Iranian Dissidents in Late Ottoman Empire

In the mid-to-late nineteenth-century, the Ottoman Empire, and specifically its capital Istanbul, became the home and socio-intellectual base of some of the most renowned Iranian intellectuals and dissidents of Qajar Iran (1785-1925). These emigres and scholars, from sites across the Ottoman Empire, produced much of the literature of reform and dissent that decades later would be regarded as some o f the most important texts circulated in Iran prior to and during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911). Despite the fact that these Iranian emigres spent considerable proportions of their careers in the Ottoman Empire, remarkably little information on their "Ottoman lives" is available. Drawing on the archives of the Ottoman Empire, Republican Turkey, Iran, Britain and France, this dissertation attempts to address this gap in the literature by examining the lives and careers of Iranian emigre-scholars and intellectuals in the late Ottoman Empire. It weaves together previously untapped resources in Persian, modem and Ottoman Turkish, French and English, and argues that late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Iranian emigres in the Ottoman Empire were mediating agents who facilitated the circulation of ideas in Iran, the Ottoman Empire and the Caucuses. The consideration of the formation of expansive socio intellectual networks within and across a region which spanned Iran, the Ottoman Empire and Caucuses thereby offers avenues for putting inter-imperial politics in the frame of writing Ottoman and Iranian history.