On February 7, 1929, Iran’s parliament ratified a short bill manumitting all slaves and declaring slavery on Iranian soil illegal. Only a few lines long, the law represented the final step in Iran’s century long history with eroding the presence of slavery from within its borders. The law came as another one of Reza Shah’s initiatives to recreate Iran as a modern and progressive nation, encompassing social and political markers in an effort to emulate European standards. Wedged in between other measures, including Tehran’s municipal decree regulating restaurants in 1928 and laws enforcing Western dress in 1930, the end of slavery was another measure intended to present a visible yet superficial semblance of Iranian modernity. Although earlier political debates, especially during the Constitutional Revolution, had questioned the presence of slavery in Iran, its legitimacy as an institution was not legally challenged until Reza Shah’s rule. By 1929, the practice of slavery was isolated to certain regions in Iran, especially along the Persian Gulf coastline. The weakness of the Iran’s center-periphery relations, coupled with the lack of urgency surrounding the bill resulted in a fairly lukewarm response to the new law on behalf of government officials. This paper looks at manumission and its aftermath during the Reza Shah period, questioning the extent to which manumission and slaves were considered to be a priority during his administration. By examining government documents and newspapers, as well as British records from the Persian Gulf, this paper seeks to present both official and popular takes on abolition and the presence of slavery in Iran.

This study examines how the development of railroads and highways in the early Pahlavi period contributed to the formation of a national community in Iran with a particular focus on the experience of the modern middle class. How did the Iranian modern middle class imagine railroads and highways? What were their visions of a national community? Finally, how did traveling on trains and automobiles impact the ways they conceived the national community? By looking at the modern middle class’s experiences with new modes of transportation, this paper seeks to shift focus from a state-centric perspective and discuss the role society played in the processes of national formation. Historiography on transportation infrastructure in Iran generally focuses on politics and international relations. While such issues as Anglo-Russian rivalries, America’s involvement, and the attitudes of Reza Shah and prominent Iranian statesmen shed light on one aspect of nationalist politics, existing works do not elucidate nation-building as an everyday practice experienced by ordinary Iranians. Furthermore, most works privilege political periodization and overemphasize transformations that started with the rise of Reza Khan in 1921 and ended with his demise in 1941. Thus, despite the continued daily experience in railway journeys among Iranians after the 1938 completion of the Trans-Iranian Railway and throughout World War II, many works abruptly end their narrative in 1938. To rectify this historiographical problem, this study looks not only at how the modern middle class envisaged railroads and highways transforming the Iranian nation but also how this class modified its imaginations as railway and highway journeys became more common from the late 1930s. Using a wide range of primary sources from the Iranian press, travel guides, memoirs, literature, and visual images, this study makes three interrelated arguments: 1) the way modern middle-class Iranians understood their experiences with railroads and highways was mediated by their perceived social standing within the nation; 2) while the modern middle class viewed the rest of the population as ignorant masses to be enlightened, it also feared the increased mobility and visibility of Iran’s backwardness; 3) despite the separation that modern middle-class Iranians imagined between themselves and the rest of the population, actual experiences of journeys necessarily entailed shared time and space with others and fostered a differentiated yet more inclusive sense of a national community.

The urban history of Tehran has usually been told either from the perspective of state building and modernization or from the perspective of changing aesthetic norms and architectural history. The history of the urban experience itself, and the emergence of new modes of social and cultural life associated with the form of the modern city, has by contrast less often been explored. This paper will investigate the experience of urban modernity from the vantage point of the rapid transformation of one specific urban institution: the bookstore. By investigating the history of bookstores in Tehran during the first half of the twentieth century, the paper will highlight the intersection of several distinct social and cultural transformations that were taking place in Tehran during that time. First, the paper will investigate the discernable patterns in the location of newly built bookstores, charting their growth from the traditional commercial zones of the Tehran bazaar to newly built commercial zones of the expanding city. Second, the paper will also link the growth of bookstores to the social growth of a new literate class of Iranians produced as a result of the educational policies of the first half of the twentieth century. These educational policies led to the growth a new class of modern readers who, for the first time, engaged in the practice of buying, reading, and trading of books on an unprecedented scale. Finally, the paper will also survey the role of modern print technology during this period, and the important possibilities that the new mass-production techniques of typeset printing enabled with respect to transforming the patterns of book circulation, as well as the experience of reading itself. As the paper will argue, it is the intersection of all three of these factors—new sites of bookstores, a new class of readers, and the possibilities of mass production—that contributed to the emergence of Tehran’s “public sphere” by mid-century. As books and readers began to share a common space within the urban experience of the city via modern bookstores, new possibilities of public opinion and political action also began to take shape. The source material for the paper is derived primarily from a growing body of published histories and memoirs of specific Tehrani bookstores and their owners, as well as the histories and memoirs associated with specific book publishers.

This paper investigates how geographically scattered labor activisms of the early 1920s Iran had a cumulative effect that led to the 1929 oil workers’ strike in Khuzestan, which in turn played a significant role in shaping governmental practices and the notions of governmental responsibility for collective welfare. Basing our research on a range of archives - including the BP Oil Company, Iranian National Archives, the British Intelligence Reports, and the Soviet archives – we revisit the emerging forms of subaltern agency and expectations, especially in the country's most significant industrial complex in Khuzestan, in order to question the notion of a passive society being coercively engineered from top by an all-powerful state. Our research sheds light on how the labor resistance during this period, especially in Khuzestan’s oil enclaves, forced the state and its agents to rethink the notions of public welfare and the spheres of governmental responsibilities - ranging from the rudiments of labor contracts, legislating workplace treatment, provision of municipal, public health, and public education services, etc. Rather than governmental elites bestowing modern spheres of social citizenship, we find these social gains to be the result of negotiated struggles (even if uneven) between the political and civil societies. The period between the two World Wars in Iran was marked by the emergence of a highly centralizing new political society, whose priority was to diminish local and tribal autonomy and enhance the interdependencies between the provinces and the center. This was accompanied by rapid urbanization and industrialization and the emergence of a new civil society characterized by non-coercive institutions such as political parties, guilds and labour unions, cultural associations and private schools. This dual process crafted a new identity for the Iranians, now being the citizens of a modern nation-state rather than subjects of a patrimonial empire. The emergence of an urban labor movement of organized and non-organized workers engaged in collective actions not only for improved working and living conditions but also for the recognition of their autonomous status as national citizens, was a clear indicator of the rise of this new demand for social citizenship. Despite rising repression, especially in the 1930s, which saw civil organizations greatly subdued, we aim to show that the collective labor and civic activisms of the earlier period left a deep and lasting imprint on both political institutions and practices as well as on public culture.