Stephanie Cronin is Iran Heritage Foundation Fellow, University of Northampton. She is the author of  The Army and the Creation of the Pahlavi State in Iran, 1910-1926, (I. B. Tauris,1997) and Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict and the New State, (RoutledgeCurzon, 2006), and the editor of The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah, 1921-1941
(RoutledgeCurzon, 2003); Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran: New Perspectives on the Iranian Left (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); and Subalterns and Social Protest: History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa (RoutledgeCurzon, 2007). She is a member of the editorial boards of Iranian Studies and Middle Eastern Studies, a member of the advisory council of Qajar Studies, and assistant editor of Holy Land Studies. Her current work focuses on subaltern responses to modernity in Iran. She has recently published ³The Tehran Crowd and the Rise of Riza Khan: Popular Protest, Disorder and Riot in Iran,² in the International Review of Social History, (2005), and is completing a new book entitled Shahs, Soldiers and Subalterns: Contesting Power in the New Iran (Palgrave, 2008).

Conceptualizing Modern Iran: a re-evaluation

This paper attempts a re-evaluation of some key conceptions, preconceptions and misconceptions which have shaped Western scholarship on twentieth century Iranian history. It will begin by questioning the “catastrophist” perspective which has dominated historical writing on late Qajar Iran, a perspective which has not only conditioned assessments of the constitutional revolution but which has also, by an emphasis on the chaos and defeat of the constitutional years, contributed to the persistence of a one-dimensional, or at most two-dimensional, picture of the Pahlavi period. The paper will also, specifically, problematize the conventional periodization adopted for twentieth century Iran. Scholarly convention locates major historical breaks in, for example, 1911 and 1921, the unheralded and apparently inexplicable eruption of Riza Khan onto the national political stage marking the birth of modern Iran. Rather then emphasizing the discontinuities supposedly represented by these and later chronological breaks, this paper will, in contrast, seek to establish continuities, in an effort to develop a more accurate picture of the broad historical narrative of modern Iran. The paper will argue that historians’ relentless focus on the state and the political elite has distorted scholarly understanding of the dynamics of modern Iranian history. It will argue in favour of a different way of locating key historical shifts, seeking to understand phenomena such as “modernization” by examining not only the agenda of the state and the elite, but also by understanding the experience of social groups usually and erroneously conceptualized as merely passive objects of this agenda. As an example, it will suggest different ways of approaching the “tribal problem” in modern Iran, incorporating the perspectives not only of the state, whether secular nationalist or Islamic, but also of internally differentiated tribal groups, both elite and subaltern. In general, the paper is concerned with challenging ahistorical dichotomies. As well as questioning the dichotomy of modernizing state and recalcitrant tribes, the paper will also revisit the role of Britain in modern Iran, arguing that the British were neither the impartial observers of self-representation nor the omniscient puppet-masters of nationalist discourse.