The Making of the First Revolutionary Movement in Modern Iran, 1850-1892
FAIN: HB-282175-22
Ranin Kazemi
San Diego State University Foundation (San Diego, CA 92182-1931)
Research and writing leading to a book on popular uprisings in Iran, 1890-1891.
I seek 12 months of fulltime work to finish my first book manuscript on the origins of a protest movement in Iran in 1891-92. If granted the NEH award, I will use the grant period to complete this monograph and submit it to Cambridge University Press by January 2023. This book is about the economic and social forces that transformed Iran over the course of the 19th century. Based on a wide range of archival and published sources in five languages and from six different countries, this work disentangles the long-term causes and context of a nation-wide insurrectionary movement known as the Tobacco Protest. Focusing on one country as a case study, this book makes a number of interventions in the scholarship on the Middle East and global history. It contends that the emergence of democratic sentiments and religious involvement in politics in the modern Middle East had much to do with the arrival of capitalism, colonial violence, and modern state building in the 19th century.