Social structure and social change in Iran from 1500 to 197

This study analyzes social structure and social change (conceived as both gradual long-term transformations and social movements) in Iran over the five centuries from 1500 to 1979. Several theoretical perspectives in the sociology of development are critically synthesized into a single framework for this purpose: dependency, modes of production, world-system, the nature of the state, and political cultures of opposition and legitimation. Social change is conceptualized as a product of internal social structure and external political and economic factors, to which the various social classes and groups in Iran have responded through the prisms of their own political cultures and value orientations.;Empirical analysis based on extensive consultation of secondary historiography and published primary sources applies this perspective to three major periods: pre-capitalist Iran under the Safavid dynasty from 1500 to 1800, the reign of the Qajars from 1800 to 1925, and the rise and fall of the Pahlavis between 1925 and 1979. Among the key findings may be noted: the conceptualization of pre-capitalist social structure as a combination of three modes of production (pastoral nomadic, peasant crop-sharing and petty commodity); the intertwined economic, political and ideological crises that led to the fall of the Safavids in 1722; the movement of Iran from the external arena of the world-economy in the seventeenth century to the periphery in the nineteenth; the concomitant dependency of the Qajar political economy on Russia and Great Britain by 1900; and the pattern of urban, multi-class populist alliances as reactions of aggreived classes to state domination and foreign power in the major social movements of the twentieth century--the 1905-11 Constitutional Revolution, the 1951-53 oil nationalization movement and the 1977-79 revolution.;Various theoretical and empirical debates addressed in the course of the research include the impact of the West on Iranian social structure, the roles played by economic, political and cultural factors in social movements, the reasons for success or failure of revolutionary movements, and a new model of revolution, based on the theoretical perspectives used throughout and the result of comparative reflection on Iran's modern social movements.