Gholam-Hosayn Zargarinezhad, Andisheh va Siyasat dar Iran-e Qajar [Thought and Politics in Qajar Iran], 2 vols (Tehran: Negarestan-e Andisheh, 1398 Sh./2019–20).

This work by Gholam-Hosayn Zargarinezhad is the fruit of decades of labor by him in the fields of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Iranian intellectual history and the history of political thought. In 1374 Sh./1995, he edited and published eighteen Persian-language texts (rasaʾel) related to constitutionalist thought and the Constitutional Revolution in Qajar Iran. This was then followed in the first decade of the 2000s with two more collections of political ethical treatises and advice literature (siyasatnameh) from the Qajar period. And then building on that, in 1395 Sh./2016, he published a four-volume collection of thirty-one Qajar-era political ethical treatises, preceded by a one-hundred-page introduction to the authors, subjects, and themes of the texts. Zargarinezhad's efforts in publishing these texts helped shine a light on the sources, many of which had remained unpublished and difficult to access in Iran. Amid this output, he also published numerous articles and books on subjects related to Qajar political and intellectual history. This latest publication is comprised of two volumes, divided into thirty-four chapters that are organized in four thematic but roughly chronological parts (baksh): there are parts that focus on, respectively, reformist statesmen (dowlatmardan-e eslah-talab) of the Qajar period, with particular emphasis on ʿAbbas Mirza and Amir Kabir; the major Qajar-era authors of advice literature (andarznameh); the political thought of ʿulama of the Qajar period; and the thought of reformists and progressive thinkers (eslah-talaban va taraqi-khahan) of the Nasir al-Din Shah period. The strength of Zargarinezhad's latest work is that it synthesizes much of the material that he had put out over the years in various other outlets. It also builds on and expands the arguments of at least two generations of historians of Qajar-era political thought — including the classic works, in Persian, by Fereydoun Adamiyat and Homa Nategh, and in English, Ann Lambton, as well as more recent work by Said Arjomand. There is little discussion in this work of contributions to Iran's intellectual history by Babi-Baha'i-inspired thinkers, and even those thinkers included in the study who had a Babi-Baha'i connection — such as Shaykh al-Raʾis — are not fully situated in that context. Nevertheless, this work should be of interest to scholars of nineteenth-century Iranian intellectual history and the history of political thought.