Epilogue

The Persian historiographical tradition imposed a good deal of restriction on the premodern projects of genealogy. Authors in the service of the nascent states of the sixteenth century often ran against the discursive limits of this canon. The same applied to early European orientalists and historians of these empires such as Mountstuart Elphinstone, William Erskine, and John Leyden who often followed career paths similar to their Indo-Persian forerunners, but who transmitted the Persian chronicle conventions into notions of ethnicity that were of importance to the early British imperial vision of the past. The histories of these empires are now understood in these terms.