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Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah: From Qajar Collapse to Pahlavi Power by Cyrus Ghani. London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998. Pp. xiv + 434. 29.50.
Cyr-us Ghani has written what is one of the fullest and most comprehensive accounts to date of the political history of Iran in the years between the close of the Great War and the consolidation of the Pahlavi monarchy in the mid-1920s. Basing himself on a close and careful reading of all the available sources in both English and Persian, Ghani has constructed an account which succeeds in imposing coherence on the chaos of the period, locating a unifying dynamic to the myriad and apparently discrete and disparate events which constituted the politics of the time. In Ghani's work the history of those years no longer appears as episodic and disjointed, even random and meaningless. Taking a historical period characterized by extreme fragmentation, Ghani has forged a work of considerable clarity and explanatory power. By employing the device of a strong and sustained central narrative, he has succeeded in keeping consistently in focus his central themes: the preconditions for the emergence of Reza Khan, and his inexorable rise to supreme power.
The years with which this book is principally concerned, 1921-26, are, as Ghani emphasizes, crucial to the understanding of twentieth century Iranian history as a whole. It was indeed the period during which were laid the foundations of the modem Iranian state. Ghani is also correct to point out that the period has received only the sparing and uneven attention of scholarship. For both these reasons Ghani's work is an important contribution. The book may also be seen, however, as representative of a very recent, perhaps even rather sudden, renaissance of interest in Reza Shah and the early Pahlavi period.
This new scholarship has tended to shift its focus away from the Pahlavi era as a discrete, self-contained and wholly novel period, towards examining the context which produced Reza Khan, and the impact of this context on Pahlavi rule itself, seeking to explain its key features by reference to its historical and political environment. Increasingly historians have attempted to establish links between the constitutional and early Pahlavi periods, and to stress the significance of the post-constitutional...