Marking Boundaries, Marking Time: The Iranian Past and the Construction of the Self by Qajar Thinkers

The intellectual model of european nationalism had a powerful impact in the second half the nineteenth century upon Qajar intellectuals and officials, many of whom lived abroad, were fluent in some European language, or were influenced by translations of European works. These thinkers, beginning in the 1850s, were the first to attempt to “imagine” an Iranian nation. That they made this attempt is a result not only of the influence upon them of the modular nationalist experience, but also of their own encounter with the same forces of modernity that were hammering Europe itself—new media of communication, new forms of transportation, and processes of economic differentiation deriving from the rise of core industrial economies and vastly increased world trade—all of which afforded states and other institutions the resources for disciplinary technologies that reshaped the Self.