Were the Safavids an Empire?

Talking about the Islamic early modern world, scholars have long categorized and treated the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal states under one collective rubric--that of the so-called gunpowder empires. That term seems to have gone a bit out of fashion lately, but it remains the only one in which the Safavid state is given equal standing with its neighbors, and the only one in which the Safavids enjoy the unqualified status of constituting an empire. Whereas scholars treat the Ottoman and Mughal states as a mater of course, the status of the Safavid state remains ambiguous in this regard. 

My paper is an analytical one. It examines the organizing ideological and infrastructural principles of the Safavid state structure, and poses the question of whether the Safavid state was capacious and universal enough to qualify as an empire. Using mostly first-hand Persian sources, I will discuss the reasons why I think that question should be answered in the affirmative, albeit tentatively and with some qualifications. Toward the end of the paper, I propose to raise a number of issues having to do with the forces that, in my view, tipped the balance toward the cohesion and coherence that enabled the Safavid state to function as an empire in spite of its exiguous economic resources and the limitations of its ideological underpinnings. Finally I will make some remarks about the forces that helped dissolve the glue that kept Iranian society together and how these contributed to the demise of the Safavid state in the early eighteenth century.