Events

Please join us on April 1st for the final installment of our Annual Lecture Series.

Iran is experiencing severe environmental challenges today which have been worsened by warfare, poor environmental management, and the effects of global warming.  Water shortages and pollution in the capital of Tehran have reached the point that the Islamic Republic recently announced plans to relocate the capital to the Persian Gulf coast.  These problems have recently made international news, but they are far from new.  This lecture will help inform our understandings of climate change in Iran’s history through a case study from another critical moment in the 18th century when decades of ongoing famine and disease epidemics combined with state breakdown and warfare to create a severe and long-lasting environmental crisis.  This was part of the global Little Ice Age which impacted societies across the northern hemisphere in the early modern period.

The Iranian Plateau is one of the most arid regions in Eurasia and was especially vulnerable to the effects of the drier, cooler weather brought on by the Little Ice Age.  This paper will argue that climate change and its impacts in the Safavid Empire (1501-1722) were critical to shaping Iran’s trajectory from a powerful land empire to a weakened and divided state by the 19th century.