In a number of outstanding books and articles, beginning with The Army and the Creation of the Pahlavi State in Iran, 1910–1926 (1997), Stephanie Cronin has established herself as an authority on the history of Iran in the twentieth century. Much of her earlier work followed what might be called the conventional, top-down view of the modernization of Iran under Reza Shah. In this collection of essays, she presents the more fashionable bottom-up view of subaltern studies. This shift of focus is valuable, and Cronin is able to illuminate important and neglected aspects of the political history of the period under consideration, notably the role of crowds in Reza Shah's rise to power, and patterns of manipulation and contestation in some of the elections in the provinces in the 1920s.

The basic theme of subaltern studies, as the substantial introduction makes clear, is the contestation of the power from below. It becomes equally clear, however, that popular contestation of power in new Iran was almost entirely reactive. With the exception of the strike in the Abadan oil refinery in 1929 as an instance of modern industrial action, what was contested in the other cases under study was the state-building policies of Reza Shah and the modernizing elite in Tehran. The implication of popular contestation being reactive is that the conventional view is correct in identifying the source of the impetus to social and political change. Resistance to conscription as a measure required for the creation of a modern standing army in 1927–28 was very broad and general. Villagers throughout Iran resisted being drafted and transplanted to a different region. This resistance was overcome by the end of the decade, and conscription was effectively enforced throughout the 1930s. It is interesting to note that Cronin's last chapter is about the conspiracy of a small group of junior officer conscripts in 1939. The author remarks incidentally that the family property of Jahansuz, the young conscript officer who led the conspiracy, had been forcefully conveyed to Reza Shah during the latter's infamous land grab, which made him Iran's biggest landlord by the end of his reign in 1941. From a different perspective, and to underline the neo-patrimonial aspects of Reza Shah's state-building, she might also have pointed out that after some basic training, instead of performing any military duties, many of the conscripts were assigned to army officers as domestic servants (gomāshta)!

The 1927 resistance to conscription was combined with urban protests against the hat law and judicial reforms in the same year, which spread to tribal areas in subsequent years. In these instances, the leaders of popular resistance and contestation were members of the clerical estate, the tribes. Perhaps more interesting are the earlier cases of contestation and open rebellion by Gendarmerie officers – a rural police force trained by Swedish officers in the decade preceding Reza Khan's coup d'etat in February 1921. In contrast to resistance to conscription, these cases can also be looked at as contestation by threatened elites. What Cronin's subaltern perspective offers additionally is a differentiation and consequent demonstration of conflict of interest between the higher and the lower ranks within each of these social groups. The higher and lower ranks of the clergy, the tribal chiefs and ordinary nomadic tribesmen, the senior and junior army officers and the soldiers, as well as the officers of the new regular army and the already established Gendarmerie, had different interests and accordingly acted differently in resisting state-building and protesting against the policies of central government.

This is an interesting perspective, but it may not completely explain the puzzle of Sardar Asʿad Bakhtiari, who continued to serve as Reza Shah's Minister of War at the height of the repression of the nomadic tribes, including his own (pp. 29, 195). Cronin's most interesting contribution, moreover, has little to do with subalterns; she demonstrates how Reza Shah's building of the army was at the expense of the Gendarmerie, and was opposed by its younger officers. At the time Reza Khan was just beginning his bid to lead Iran to modernization, as Cronin (p. 100) points out, “the Gendarmerie attained the height of its political power and organizational development”. The rebellion of Lieutenant-Colonel Mohammad Taqi Pesyan in Mashhad from April to October 1921 amounted to a claim by the officers of the Gendarmerie as the first modernized unit of the armed forces to lead Iran to modernity on a republican model, and the incipient attempt of Colonel Reza Khan to create a modern army out of the Russian-trained Cossack Brigade, in which he had served, was no more than a background factor. The eleven-day revolt of the preponderantly non-commissioned gendarmes of Tabriz under the leadership of Major Abu'l-Qasem Lahuti, which followed a few months later in January 1922, by contrast, was unmistakeably a reaction to Reza Khan's promotion of the Cossack officers, tainted by their Russian connection, into the senior ranks of the new army. Lahuti, who left for the Soviet Union for a brilliant intellectual career in Tajikistan after the failure of his revolt, called his fellow gendarmes the partisans of freedom, while explaining their revolt partly as the refusal to put on the uniform of the “wretched Cossack executioners” (p. 124).

Cronin's hubris manifests itself in an extensive conclusion (pp. 261–9), where she sets aside the historian's meticulous use of evidence and jumps four decades beyond her material to claim the Islamic revolution of 1979 for the subalterns. In the opinion of this reviewer, nothing can be further from the truth. Fortunately, however, this unsubstantiated conclusion does not inform the analysis of the earlier chapters, nor does it vitiate their careful documentation.