A Revised History of Persia

The assassination of Nasereddin Shah in 1896 did not produce immediate revolution, but it exposed the exhaustion of the Qajar state and accelerated the crystallization of new political demands that had been fermenting for decades beneath the surface of dynastic rule. Within a decade, Iran would experience the most profound domestic upheaval of the nineteenth century: the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-1911. To reduce this transformation to an echo of religious dissent, as some accounts continue to do, fundamentally misreads its structural causes and global significance. The revolution was forged in the crucible of imperial rivalry, global capitalism, and the uneven diffusion of industrial modernity—forces that transcended the millenarian impulses of earlier sectarian movements while drawing upon distinctively Iranian traditions of resistance and renewal. The Global Context: Industrial Modernity and Imperial Competition The Constitutional Revolution cannot be understood apart from th...