Reviews: The Political Economy of Iran under the Qajars: Society, Politics, Economics and Foreign Relations, 1796-1926

Forty charts and tables provide figures for a variety of economic indicators, including transportation conditions, foreign investment, expenditures, exports, wages, and foreign trade. The author further divides the ruling class into two categories--the "dependent" and the "national"--and argues that the former, more reactionary, group overpowered the latter to take the accumulating capital made possible by high prices, low wages, and the formation of a commodity market to shift investment to foreign trade, cash crop production, and real estate (pp. 180-81). Works by scholars such as Daron Acemoglu, Douglass North, Steven Pincus, Kenneth Pomeranz, James Robinson, R. Bin Wong, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal, for example, point to the content of political and ideological debates, to policies pursued, to the forms of institutions created, and to environmental conditions as the most important factors in stimulating economic innovation and growth or, conversely, stagnation.