on the historiography of the premodern Persianate world. The immediate research output of the workshop will be an AHRC Standard grant proposal, to be submitted following the workshop, in late 2017. My objective for that AHRC grant is to fund a further four-year research project, leading to outputs for submission in both the current and next REF cycles. Moreover, because the AHRC application will require the involvement of a secondary investigator from another university, an additional short-term objective of the workshop was to identify a suitable collaborator from among the presenters, who can contribute to the AHRC application. Furthermore, the workshop afforded me with the opportunity to invite SOAS’ impact officer to attend the workshop with the intention of developing an impact statement for the AHRC application and for identifying and promoting potential impact cases for the current or next REF cycle.     

Workshop Participants: 

• Derek J Mancini-Lander, SOAS 
• Roy S. Fischel, SOAS 
• Mana Kia, Columbia U 
• Mimi Hanaoka, U Richmond 
• Anubhuti Maurya, Delhi 
• Peyvand Firouzeh, Max Plank, Firenze  
• Blain Auer, Lausanne 
• Stefano Pello, Venice 
• Sussan Babaie, Courtauld, London 
• Charles Melville, Cambridge 
• Francesca Orsini, SOAS 

The purpose of this workshop, titled “Local History in the Persianate Cosmopolis” was to open a systematic inquiry into the local aspect of premodern Persian historiography, emphasising that the particular characteristics of local histories have less to do with scale than with orientation. Despite their foregrounding of local places, personages, and events, the historians were deeply concerned with the relationship between local circumstances and the larger world beyond. Moreover, as the papers in this workshop explored, local histories frequently wove chronologies with detailed prosopographies, pushing forward human relations between members of different local communities from a range of social classes on the one hand, and on the other hand, between locals and outsiders. The participants in the workshop discovered that local historians worked to position their locale within a vast network of people and places, usually privileging their own locality as a central node in this wide-ranging circulation.  These works present history from the edge, to borrow Richard Bulliet’s well-known phrase.  

But if these historians were writing from the edge, where was the centre? The participants found that the case of Persian local histories was instructive because it demanded that we disentangle the notion of the local from that of the periphery and, as a consequence, challenges our understanding of the idea of a centre or a metropole. The particularity of the Persian language was found to be central to this issue as it filled two distinct roles. On one level, Persian is the language associated with the land of Iran, and as such, it is ingrained in expressions of locality. At the same time, it was the backbone of what Sheldon Pollock defines as a cosmopolitan: a language that was used and produced over vast and diverse regions, creating unified political idioms, cultural traditions, and shared legacy, distinct from vernacular languages. The dual function of Persian raised a series of questions regarding the relationship between local and general, core and periphery, settled and transient, which only further research can answer. The constant movement of people and ideas within the wider lands of the Persian cosmopolis created long-lasting links between parts of the cosmopolis and beyond. This cosmopolis was “polycentric” and without an agreed upon metropole. The participants began to address some of these issues in their presentations and following discussions, but future collaborations will explore them further. 

The participants found that among the most mobile actors within this cosmopolitan world were the very people who produced texts, historical and otherwise.  As such, they served as agents of transregional connectivity and global interaction. Often composed from new homes, their writing required shifts in loyalties and orientation and a constant process of adaptation and negotiation. Transient writers thus embodied the tension between local and cosmopolitan registers, and in their works they were forced to wrestle with the concepts of locality and universality. Local histories in Persian were composed within this interconnected realm, where the boundaries between local and universal were unstable, permeable, and movable.  

The BIPS funding for this workshop allowed the participants to examine permutations of local histories within the Persian Cosmopolis: their formats, scales, and universal links. Comparing works from all parts of the Persianate world, the workshop aimed at defining the various formations and genres of local histories, from provincial manifestation of universal histories to stories of small-scale places. Although the primary focus was on texts, the workshop included contributions from art historians, too, whose work explored commemorative programmes embedded in architecture and portable artefacts. With this comparative examination of modes of local historicising in a cosmopolitan environment, the workshop allowed the participants to establish new approaches to exploring wider questions about transregional interactions, early modernity, subjectivity, the production of information, circulation, and the interaction between core and periphery.

The workshop allowed me, as the recipient of the grant, to continue to develop these findings by identifying strategies for an AHRC application toward the end of this year. I have also selected a few candidates among senior scholars to collaborator with on that application. That AHRC project will continue to draw on the participation of the scholars who contributed to the workshop. The initial leg of the AHRC project will be an expanded conference on the theme of local history in the Persianate cosmopolis, which will be followed by a special addition of a journal. 

The BIPS funding has enabled me to move forward on this exciting long-term project. Most importantly, it has allowed me to assemble a research network of scholars on three continents, all working together on similar projects.