Iran and a French Empire of Trade, 1700–1808: The Other Persian Letters by Junko Thérèse Takeda (review).

Takeda carefully unpacks this vast Enlightenment literature on the political convulsions that shook Persia. Takeda's work clearly demonstrates the importance of the tumultuous political events in Persia during the eighteenth-century as models for French-empire building. Takeda unearths a truly global Enlightenment era in which Frenchmen watched events in Persia and responded, revealing the commercial and intellectual intertwining of Asian and European Empires. [Extracted from the article]