The historiography of modern Iran disagrees on nearly everything except one social fact: 1979 was the year zero that cleaved the country into two distinct historical periods and social-ideological formations. Yet in both a symbolic and material sense, the Islamic Republic rests on the uneasy foundations of the Pahlavi Monarchy. This paper will propose one mechanism through which the Islamic Republic's unexpected longevity emerged from its predecessor's politics: the after effects of the Shah's land reform policies of the 1960s-70s in the post-79 era. Drawing from anthropological and historical sources as well as my own ethnographic work, I argue that a significant segment of the Iranian peasantry took advantage of the unsettled property rights regime of the 1980s-1990s. If the Shah's land reform enlarged a middle peasantry, the 1979 revolution and its aftermath provided new avenues for these peasants to capitalize on the country’s refashioned political economy - in some cases, literally. They did this not solely through peasant production for the market but also land pooling and speculation concomitant with urbanization. In this sense, the relatively persistent pattern of low inequality in Iran – far less than middle-income countries in Latin America, for instance – can be partly traced back to the long-term effects of land reform under the Monarchy. Land claims and tenure operated as a rural subsidy to household livelihoods. This paper examines the provinces of Fars, Mazandaran, and Khorasan to show the variation in state formation in the Islamic Republic and the actually existing social contract which emerged. In each case, provincial elite politics as well as center-periphery relations played a key role in determining the ability of peasants to capitalize on land reform. In addition, the agrarian structure of each region shaped the bargaining power of peasants in the post-revolutionary era. The paper concludes with a research program aiming to re-theorize provincial politics in Iran over the 20th century.