Introduction

The Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911 was a movement for parliamentary representation, constitutional government, reform, and centralization. It was the consequence of a variety of Iranian developments in the nineteenth century: military defeats by Russia, commercial capitulations and concessions to Russia and Great Britain, European economic penetration, dislocation of local manufacturers, and subsequent social discontent. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution began at the end of 1905 when a group of clerics and merchants took sanctuary in the royal mosque of Tehran. Three factors that explain the unique phenomenon are: (1) the revolutionary and intellectual milieu of the Caucasus and its influence on the centuries-old Iranian Armenian community; (2) the communal violence between Caucasian Armenians and Muslims and the desire of the political left to counter this by encouraging collaboration of the two peoples in the Iranian movement; and (3) the fluidity of identities that made participation in a revolutionary movement outside the Ottoman and Russian Empires possible.