Feudalism, Nation-State or National State: Analysis of Intellectual’s Interpretation of the Modern State in Qajar Era

The main question of the present study is to analyze the concept of the modern state in the thinkers’ thoughts of the Qajar era and their normative view on the definition of the scope and framework of the modern state. Using historical sociology, this paper attempted to recognize the state-building trends and investigate the mental-intellectual structure of Iranian intellectuals about state and politics in the Qajar period. The analysis of the available documents reveals that the practices such as eliminating opposition groups and centralizing power, modernizing the judiciary or reforming the structure of the army, and even entering the global economic system, by themselves could not result in the formation of a state. In contrast, the issue of territorialization and the accumulation of capital in modern Persia were central in the state-building process. In addition, Mirza MalekomKhan, a leading intellectual in the Constitutional era, enlightened the nature of the state and its mechanisms by emphasizing the monopoly of power, the establishment of an efficient court, the restructuring of the army, and the need for national unity. It is important to note that MalekomKhan’s ideas about the intellectual basis of modern state overlap with Charles Tilly’s; they both believed that in multi-ethnic societies such as Iran, building a national state based on a territory like the United States and Switzerland is more suitable.