Against conventional views of the unchallenged hegemony of a modernizing monarchy, this book argues that power was continuously contested in Riza Shah's Iran. Cronin excavates the successive challenges to Riza Shah's regime posed by a range of subaltern social groups and seeks to restore to these groups a sense of their historical agency.

STEPHANIE CRONIN   is Departmental Lecturer in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Oxford, UK. She has also held an Iran Heritage Foundation fellowship for many years. She is the author of The Army and the Creation of the Pahlavi State in Iran 1910-1925 (1997) and Tribal Politics in Iran: Rural Conflict and the New State, 1921-1941 (2006), and editor of The Making of Modern Iran: State and Society under Riza Shah, 1921-1941 (2003); Reformers and Revolutionaries in Modern Iran: New Perspectives on the Iranian Left (2004) and Subalterns and Social Protest: History from Below in the Middle East and North Africa (2007). She is currently working on a book on state-building in tribal societies.