Said Amir Arjomand. « Coffeehouse, Guilds and Oriental Despotism. Government and Civil Society in Late 17th to Early 18th Century Istanbul and Isfahan, as seen from Paris and London ». Archives européennes de sociologie

Abstract

The author probes the question of the existence and nature of a civil society in 17th century Istanbul and Isfahan through the prism of contemporaneous Western perspectives on the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran with their focus on despotic and oppressive governments. These same sources, however, also suggest the limited reach of rulers, and they reveal the existence of a lively “public sphere”, of which the court itself was part inasmuch as it was, at least in the Iranian case, public specta...