Alice, Week 3, Primary Source

While thinking about and researching both of my potential topics, I realized that I was a lot more interested in the lesser-explored of the two: Sir Jean Chardin, the French jeweler who in the late 1600s spent ten years traveling and living in Persia, and subsequently wrote a large tome on Persia referred to as Travels (Voyages in French). Chardin traveled for both purposes of curiosity and business, and wrote on a variety of topics; the preeminent work on Chardin, R. W. Ferrier's "A Journey to Persia," divides these topics into broad categories that encompass nearly all of Persian society: the landscape, the shah and his court, government, religion, life and customs, the Persian character, knowledge and literature, arts and crafts, and industry and commerce. My primary interest with the text is what it has to say (and imply) on Franco-Persian trade and power relations in the seventeenth century - what Chardin can tell us as a stand-alone source, and how/whether or not that fits into the academic output on the subject. I'm sure that my topic will change and narrow with more reading and research, but I've found a couple other French seventeenth-century sources that I'll hopefully be able to draw into my discussion