Afsharids, Zands and Qajars

Nader, a soldier of the Afshar tribe from Khorasan, rose by driving the Afghans and Ottomans out of Iran in the name of the Safavids, then in 1736 had himself proclaimed shah on the Moghan plain. In 1739 he invaded Mughal India, defeated its army at Karnal and occupied Delhi. He came home with the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. His later years were marked by suspicion and cruelty, and in 1747 his own officers killed him.

The regent of Shiraz

In the confusion that followed, Karim Khan of the Zand tribe became master of most of Iran and ruled from Shiraz until his death in 1779. He never took the title of shah, calling himself instead vakil, 'deputy' or 'regent'. Shiraz still carries his mark: the Vakil Bazaar with its high brick vaults, the Vakil Mosque with its spiralling stone columns and tiles of pink roses, and the Vakil Bath. He also rebuilt the tombs of Hafez and Saadi.

Qajar Tehran

The Qajars, a Turkmen tribe from the south-eastern Caspian, ended the Zands. Their founder, Agha Mohammad Khan, made the small town of Tehran his capital around 1786 and was crowned in 1796. Under his successors Iran lost its Caucasian provinces to Russia in two wars, ended by the treaties of Golestan in 1813 and Turkmenchay in 1828. Naser al-Din Shah, who reigned from 1848 to 1896, was a keen photographer and the first Qajar shah to visit Europe, which he described in published diaries. Much of the Golestan Palace in Tehran, with its mirrored halls, dates from his reign. In 1851 the Dar ol-Fonun, a college for modern sciences planned by the reforming minister Amir Kabir, opened in Tehran. In 1891 a concession giving a British company control of the tobacco trade provoked a nationwide boycott, and the shah cancelled it. In 1905 protests by merchants, clerics and reformers grew into the Constitutional Revolution, the Enqelab-e Mashruteh. In 1906 Mozaffar al-Din Shah agreed to an elected assembly, the Majles, and signed a constitution shortly before his death. His successor, Mohammad Ali Shah, had the Majles shelled in 1908, but constitutionalist forces took Tehran in 1909 and deposed him. Foreign intervention and internal division weakened the new order, and in 1925 the Majles deposed the last Qajar shah.