Qajar Iran

Qajar Iran was the Iranian state ruled by the Qajar dynasty from 1789 to 1925. Its founder, Agha Mohammad Khan, came from the Qajar tribe, a Turkic tribe of northern Iran, and reunited the country after the fall of the Zand dynasty, making Tehran its capital. Over the following century the Qajars lost their Caucasian provinces to Russia and struggled to keep Iran independent between the Russian and British empires, while the country went through its first experiments with modern schools, a constitution and an elected parliament.

The Qajars had been one of the Turkoman tribes that served the Safavid shahs. After Karim Khan Zand died in 1779, Agha Mohammad Khan, who had spent years at the Zand court as a hostage, fought his way to power. He was known for extreme cruelty even by the standards of his age; after taking Kerman, which had resisted him, he had some 20,000 of its men blinded, according to accounts of the siege. By 1794 he had eliminated the last Zand ruler, Lotf Ali Khan. In 1795 he invaded Georgia, whose king had placed himself under Russian protection, and sacked Tbilisi. He was crowned shah in 1796 and murdered at Shusha the following year.

His nephew Fath-Ali Shah (r. 1797–1834) inherited a conflict over the Caucasus. Russia annexed eastern Georgia in 1801 and attacked Ganja in 1804, opening a war that ended in defeat for Iran. By the Treaty of Gulistan in 1813 Iran gave up most of its Caucasian lands, including Georgia, Dagestan and much of today's Azerbaijan. A second war in 1826–1828 went worse still: Russian troops briefly occupied Tabriz, and the Treaty of Turkmenchay set the border on the Aras River, handing over what is now Armenia and the rest of Azerbaijan to the Russian Empire.

Fath-Ali Shah's grandson Mohammad Shah (r. 1834–1848) twice tried and failed to take Herat. His son Naser al-Din Shah reigned for almost half a century, from 1848 to 1896. His first chief minister, Amir Kabir, cut spending, reorganised the administration and in 1851 founded the Dar al-Fonun, a college in Tehran that taught Western sciences, before rivals turned the shah against him and he was put to death. In 1856 Iranian forces captured Herat, but a British war forced Iran to give it up. In the north-east, Russian expansion into Central Asia led to the Treaty of Akhal of 1881, which fixed the border on the Atrek River. To raise money the shahs granted foreign concessions, beginning with the Reuter concession of 1872, which was cancelled after opposition at home; many Iranians came to see their rulers as serving foreign interests.

Naser al-Din Shah was assassinated in 1896. Under his son Mozaffar al-Din Shah, protests by merchants and clergy forced the grant of a constitution, which the dying shah signed in December 1906, creating an elected parliament, the Majles. His successor Mohammad Ali Shah turned against it and in 1908 used the Russian-officered Persian Cossack Brigade to shell the parliament building. Constitutionalist forces took Tehran in July 1909, deposed him and placed his 11-year-old son Ahmad Shah on the throne. Meanwhile the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 had divided Iran into Russian and British spheres of influence, and in December 1911 Russian pressure brought the closure of the parliament.

Iran declared neutrality in the First World War, but Russian, British and Ottoman armies fought on its soil, and the Ottomans occupied large parts of the north-west. In February 1921 Reza Khan, commander of the Cossack Brigade, seized power in a coup. Ahmad Shah left for Europe in 1923, and in 1925 the Majles deposed him and ended Qajar rule, opening the period of Pahlavi Iran. For the longer history of the country, see Iran.

Our 1800, 1815, 1878, 1880, 1900 and 1914 maps label the Qajar state "Persia", and the 1920 map labels it "Iran". Up to 1914 its main neighbours are the Russian Empire to the north and the Ottoman Empire to the west.