Originally completed mere months before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Fred Halliday’s study of twentieth-century Iran was not only incredibly timely but a deeply researched, thought-provoking work. It masterfully surveys the country’s uneven capitalist development, state-building and class structure, security and military apparatus, dissent and opposition movements, and foreign relations. Even decades later it remains among the most sophisticated and compelling analyses of this period of Iranian history. Halliday persuasively argues against crude interpretations of the Pahlavi regime as an enlightened and modernising monarchy or merely a dependent client state. Instead, he contends that to make sense of the Pahlavi regime and its vulnerabilities, it is crucial to understand the dialectic of dictatorship, development and the imperial geopolitics of the global Cold War.
This new edition also includes six of Halliday’s essays on the Islamic Republic, demonstrating how his thinking on Iran and the revolution evolved over time.
‘It is impossible to exaggerate the significance of Halliday’s magisterial study for an entire generation of students of Iranian social and political history. Today it stands as a landmark of the particularly crucial decades between the US–UK coup of 1953 and the collapse of the Pahlavi dynasty in 1977–9.’
‘This new edition...with Sadeghi-Boroujerdi’s thoughtful introduction is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding Pahlavi-era Iran on its own terms and not merely as the background to the 1979 revolution.’
‘That Halliday did not predict the revolution, or its Islamic turn, does not diminish the import of his contribution. Published here along with the original text, Halliday’s writings on post-revolutionary Iran show he quickly recognized the Islamic Republic’s repressive character and gave us insightful commentary on it to the end of his life. Masterfully introduced and elucidated by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, this new edition revives an indispensable text of the Iranian Revolution and a landmark of leftist intellectual history.’
‘Remarkable...almost miraculously timely...a carefully written, well-researched and deeply serious account of modern Iran.’
