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Acknowledgments:
I would like to thank Houchang Chehabi and Naghmeh Sohrabi, the participants in a 2010 Columbia University Iranian Seminar, attendees of a 2011 UCLA job talk, and the anonymous CSSH referees for their insightful comments, and CSSH Managing Editor David Akin for smoothing and refining the text. Research for this paper was made possible by a Swiss Foundation for the Sciences Fellowship for Advanced Scholars.
This paper examines two intertwined processes that helped shape life in Tehran in the 1950s. One was a ravenous demand for electricity, part of a surge in popular expectations for mass consumer goods and higher living standards that began in mid-century; the other the 1958-1961 construction, to meet that demand, of a massive hydro-electrical dam, 180 meters high and 390 meters long, on the Karaj River 60 kilometers north of Tehran. 1 This double story, and more particularly the crucial role that societal actors played in it, illuminates society-state and domestic-global interactions characteristic of post-colonial, Third World countries during the Cold War.
The mass consumer society that began to emerge in the 1950s in Tehran, and thereafter across Iran, was not a bolt from the blue. 2 While in the West twentieth-century mass consumerism was rooted in the rise of consumerism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in Iran its origins are found in the nineteenth century. 3 That is when Western, Russian, British-Indian, and Ottoman goods began to arrive there in greater quantities than in the disordered eighteenth century, aided by Iran's greater stability under the Qajars (1794-1925) and trade agreements imposed by several European powers. After mid-century, courtiers and wealthy merchants, especially in the growing capital, Tehran, started to display wealth more openly. 4 The Constitutional Revolution's mass politics (1905-1911) helped popularize some goods like photographs, and at the same time debates intensified about the consumption of certain imported goods such as Western cloth. 5 In the 1920s and 1930s, Reza Shah Pahlavi's state (1921/25-1941) expanded roads and railways that helped create a national market. An emerging modern middle class joined what had been a small pool of people who could afford consumer goods. In Iran's largest cities new avenues lined by modern shops were central for marketing, selling, and...