Late in 1905, a merchant protest erupted in Tehran, supported by the leading Shi’i clergy. This protest transmuted over the next several months from a dispute sparked by tariff grievances into a revolution demanding political change and the introduction of constitutional government in Iran. The struggle that developed in Iran between the constitutionalists and the forces of reaction was, of course, not purely the domain of the indigenous groups in Iran whose political fate was at stake. Given Iran's position as a focal point of the Great Game—the epic competition for regional hegemony between Great Britain and Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—it was unavoidable that the two Great Powers took an interest in and, to varying degrees, tried to affect the outcome of Iran's internecine struggle.

In his valuable new book Britain and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911, Mansour Bonakdarian reinterprets the role played by one of those Great Powers in the Iranian revolution. With the outbreak of the revolution and its turn toward a constitutional struggle, the Iranian opposition had hoped for official support from Liberal Britain for their cause; this official backing never came. Chief among the reasons for this disappointment, according to Bonakdarian, was the dogged commitment by Britain's autonomous foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, to the idea and reality of the rapprochement and accord with Russia that he had worked so hard to construct. For the sake of the agreement with Russia, which Bonakdarian sees as being oriented toward countering a German threat, Grey would have been willing to sacrifice all appearances of Persian territorial integrity and political sovereignty, short of sanctioning outright annexation by Russia. Unfortunately for the revolutionaries, Russia was determined to back the anticonstitutional reaction led by the new shah, Mohammad Ali; in an interesting side note, Bonakdarian suggests that this Russian position was designed not only to preserve Russian influence in Tehran but also to frustrate Russia's own reformers. And Bonakdarian sees Grey as complicit in Russian interference, painting a picture of a foreign secretary not only incapable of stemming the tide of Russian transgression, but uninterested. Bonakdarian's Grey is a Russian apologist sine qua non.

Where this book makes its greatest contribution is in its insistence that the official government policy channels, embodied most immediately by Grey, were only part of the story. In order to truly understand the nature of Britain's official response to the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, one must delve into the unofficial support coming from the different pockets of dissent that dotted the British political landscape. Radical Liberals, Unionists, anti-imperialists, pro-Persianists, Labourites—all had factions that at times offered vocal opposition to Grey's Persia policy. Chief among the dissenters were the members of the Persia Committee, a nonpartisan and nongovernmental group headed jointly by the liberal imperialist businessman H. F. B. Lynch and, most notably, the influential Cambridge Orientalist E. G. Browne, who labored long and hard to stress that Iranian constitutionalism was an indigenous movement—influenced by the West, indeed, but one whose roots were firmly planted in Persian political and intellectual traditions. The committee, and the dissenters at large, formed a group that worked closely with the Iranian revolutionaries. While it is true that influential elements of British opinion—official and unofficial—saw the Persian question purely in terms of the traditional structures of imperial competition and governance, Bonakdarian shows that British responses to Persia were much more textured than the classic postcolonial assumptions would suggest. And Bonakdarian makes it clear that, ultimately, Grey and his government listened to these voices of dissent, if, perhaps, reluctantly. What Bonakdarian shows is that the foreign-policy dissenters, made famous by A. J. P. Taylor in his seminal 1958 work The Troublemakers, were, in fact, successful in influencing Grey's foreign policy vis-à-vis Persia and in pressing him to rein in Russian excesses.

Where Bonakdarian goes astray, however, is in his tendency to deny Grey any semblance of scruples in his unquestioning compliance with the realities of Russian encroachment upon Persian sovereignty. Bonakdarian's portrayal of Grey's blind acceptance of Russian action is unjustified, as exemplified by his discussion of the 1908 Liakhov affair (112). While the documentation in the British archives upon which Bonakdarian has relied does reflect the kind of passivity that the author recognizes in Grey, somewhat recent scholarship, which does not appear in this book's bibliography, draws on Russian archival evidence to show a much more active record of critical reproach of Russian policy and actions by Grey and his government. Although Grey was criticized by his opposition at the time for his indifference to the Persian constitutional plight, and rightly so, perhaps he is not quite as deserving of unwavering censure as Bonakdarian's portrait suggests. Furthermore, Bonakdarian has focused a bit too narrowly on his subject, often forgetting that, for Grey and Britain as a whole, the Persian question was always part of the much larger challenge of the Great Game and could not be disengaged from strategic concerns vis-à-vis Afghanistan, Tibet, and, above all, the defense of India, which, particularly at the time of the signing of the Anglo-Russian agreement, took precedence over British interest in forming an anti-German bloc.

That said, there is far more to recommend in this book than to question. It makes an important contribution to the historiography on a number of areas of British and Iranian history, adding to both the scholarship on the Iranian constitutional revolution—the centerpiece of which remains Browne's own contemporary magnum opus—and the literature on public opinion in Britain (although it is, perhaps by necessity, overbalanced in favor of the foreign-policy elites). It includes a wonderful collection of political cartoons, some immediately familiar, some a revelation. Furthermore, Bonakdarian insists that Persia be recognized at the foreground of the foreign-policy concerns of Grey's term in office, a place of prominence that the Persian question merited and that traditional historians of Edwardian foreign policy deny. In addition, he revises the dominant scholarship on the Iranian constitutional revolution by giving the role of British foreign-policy dissent its rightful place. For all these reasons, this book should be welcomed by scholars of Edwardian foreign policy and modern Iran.