467 NĀDIR SHĀH IN IRANIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY: WARLORD OR NATIONAL HERO? RUDI MATTHEE INTRODUCTION Western—European and North American—historiography generally portrays the years between the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and the Congress of Vienna in 1815 as having given birth to the modern world—a republican world founded on rational discourse and popular sovereignty; an empirically grounded, industrializing world built on progress and productivity; an aggressive, market-driven world espousing expansion as agenda and organizing principle. In the traditional interpretation of Islamic Middle Eastern history, the “eight- eenth century” projects an entirely different image. Rather than evoking energy and innovation, it conjures up stasis, decline, and defeat. It speaks of exhausted, mis- managed empires that either succumbed to regional competitors or proved too weak to resist the juggernaut of European imperialism. Examples abound. The state that had ruled Iran since the early sixteenth century, the Safavids, collapsed in 1722 un- der the onslaught of Afghan insurgents from the tribal periphery. The Ottomans, having failed to take Vienna in 1684, subsequently retreated against the Austrians and the Russians in the Balkans and later lost Egypt, first to the French and then to the Albanian warlord Muḥammad ʿAlī Pasha. In the Indian Subcontinent, mean- while, the once mighty Mughal Empire disintegrated and was brought into the Brit- ish orbit. Iran was doubly disadvantaged in this process of “regression.” The Ottomans suffered defeat and lost territory yet maintained military, diplomatic, and commer- cial contact with the nations of Western Europe, the source of most of what was new at the time. The so-called Tulip Period of the early eighteenth century reflects a fascination with things European among the ruling classes of Istanbul. The Mughal state became tributary to the English East India Company and then was absorbed into the expanding British Empire. Yet that same process caused its elite gradually to become familiar with the ways and means of the new colonizers, creating models and generating ideas that helped the country keep in touch with developments in the wider world. Iran, by contrast, in this period not just fell precipitously from stability to cha- os, but in the process became disconnected from the world in ways not experienced by the other “gunpowder empires.” Until the late seventeenth century the Safavids had been roughly on par with the Ottomans and the Mughals in their projection of wealth, power, and cultural prestige. Sophisticated Europeans knew Iran as the leg- endary land of the Sophy, a term personified by the most dynamic ruler of the dyn- asty, Shah ʿAbbās I (r. 1587–1629). Shah ʿAbbās had connected his country to the world in unprecedented ways. After proclaiming Isfahan his capital and endowing it with a newly designed, awe-inspiring center, he had turned this centrally located city