ABSTRACT
THE purpose of economic history is presumably analysis as well as collection of facts with a view to explaining certain uniformities that are believed to exist in the economic life of human societies. In other words, the art consists of formulating verifiable hypotheses and testing them against the facts of economic history. Few people have advanced hypotheses concerning the causes, prerequisites, patterns and problems of economic development that could have universal applicability, for all times and all places. The less ambitious approach consists in pinpointing and explaining certain uniformities within a more limited time span and for a more limited area. The area of our interest in this paper—that of the Rentier States—is not quite limited to the Middle East, though most countries of this region happen to belong to this category. As for the time span of our study, it is one of the objectives of this paper to suggest that the period roughly corresponding to 1950–6 represents a landmark in the economic history of the Middle East and that at least in the case of Iran the structure and sources of economic growth after this period are distinctly different from the decades preceding it.
