Cronin Stephanie. Social Histories of Iran: Modernism and Marginality in the Middle East

Cambridge University Press, 2021. — 320 p.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 Elahé 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 (2019), 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).