| The Qajar monarch, Nasir al-Din Shah, ruled Iran for the second half of the nineteenth-century (1848-96), a momentous period in which the forces of colonialism and Western commercial interests were fully unleashed on the Islamic world. On April19, 1873 the Shah set out on a trip which was to take him to Russia, Germany, Belgium, England, France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Turkey, and Georgia. During the tour he faithfully recorded his impressions of Europe in a diary. Within a year of the Shah's visit to Europe, Sir James W. Redhouse, a well known British Orientalist scholar had published a translation of the Shah's diary. It remains a document of nineteenth-century social history which records a vanished world of European imperialism and industrial and technological change. |