This paper is part of a larger project on widespread famine and recurrent food protest in nineteenth-century Iran. I explain the primary causes and the historical context of food scarcity and protest, the Iranian state’s response to famine and food-related riots, and the significance of these for an understanding of modern Iran and the contemporary Middle East. My contention here is that these subsistence riots contributed to the development of popular politics in Iranian society paving the way for major, country-wide revolutionary movements in the late nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries. I argue that the causes and context of nineteenth-century famine and food riots were unprecedented or “modern" phenomena, and these in turn set the stage for the development of political participation in the country. This paper is divided into three sections. In part one, I briefly examine the roots of public frustration in nineteenth-century Iran. In the second part, I focus on the causes and frequency of famine during this period. And in the final section, I speak of the main features of subsistence protest. I will conclude by pointing to the importance of food riots in the development of popular politics in Iran and by implications across the Middle East. This work is based on eighteen months of archival research in Iran, Turkey, Britain, and the US. The social conflict and violence that I study and that were generated as a result of food crises are important because they served as templates for future popular movements and revolutions in this country. Scholars of France (e.g., George Rudé and Cynthia Bouton) and China (e.g., Joseph Esherick and Paul Cohen) have shown how famine and food-related grievances contributed to the making of the French Revolution of 1789-99 and the Boxer Uprising of 1898-1901. Despite these broader interest in the background of important revolutionary episodes, historians of the modern Middle East have, by and large, overlooked to scrutinize the economic, social, and political origins and genealogy of the widespread social upheaval in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My work moves away from this earlier historiography by explaining the agrarian and social background that contributed to the development of popular dissent during this period. My study shows that the reasons for the development of political participation were far more complicated than what earlier historians have noted.