Opium, Carpets and Constitutionalists A Social History of the Elite Households of Kirman, 1859--1914

The late 19th and early 20th centuries in Kirman, Iran were marked by significant social, political and economic change associated with globalization. This dissertation is a study of the role of the elite households of Kirman in mediating these transformations at the provincial level. Elite households were extended partlinear kinship groups which dominated provincial society in Qatar Iran (1795-1925) through their control over three key areas of social, political and cultural life: landholdings, through which they acquired surplus from the agricultural sector of the economy; religious institutions, which involved control over extensive vaqf (religious endowment) revenues, religious ceremonies, various social services and patronage; and access to stipendiary administrative posts, which institutionalized elites' domination over local society and regularized their access to Qatar appointees. These activities formed the core of elite household estates for their socio-cultural, as well as economic, importance.;This dissertation utilizes a large body of source material which has never been systematically explored by scholars, including a number of local histories and geographies and several recently discovered Persian travelogues, in order to reconstruct in detail the estates of Kirman's leading households and explore the means by which elites adapted to changing circumstances. These sources demonstrate that Kirman's local elite households were the principle agents of change in the social, political and economic transformations often grouped under the rubric of modernization. The commercialization of agriculture and handicraft weaving, led by local elites, together resulted in an unprecedented level of urban-rural integration through the intensification of urban elites' rural landholdings and control over productive relations. In Barn, elites similarly took advantage of the exigency of maintaining a Qatar presence in Baluchistan to gain control over the lucrative henna producing lands in Narmashir. These activities strengthened urban households' control over local society and intensified factional competition among them. This intense factionalism culminated in a large scale riot in Kirman City in 1905, ostensibly on sectarian lines, which became a catalyst for Iran's Constitutional Revolution. While critical in the revolution's success, Kirman's elites were also central in curtailing its reach once its institutions challenged their own local patrimonial authority.