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Ervand Abrahamian, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), xxv+228 pp. ISBN: 9780521528917. £10.80
Ervand Abrahamian, the author of this well-written book and a member of Iran's ethnic Armenian minority, is Distinguished Professor of History at Baruch College and Graduate Center of City University of New York. His previous publications, among them The Iranian Mojahedin (1989), Khomeinism (1993) and Tortured Confessions (1999), feature more or less the left-wing political perspective of their author - especially in terms of socio-political and socio-economic analysis.
Another reviewer - Edward Mortimer, Senior Vice-President of the Salzburg Global Seminar - pointedly stated that "Ervand Abrahamian has done for Iran what de Tocqueville did for France, showing how the revolution continued the work of the ancien régime through the ever increasing power of the state." In addition to this, other scholars in Iranian Studies, among them this reviewer who lived in Iran for several years during the 1980s,1 have also argued that Iran's foreign policy under the post-1979 regime, too, shows remarkable signs of continuity (rather than a break) with the previous Pahlavi era. In true Marxist analysis - but in the case of Iran's history since the late Qajar era - actually based on historical facts rather than myths, Abrahamian argues throughout his book - as its main thesis - that the history of Iran since the late 1800s is actually the history of the growth...