The Middle East in Cambridge
Encounters in the Persianate World: The Safavid Diplomatic Envoy to Siam
9th June 2023 at 2pm UK time
Encounters in the Persianate World: The Safavid Diplomatic Envoy to Siam
Platform: Audit Room, King's College (and online on Zoom)
Zoom registration: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUodOisrz8iGdecUf_FouB4rPpJFtUJVExc#/registration
Abstract:
In 1685 a diplomatic envoy of the Safavid Empire (Iran) embarked upon a journey across the Indian Ocean to Siam (Thailand). A relic of this journey is the travel or diplomatic account the Safīna-i Sulaimānī – the Ship of Sulaimān – written by the scribe of the Persian envoy Muhammad Rabī‘ at the end of the seventeenth century. In this talk Dr Arian explores the Safavid envoy’s politics of knowledge formation about the encounter with the Siamese and discusses the envoy’s knowledge production about the Siamese sovereign, court and kingdom, society, culture and religion, and how this was governed by the Safavid political order.
About the speaker: Dr. Anahita Arian is a postdoctoral research associate at the Centre for Geopolitics and a college research associate at King’s College Cambridge University. She has a PhD in International Relations from the University of Groningen and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Department of History of Science at the University of Erfurt. She has also worked as a Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Erfurt and the University of Groningen and has been a visiting scholar at the Department of Global History and the Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut of the Freie Universität Berlin, the Department of International Relations at Universidad de San Francisco de Quito in Ecuador, and at the Orient Institute Beirut of the Max Weber Foundation in Lebanon.