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In this episode, Belle interviews James Gustafson, Associate Professor of History at Indiana State University, about his new book, The Lion and the Sun: Environmental History and the Formation of Modern Iran (I.B. Tauris, 2025).
In The Lion and the Sun (and our podcast episode), Gustafson presents an overview of Iran’s environmental history from the Safavid Empire (1501-1722) to the rise of Reza Khan in the 1920s. Weaving together threads of local history alongside and within regional and global trajectories and environmental trends, he illustrates how the environment shaped histories of labor, revolution, and empire. He argues that the relationship between people and place that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries shapes what we know as Iran today.
We begin with a discussion of broader strokes of environmental history related to the Iranian plateau, marked by cycles of drought and ensuing famine, agrarian crises, and epidemics, which Gustafson notes are missing from global environmental history surveys. One of his sources from the early 19th century refers to a historical “greater Iran” (encompassing Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, in addition to Iran) as “Ajam,” so we of course discuss the meaning of “Ajam,” as well!
We discuss the variety of sources Gustafson relied upon for his analysis – from travelogues to counting the rings in juniper trees – that give him novel insights into Iran’s history. While many scholars have blamed imperial decline for the fall of the Safavids, for example, Gustafson argues that Iran’s experience of the “Little Ice Age” in the 17th century shows Safavid rulers managed to hang on longer than ruling dynasties elsewhere, presenting a new understanding of Iran’s early 18th century.
Gustafson focuses on the often-overlooked Zand and Afshar dynasties during the period between Safavid and Qajar imperial rule in the 1700s. He argues that environmental factors played a key role in this period of Iranian history, contributing to instability, increased tribalism, and waning agriculture. For example, he argues that Nadir Shah’s ventures into Mughal territory arose from a need to increase access to grain for his armies and people, Gustafson notes – not necessarily because he desired control over India.
In turning to the Qajar era, we discuss Gustafson’s attention to the assemblages of not only the environment and people, but also animals, and different ways in which humans and animals interacted with one another and their environments through labor. He talks about both human and non-human animal labor, particularly the relationship of peasants to the elite families who owned land and what it yielded, and how these relationships between people, animals, land, and the environment structured relations across Iranian society and empire.
We end the episode with a discussion of the rise of Reza Khan in the early 20th century, and Gustafson shares the importance of understanding how the environment has influenced not only Iranian history, but the entire world– warning us: “we ignore the environment to our own peril!”
Guest
James Gustafson
James M. Gustafson is Associate Professor of History and Chair of the International Studies program at Indiana State University, USA. He is the author of The Lion and the Sun: Environmental History and the Formation of Modern Iran (I.B. Tauris, 2025) and Kirman and the Qajar Empire (2015); serves on the executive board of the Association for Iranian Studies; and is a senior editor for the Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Asian Commercial History.
Host
Belle Cheves
Belle Cheves is a senior editor at Ajam Media Collective and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Bard College. Her research focuses on the history of family in Qajar Iran, specifically on how transformations of marital practices and affective perceptions of gender, race, and ethnicity shifted understandings of kinship, enslavement, and domestic service over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Credits
Episode No. 47
Release Date: 7 April 2025
Recording Location: remote
Recording Date: 1 March 2025
Produced by Belle Cheves
Audio Editing: Belle Cheves and Nicholas Gunty
Music: Yavaran (Intro: “404 day in heaven;” Outro: “Har Chi”)
Cover Image: Courtesy of the author. Design: Adriana Brioso. Cover image (c) B.O’Kane/Alamy Stock Photo. “Tile Mosaic of Lion and Sun” Shir Dar Madrasa, Samarqand, Uzbekistan.
