ABSTRACT
In the two decades between his arrival in power in 1921 via a coup d’état and his abdication in 1941, Riza Shah presided over a period of profound political, economic and social change in Iran, unprecedented in its scope and in its pace. Although his regime drew much of its support, at least in its first decade, from the urban political elite and the nationalist intelligentsia, and its state-building effort was primarily oriented towards the urban populations and focused on industrial development, nonetheless the early Pahlavi period was a time of profound change for rural Iran. Throughout the countryside, the rural poor, nomads and settled peasants were profoundly affected by the upheavals unleashed by the regime’s choice of authoritarian state-building and modernization based on European models. Both nomads and peasants suffered materially as a consequence of the general development policies implemented by the new state and by the khans’ and the landowners’ adoption of the new state’s ideological outlook, especially its attitude towards private property, and the resulting efforts by rural elites to assert their personal and absolute ownership over resources hitherto held collectively or contingently.
