Social Histories of Iran: Modernism and Marginality in the Middle East
Cambridge University Press
Edition: New, 1/28/2021
EAN 9781107190849, ISBN10: 1107190843
Hardcover, 320 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
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.
Introduction
I. Iran
1. The Iranian Revolution, the Islamic Republic and the 'Red 1970s'
a Global History
2. Bread and Justice in Qajar Iran
the Moral Economy, the Free Market and the Hungry Poor
3. The Dark Side of Modernism
the 'Dangerous Classes' in Iran
II. The Wider Middle East
4. Noble Robbers, Avengers and Entrepreneurs
Eric Hobsbawm and Banditry in Iran, North Africa and the Middle East
5. Islam Slave Agency and Abolitionism in Iran, North Africa and the Middle East
6. Modernism and the Politics of Dress
Anti-Veiling Campaigns in the Muslim World.