With the exception of allegoric social, cultural, and political referentialities to con-temporary Iran in the ‘Persian Letters’ genre of Irish literature, including in Moore's 1813 Intercepted Letters, prior to 1856 it was Irans of past historical and/or imaginary settings that featured in Irish nationalist commentaries in connection with Ireland itself (namely in antiquarian and literary works). In 1856 contemporary Iranian developments became a subject of Irish nationalist political observation and commentary in the framework of the Irish Question, more specifically in so-called radical nationalist circles. This marked the start of what became periodic Irish nationalist expressions of solidarity with variously configured “Iranian” acts of resistance to outside aggression, initially in the form of defending the Iranian state, which was itself engaged in an act of territorial aggression, and subsequently in the form of expressed camaraderie with varying Iranian popular expressions of anti-imperialist nationalism (as well as with Iranian anti-autocratic endeavors). In 1856 Britain and Iran went to war for the second time; the first occasion having been the brief Anglo-Iranian War of 1838 that resulted in a British military victory and subsequent commercial and other privileges in Iran under the eventual peace treaty of 1841. The 1856 Anglo-Iranian conflict occurred just as the ravages of the devastating Irish famine of 1845–51 had subsided. It also coincided with the closing stages of the Crimean War (1854–56), in which Britain and France had joined the Ottoman state in curbing Russia's territorial aggression against the Ottoman Empire and foiling St. Petersburg's control of the Black Sea. During the latest Anglo-Iranian War, British troops dispatched to Iranian territory from neighboring British India also included, alongside the native Indian sepoys, Irish soldiers and officers (Protestants and Catholic), as had been the case in the 1838 armed conflict between Iran and the British Empire. In Ireland and in the Irish diaspora (notably in the United States) the more “radical” Irish nationalists seized the Anglo-Iranian War as an opportunity to condemn what they characterized as Britain's continued imperialist aggression around the world, by also circuitously redirecting attention to continued English occupation and alleged maladministration of Ireland.

The Anglo-Iranian War of 1856–57 (or the “Second Anglo-Persian War” as it came to be known) was waged by Britain as a means of reversing Iran's military operations for capturing Herat and its adjoining “Afghan” territories.