Iran

Dictatorship and Development

Fred Halliday

• Publisher: Oneworld Academic
• Year: 2024
• eBook ISBN: 9780861548736
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction by Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi
• Author’s Preface
• Maps
• 1 Iranian Society: An Overview
• 2 The State: Historical Background
• 3 The State: General Characteristics
• 4 The Armed Forces and SAVAK
• 5 Agricultural Development
• 6 Oil and Industrialization
• 7 The Working Class
• 8 The Opposition
• 9 Foreign Relations
• 10 Conclusions
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Appendix I  The Revolution Turns to Repression
• Appendix II Iran’s Revolution: The First Year
• Appendix III Year Three of the Iranian Revolution
• Appendix IV Year Four of the Islamic Republic
• Appendix V The Revolution’s First Decade
• Appendix VI Iran’s Revolution in Global History
• Index
• Copyright