A History of Persia

Robert Grant Watson was a British diplomat attached to the British Legation in Persia. His A History of Persia, published in 1866, is a detailed account of events in the country in the first half of the nineteenth century, when the foundations of the Qajar dynasty were being laid. Watson uses both European and Persian sources to detail the circumstances of the Qajar rise to rule and recount the tumultuous events of Persia affairs – both foreign and domestic – between 1800 and 1860. This was one of the first books to be written on this specific period and details Persia’s entanglements with European powers, including the war between Persia and Russia, her internal ructions, and the complex dealings of the various treaties and their upsets. The hard-to-find volume is now re-published with a new introduction by the leading scholar of Iranian History, Ali Ansari, who is Professor at St Andrews University in the U.K.