Last year’s nuclear deal raised hopes of renewed cultural exchange between Iran and the west. As a historical model, we could do worse than look at what happened after the Anglo-Iranian Treaty of 1812. Nile Green’s well-researched book tells the story of six Iranian students who arrived in England in 1815 to learn about the new technologies they lacked at home. One student, Mirza Salih, kept a diary over his four-year stay, noting the morals and manners of the Englishmen (and women) he met. Never translated into English, Mirza’s diaries offer a fascinating perspective on scenes familiar from Jane Austen’s novels. Initially puzzled by the free mixing of the sexes, the students soon threw themselves into social life, flirting and dancing with society ladies.
The Persian prince who paid for their trip wanted to know how to modernise Iran. After learning English, the Iranians travelled round the country—including Oxford and Cambridge—studying mathematics, engineering and medicine. They learned about Christian sects, finding an affinity between Islam and Unitarianism. Inevitably they got into scrapes: Mirza was told off for dyeing his beard in a Turkish bath, and evangelicals tried to convert them. But a more common reaction was hospitable friendliness.
Some modern Iranian intellectuals, their views coloured by later English dominance, read these diaries as the start of the Iranian elites’ fatal intoxication with the west. But Mirza viewed his hosts with an anthropological eye, noting cultural differences but rarely judging them. Fittingly, he later returned to England as a diplomat.
