No Easy Thing to Understand: A Historiography of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution

Abstract

The historiography of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran centers on the root causes of social change in Iran. In this way, authors must generally accomplish two things in their histories of the Constitutional Revolution. One, they must describe Iranian society during the late Qajar period in order to describe what the Revolution changed. Two, they also explain why Iranian society changed. However, these are two different projects. The former is largely a social history project, while the latter is one largely addressed by sociology (in this case, primarily historical sociology). This paper will, broadly speaking, cover three sets of approaches: Whig history, historical sociology, and social history. All three of these approaches have different attitudes towards social change. Differences amongst the authors in terms of their portrayal of Iranian society represent both historiographical shifts and changes in Iranian society. This combination of theoretical and political assumptions has affected how we have understood the beliefs and organization of Iranian society before the Constitutional Revolution and why they changed during the Revolution. Rather than focusing on 1905, scholars should turn their attention on 1940's Iran as a way to understand Iranian society during the Constitutional Revolution.