چکیده:
The general trend of Iran's economic, political, and military power during the period beginning with the collapse of the Safavids and ending with the Constitutional Revolution is downward, and it has usually been interpreted as the decline of Iran. During this period, the continued expansion of Iran's connections with other countries, which had begun previously, provided the ground for the creation of travelogues written by authors who came to Iran with different objectives. The travel writers of the aforementioned period were carriers of Western modernity; for this reason, although most of them, under the influence of an Orientalist perspective, used constructed concepts such as Oriental despotism and the decline of the East or the backward East, they viewed Iran's problems from a new angle that is missing in Iranian sources; and they cited different causes for them. The predominant aspect of these causes was political, and at its forefront was Iran's method of government. Based on this view, Iran's method of government and the concentration of political and economic power in the hands of a single individual provided the grounds for corruption, oppression, insecurity, and foreign interventions, which themselves caused the decline of Iran during this period. Examining the perspective of travel writers clarifies the flaws of the Orientalist view on one hand and opens a new angle for understanding Iranian history on the other.
خلاصه ماشینی:
The travel writers of the aforementioned period were carriers of Western modernity; for this reason, although most of them used constructed concepts such as Oriental despotism and the decline of the East or the backwardness of the East under the influence of an Orientalist perspective, they looked at Iran's problems from a new angle that is missing in Iranian sources; and they cited different causes for it.
The hypothesis of this research is that, from the viewpoint of foreign travel writers, the method of government in Iran was such that it led to the concentration of the country's power and wealth in the hands of a single person and provided the ground for government inefficiency, widespread corruption, and the oppression and tyranny of officials, the result of which was the decadence of Iran.
The importance of the present research lies in the fact that, despite similar studies conducted in this field, attention has not yet been paid to the views of travel writers who examined the decadence of Iran from the perspective of the dominant discourse of that period, namely the theory of Oriental Despotism.
Introduction Efforts made to describe the conditions resulting from the increasing weakness of the Iranian government in the actual period between the fall of the Safavids and the Constitutional Revolution, using concepts such as decadence, backwardness, or lack of development, were generally under the influence of a movement that Edward Said named "Orientalism.
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