SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Tropes and stereotypes played a significant role in the mentalities of the British empire, reducing subject populations to a simplistic list of essential characteristics and thereby denigrating their capacity for change or advancement. While Iran was not formally colonised in the 19th Century, the Iranians were still heavily stereotyped, primarily through travel literature which purported to present an accurate impression of the land and its peoples. Iran is also unique in this regard as there was extensive precedence for the characterisation of the Iranians as an archetypal eastern ‘Other’. This stemmed from British reception of the Greco-Roman sources which, while poorly understood through the public school system, were venerated as the genesis of white, Western culture, influencing Victorian conceptualisations of empire. Tropes contained in Orientalist literature of the 18th and 19th Centuries expanded upon this view of Iran; with depictions of Iranians characterised by despotism, cruelty, greed, cowardice, deception, and debauched sexuality. Additionally, the anxieties of empire and significant changes within Iran itself further shaped perceptions of Iran in British travelogues. This thesis examines these intersections of stereotyping and their impact upon British perceptions of Iran through close analysis of three influential English travelogues of the late-Qajar period, produced between 1880 and 1905. These are George Nathaniel Curzon’s Persia and the Persian Question, Edward Granville Browne’s A Year Amongst the Persians, and Percy Molesworth Sykes’ Ten Thousand Miles in Persia, or Eight Years in Iran. By gauging these texts’ adherence to, and deviation from, pre-existing stereotypes, this research aims to assess their engagement with themes of continuity and change and thus better understand the intertextual origins of contemporary British perceptions of Iran