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Well, basically, I've been thinking of doing a "Persia comes out better" TL for the last couple years (and even pestered Leo and Abdul with questions about it on occaision). But now (thanks in part to a PM conversation with another user that allowed me to focus my thoughts on the subject) an idea for a POD finally came to me-eliminate the Safavid practice of raising heirs in the harem. Safavid Shahs did this to prevent their heirs from conspiring against them, but it also meant that said heir had no contact with any influential political/military figures and recieved no real education in politics or government or really anything except hanging out with women and smoking opium. As one would expect, this made all the later Safavid Shahs...less than steller rulers, and led to the dynasty sputtering on empty for a while before finally collapsing in the early 18thC (ushering in the destructive reign of Nader Shah and the consummate mediocrity of the Qajar dynasty, during which Russia and Britain gradually eroded Persia's sovereignty away).

So, lets say it dawns on Abbas II (the last really competent Safavid Shah, and incidentally the last one not to grow up in a harem) to talk to his son. He questions his son, and it gradually dawns on him that the environment the boy is growing up in will make him manefestly unfit to rule. He thus has the son taken out of the harem and given a decent education, and once he's old enough, keeps said son by his side and begins grooming him to rule. I'll have Shah Abbas live a little longer (OTL he died at 34), and when he dies, his son (OTL Sulieman) grows up to be competent ruler. The Safavid dynasty doesn't go into decline.

Beyond that, the Afghan revots still occur as OTL. The more competent Safavids are able to maintain control of Herat, but loose their grip on Khandahar. An Afghan invasion of Persia is defeated. After a period of recovery, the Afghan tribes invade India sometime in the late 1710's-early 1720's, taking Delhi. The Afghans and the Marathas then procede to battle each other into exhaustion over the next several decades. European penetration of India still occurs, and since I'm planning on all the European wars going the same way up till 1875 or so, British India is established as OTL.

Persia itself is spared the chaos that engulfed it for most of the 18th century OTL, and continues along the same economic path of the 17th-more trade develops, as does some small-scale "industry" (if thats the right word), most notably porcelain (one of the major manufactured products of OTL Safavid Iran). The Safavids make some stabs at developing a navy, though they don't have the resources (especially forests) to become a true naval power.

In the late 18th-early 19th centuries, Persia falls behind like OTL, leading to a "Muhammad Ali" figure, who imports European ideas, reforming the military and bureaucracy along more modern lines. This allows the Safavids to prevent Russia from grabbing Armenia and (Northern) Azerbaijan-the Safavids will likely outnumber the Russians-Qajar Persia did IOTL-and will be fighting in terrain the heavily favors them as the defenders, so if they can have a military even moderately better than the OTL 19thC Persian military, I think they can bloody the Russians up to the point that they decide Baku just isn't worth it. Diplomatically, the Safavids do the same thing with Russia and Britain that Siam did with France and Britain-they try to cultivate friendly relations with both powers, and present themselves as a buffer state to keep the two seperate. Thus, the Safavids are able to preserve effective freedom of action into the late 19th century. Though they extensively import military trainers and techniques from Europe, the Shahs are careful to make sure that their officer corps remains (mostly) native.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Safavid monarchy will come under increasing pressure, both from the outside and from reformists within its own country. I plan on having something like the Persian Consitutional Revolution happen, though the monarchy will maintain a great deal of political power.

20th century Iranian politics will follow a completely different dynamic from OTL-IOTL the Pahlavi dynasty secularized the government to almost Ataturk-like levels and created a secular Persian nationalism based largely on romanticized notions of the Achaemanid and Sassanid eras. It implicitly denegrated the Islamic era and rather explicitly attempted to minimize the influence of the clergy, which led to the clergy becoming the focus for opposition against the regime. By contrast, a surviving Safavid dynasty would likely draw its legitimacy primarily from Shia Islam, and any romantic nationalisms it created would be based around the Islamic past and the early Safavid rule in the 16th and 17th centuries. It would remain openly allied with the clergy, and opposition to it would probably be leftist/communist and strongly anti-clerical. I'm not sure whether to have the Safavids reform into a constitutional monarchy or get overthrown in a violent revolution-the latter has the chance to descend into several levels of nastiness.

Thoughts?
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