Cronin - Social Histories of Iran

Social Histories of Iran

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.

STEPHANIE CRONIN is Elah Omidyar Mir-Djalali Research Fellow at St Antony's College and is a member of the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford. She is the author and editor of multiple books and journal articles on Middle Eastern and Iranian history including Crime, Poverty and Survival in the Middle East and North Africa: The 'Dangerous Classes' Since 1800 (2020), Armies and State-building in the Modern Middle East: Politics, Nationalism and Military Reform (2013), Soldiers, Shahs and Subalterns in Iran: Opposition, Protest and Revolt, 1921 1941 (2010) and Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran: New Perspectives on the Iranian Left (2004).

Social Histories of Iran

Modernism and Marginality in the Middle East

Stephanie Cronin

University of Oxford

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DOI: 10.1017/9781108120289

Stephanie Cronin 2021

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First published 2021

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A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

NAMES : Cronin, Stephanie, author.

TITLE : Social histories of Iran: modernism and marginality in the Middle East/Stephanie Cronin.

DESCRIPTION : Cambridge, United Kingdom; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

IDENTIFIERS : LCCN 2020030270 (print) | LCCN 2020030271 (ebook) | ISBN 9781107190849 (hardback) | ISBN 9781316641255 (paperback) | ISBN 9781108120289 (epub)

SUBJECTS : LCSH: Social classes--Iran. | Marginality, Social--Iran. | Iran--Social conditions. | Iran--Economic conditions.

CLASSIFICATION : LCC HN670.2.A8 C76 2021 (print) | LCC HN670.2.A8 (ebook) | DDC 305.50955--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030270

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020030271

ISBN 978-1-107-19084-9 Hardback

ISBN 978-1-316-64125-5 Paperback