Between 1870 and 1910, there was a surge in the production of regional histories and geographies throughout Iran. These texts reflect strong local and regional identities through their narration of space and place, as communities bound together by a common history and culture, commodities and curiosities, and the sacred and poetic. Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Mana Kia, and others have suggested that medieval Persian local histories reflect something of a “proto-nationalism” as far back as the Mongol period, but relatively little attention has been paid to the ideological aspects of their 19th and early 20th century counterparts. This paper will apply insights from postmodern geographers and critical theorists like Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Mike Featherstone to investigate space as an ideological construct in these texts and the relationship between spatial imagination and the politics of identity. The prevailing argument among intellectual and cultural historians is that nationalism was introduced to Iran by Europeans as a totalizing ideology and an aspect of modernism, which subsequently out-competed various particularlisms like tribalism, sectarianism, and regionalism. The local histories of Kashan (1871), Kirman (1874), and Isfahan (1877) will be explored in this paper as alternate entry points for viewing the politics of identity beyond the elite communities of Tehran and their transnational networks. A brief discussion of two annotations and commentaries on the local history of Kirman in the first decade of the 20th century will be included to offer some temporal depth to this discussion. I will argue here that regionalism was not outcompeted by nationalism, but was rather a critical component in its creation. Being Kashani or Kirmani or Isfahani was not contrary to being Iranian, it was an aspect of one’s Iranianness. This is particularly strongly reflected in two texts from the early 20th century that are largely commentaries and annotations of the 1874 history of Kirman. This brings into question the interplay of the global and the local in the changing ideological landscape of the late 19th century, as well as how Iranians produced, rather than received, new forms of identity as active agents of change.