Economic Modernisation of Iran, 1953–1968

Ali Rahnema is Professor of Economics at the American University of Paris. He is the author of Call to Arms: Iran’s Marxist Revolutionaries, The Rise of Modern Despotism in Iran and An Islamic Utopian: A Political Biography of Ali Shari‘ati.

'This is a ground-breaking study of the economic dimension of the modernisation of Iran in the second Pahlavi period. Despite its fundamental importance, the economic history of Iran has, until now, been largely eclipsed by a concentration on politics and ideology. With his book Ali Rahnema, using a finely granular analysis, has taken this Cinderella of the social sciences and restored it to its true centrality, placing it at the heart of the fifteen key  years between the coup of 1953 and the beginning of the fourth Five-Year Plan in 1968. The book is important and original, offers new challenges to scholarship on modern Iran, and will undoubtedly become a classical account of its subject.' Stephanie Cronin, author of Social Histories of Iran