This article examines a copy of Farhād Mīrzā’s Jām-i Jam (the World-Revealing Goblet) published in 1856 in Tehran and kept at Columbia University Library offsite storage. It demonstrates the dual importance of this book in geographic knowledge production and as part of the library of Saʿīd Nafīsī, one of the most prominent Iranian scholars of Persian literature. Methodologically, the paper offers various ways to study a single lithograph to decipher larger historical processes in histories of education, translation, and print. First, it analyzes the paratext to expose scholarly and political networks in order to examine the genealogy of geographic knowledge production in mid-nineteenth century Qajar Iran. Second, it studies the content and translation practices employed by Farhād Mīrzā to offer novel strategies for analyzing dissemination and reception of new ways of production and categorization of geographic knowledge as well as methods utilized in composition of pedagogical geography books. Finally, it discusses how cataloging practices affect current scholarship and lead to rendering certain texts “hidden.” It therefore illustrates how the study of Farhād Mīrzā’s Jām-i Jam, a book aspiring to reveal the world, can expose much about scholarly practices not only in the past but also the present.

Russia’s early nineteenth-century conquest of the South Caucasus imposed new borders that, among other effects, disrupted regional Shi‘i Muslim religious networks. Drawing on documents from the Qajar imperial archives, the chapter reveals how tsarist expansion created new issues for the three empires that met in the region—the Russians, Ottomans, and Qajars—and their regulation of religious institutions and practices. The focus here is on revenue-generating endowments (waqfs) in Yerevan that had long helped sustain the holiest Shi‘i shrines in Ottoman-ruled Karbala and Najaf, and on Shi‘i pilgrimage to these holy sites. This focus on religious networks and practices illuminates some of the consequences of the Russian conquest for Shi‘is living in the South Caucasus, and intersections between religion and imperial diplomacy.

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