Suchergebnisse

The Iranian Revolution, the Islamic Republic and the Red 1970s : a global history -- Bread and Justice in Qajar Iran : the moral economy, the free market and the hungry poor -- The Dark Side of Modernism : the Dangerous Classes in Iran -- Noble Robbers, Avengers and Entrepreneurs : Eric Hobsbawm and banditry in Iran, North Africa and the Middle East -- Islam, Slave Agency and Abolitionism in Iran, North Africa and the Middle East -- Modernism and the Politics of Dress : anti-veiling campaigns in the Muslim World

Histories of Iran, as of the wider Middle East, have been dominated by the twin narratives of top-down modernization and methodological nationalism. In this book, Stephanie Cronin problematizes both of these narratives. Its attention is firmly fixed on subaltern social groups: the 'dangerous classes' and their constructed contrast with the new and avowedly modern bourgeois elite created by the infant Pahlavi state; the hungry poor pitted against the deregulation and globalization of the late nineteenth century Iranian economy; rural criminals of every variety, bandits, smugglers and pirates, and the profoundly ambiguous attitudes towards them of the communities from which they came. In foregrounding these groups, the book also seeks to move beyond a narrow national context, demonstrating, through a series of case-studies, the explanatory power of global, transnational and comparative approaches to the study of the social history of the Middle East.

Against conventional views of the unchallenged hegemony of a modernizing monarchy, this book argues that power was continuously contested in Riza Shah's Iran. Cronin excavates the successive challenges to Riza Shah's regime posed by a range of subaltern social groups and seeks to restore to these groups a sense of their historical agency.

The articles in this collection provide an alternative view of Middle Eastern history by focusing on the oppressed and the excluded, offering a challenge to the usual elite narratives.

"This innovative and important book challenges conventional political and scholarly approaches to understanding tribal politics in the Middle East, taking as its historical focus a country and a period where these politics were a site of intense conflict: Iran under Riza Shah. The book places the 'tribal problem' at the centre of Riza Shah's state-building effort. Taking its cue from approaches developed by social historians such as Eric Hobsbawm, and from the Subaltern Studies school of South Asian history, the book offers a major critique of the elite nationalist version of the nature of the shah's rule and of the historical role played by the tribal and nomadic populations." "The book challenges the conventional preoccupation with the Tehran regime and its version of modernity, shifting attention to the rural areas, and restores to the rural poor a sense of their own historical agency."--Jacket