| This study is an attempt to explain agrarian change in Iran as an integral component of a developing world economy. Methodologically, its primary aim is to avoid dichotomizing the "internal" and the "external" and to analyze social change from a global perspective which seeks to bring back economy, politics, and ideology into a coherent relationship with each other. Thus it starts with a changing totality, and then proceeds to analyze a constituent relation within this totality. In contrast with the world system perspective, however, the concept of totality employed in this study has a dialectical content. That is, the non-class characterization of economic development that is distinctive of the latter approach is avoided.;In Part I, the social structure of world capitalism at two distinct periods is depicted. The aim is to show how the global politicoeconomic regimes of capital accumulation, the Pax Britannica in the late nineteenth century and the Pax Americana after the second World War, each led to a distinctive path of capitalist development in Iran, and how, more specifically, Iranian agriculture was constructed and reconstructed within each changing international complex. The point of departure is the stages of development of capital as a world-economic process. That is, we start from the analysis of new and dominant forms of world capital and the corresponding changes in the organization of production and circulation of commodities. Within this context, we examine how these production regimes organized and reorganized forms of agricultural production in Iran. Part II begins with an analysis of commercialization of Iranian agriculture in the context of the emerging international division of labor in the late nineteenth century. Later, the study focuses on land reform, agricultural development, and state policy in Iran with the aim of linking these to the changes in the organization of the world market in the post-World War II era. The land reform program and its consequences are analyzed on the basis of a framework derived from a specific periodization of the postwar world economy. |
