Histories of Iran, as of the wider Middle East, have been dominated by the twin narratives of top-down modernization and methodological nationalism.
Its attention is firmly fixed on subaltern Social groups: the \'dangerous classes\' and their constructed contrast with the new and avowedly modern bourgeois elite created by the infant Pahlavi state; the hungry poor pitted against the deregulation and globalizatio.
In this book, Stephanie Cronin problematizes both of these narratives.
Histories of Iran, as of the wider Middle East, have been dominated by the twin narratives of top-down modernization and methodological nationalism