Houshang Pourshariati Iranian Studies Book Award
Rudi Matthee, Willem Floor, and Patrick Clawson
2014 Winner
The Monetary History of Iran represents a major contribution to the economic history of Iran. Focusing on the period from the rise of the Safavids in 1501 to the end of the Qajar dynasty in 1925, the authors trace evolving understandings of the uses of money, the nature and function of government mints, and the role of the state in managing Iran’s money supply.
In tracing this history, the authors describe the complexities of Iran’s trimetallic money system – consisting of gold, silver, and copper—and the evolution of this system from coinage to the advent of paper currency at the end of the nineteenth century. Using sources in ten languages, and archives found on three continents, the authors argue that the Safavid, Afsharid, Zand, and Qajar dynasties’ monetary policies were conditioned by stresses resulting from shifting patterns of global commerce in the early modern period, as well as by the inherently limited supply of gold and silver found within Iran. According to the authors, this shortage of internal supply of precious metals made Iran dependent on external sources, while also making the Iranian economy increasingly vulnerable to chronic outflows of wealth, especially to India and Europe. As the authors convincingly argue, it is this broad political and economic context that helps to explain the monetary policies pursued by Iranian states between the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, which included attempts to standardize local-regional money systems, state-led attempts to ban the export of bullion, and the growing use of government mints to devalue the money supply by debasing the alloy content of coinage.
Through research that combines meticulous detail and careful analysis of this complex interplay of factors, the authors have placed Iran’s monetary history within its national, regional, and global contexts, and in doing so have produced a book that will certainly be considered a foundational work for the study of Iran’s modern economic history.