Until now, there have been no books and only a few articles available in English that deal with the actual practice of medicine in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Iran. Willem Floor's Public Health in Qajar Iran fills this lacuna, giving a broad and comprehensive survey of the state of public health, medical practice, and its practitioners in 1800-1925. Based on firsthand accounts of European travelers and doctors who practiced and observed medical treatment, the study provides an overview of the major diseases the population suffered and how these were treated. It also includes the...

Although most people do not speak of theater and Iran in the same breath, dramatic expression has always been a fixture of Iranian culture. Some 2500 years ago, kings and commoners alike were regaled by comic theater in the form of dance and mime, accompanied by music. The dancers often wore masks, a vestige of an earlier era when such dances were enacted as religious rites. Comic drama also took a slapstick form, in which social situations were lampooned and people ridiculed by imitating their accents and behavior. Yet another ancient dramatic art was that of puppetry, now known to have...

AGRICULTURE was the mainstay of Iran's economy in the nineteenth century, yet little is known about it. Historians have rarely taken that important reality into account when writing on the economic or social history of that period, and until now there have been no comprehensive studies of Iranian agriculture. Now, in Agriculture in Qajar Iran, renowned scholar Willem Floor has compiled an all-encompassing analysis of nineteenth-century Iranian agriculture based on extensive research into previously untapped Persian and European archives. Floor presents farming in Iran from the ground up and...

In 1770 the young German scientist and explorer Samuel Gottlieb Gmelin embarked on a journey on behalf of the Russian Academy of Sciences and in the service of Catherine the Great. These heretofore little-read accounts of his travels and broad research in Northern Persia, first published in German in St. Petersburg in the 1770's, have now been translated for the first time into English by renowned scholar Willem Floor. In the two voyages recounted in this volume, Gmelin kept journals describing the customs, industry, political world, warfare, geography, and plant and animal life of Northern...

Titles and Emoluments in Safavid Iran: A Third Manual of Safavid Administration contains unique and important information on offices, ethnic attitudes and administrative developments in Iran's Safavid government (1495-1720). It provides the official honorific title for each official (and the variations thereof), which shows the importance of these titles in the intricate structure of social and political standing among the power elite. The commentary's long database of all known administrative jurisdictions with names and dates of each of its governors gives us a more nuanced understanding of...

This study illuminates the 2,500-year social history of sexual relations in Iran. Marriage, temporary marriage, prostitution, and homosexuality are all discussed, as well as the often unintended result of these relations-sexually transmitted diseases. A Social History of Sexual Relations in Iran uses travelers' accounts, Iranian and international archival sources, as well as government data, to bring together, in detail, and within the context of Iranian culture and religion, the nature, variety, and problems of sexual relations in Iran over the ages. Finally, Willem Floor summarizes the...

Offers an analysis of primary source references essential for a better understanding of the socio-economic conditions that led to Iran's push toward modernisation in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

By any measure, Nader Shah - founder of the Afsharid Dynasty - ranks as a towering figure in Iranian history. This book looks at his life: how a shepherd boy mastered fighting skills, assembled armies, reunited Iran and freed it from Afghan occupation, and crowned himself Nader Shah of Iran after usurping the Safavid throne in 1736.

A compendium of Iranian, Dutch, and British reports and primary sources. It is includes research into the work of travellers in the region of Persian Gulf. It is suitable for scholars of the history of the Gulf, as well as for those readers who are interested in the history of the region in general.