This book's subtitle more accurately represents its scope than does the title. Although the book's focus is certainly Persian-speaking peoples, it also touches on the relevant historical contributions of Arabs, Turks, Mongols, and others. It is a broad survey, intended for general as well as advanced readers, of the history of the Iranian plateau (excluding Afghanistan) from ancient to current times, and as such it joins a growing list of books of this type that have been published over the past few years. It is not, however, yet another rehash of a by now familiar historical narrative. As the author notes, good history is not just descriptive but also analytical, and Katouzian manages to impose a unifying interpretative framework, drawn in large part from his own earlier studies and interdisciplinary interests, on his complex and sprawling subject.

About one-third of the text (six chapters in 151 pages) covers Iranian history from its earliest beginnings to the middle of the Qajar period (i.e., the death of Mohammad Shah in 1848). These chapters are not annotated, but each provides a “select bibliography” of mostly secondary sources. The range of topics covered is fairly comprehensive, but the amount of coverage given to each is necessarily brief. The whole of the Achaemenid period, for example, is treated in less than ten pages, although there is a substantial recounting of the ancient national mythology (mostly as found in Ferdowsi's Shahnameh) that may well be more important for the author's purposes than the actual history. There are frequent mentions of literary, architectural, and other cultural accomplishments for various periods as well as apt, if often legendary, illustrative anecdotes. The remaining chapters (7–14) begin with the reign of Naser al-Din Shah and conclude with the demonstrations that broke out after the controversial June 2009 presidential elections. These chapters are extensively footnoted and followed by a long bibliography of English- and Persian-language sources and studies. They are also richly detailed, very informative, and provide many useful quotations from primary sources. They could easily have stood on their own as an independent book and as such would have been arguably the best general survey of 19th- and 20th-century Iranian history currently available.

What ties all these chapters together is the author's thesis of perpetual tension and conflict between an “arbitrary state” and a “short-term society” in Iran. In his view, “all Iranian rulers enjoyed arbitrary power” (p. 118) over the lives and property of their subjects that “was not constrained by any law or entrenched tradition” (p. 159). Society was not composed of “independent long-standing social classes” (p. 4) acting on the basis of rational long-term class interests but rather of social groups and individuals motivated by “short-term personal gain” (p. 179), resisting compromise even if it meant risking total failure (p. 14) and willing to rebel “against the government at any opportunity that promised success” (p. 144). Iranians did not look to “law-based government” to regulate this inherently chaotic system but instead for a “just ruler” capable of providing “order, discipline, and security to society” and ensuring “normal social and economic activity.” One result of this was “the all-important historical role of the Iranian ruler's personality in determining the course of events and the destiny of the country.” However, it also meant that the very process that made a ruler “just” would also make him “disliked in his own time but missed and lamented when his disappearance once again led to chaos” (p. 119). Katouzian repeatedly emphasizes that the Iranian historical experience was thus utterly different from anything in the West, where “lawful government and orderly society had been the rule rather than the exception” (p. 157). In Marxian terms (p. 179), Iran was an “Asian society,” and in the author's view its history was devoid of true class struggles or revolutions of the underprivileged, just one rebellion after another of the constantly resentful, chronically shortsighted, and often ungrateful whole of “society against the state” (p. 180). As late as the 1970s, “society would simply not acknowledge any service to it rendered by the state” and “systematically represented every achievement of the state as another failure” (p. 291) until the existing regime was overthrown with the active assistance even of groups that were its prime beneficiaries.

It is not surprising, then, that the story of the Tobacco Protest and the Constitutional Revolution are literally and figuratively at the center of this book. The former, according to Katouzian, was “perhaps the nearest thing to the European practice of politics that had ever been experienced in Iranian history,” as Iranians finally discovered that they could protest peacefully “for a clear and well-defined purpose” and the “arbitrary state” could yield “to a public demand rather than either suppressing it or being overthrown violently” (pp. 164–65). The latter was another revolt of the whole of society, not just for a change of ruler this time but also for beginning “a revolution for law and against arbitrary rule itself” (p. 180). As the rest of the book makes clear, though, the system soon reverted to form, leaving that revolution far from complete even today.

This is a harsh, scathing, and rather unflattering reading of Iranian history that makes 19th-century fulminations against “Oriental despotism” seem almost tame by comparison, and it is likely to provoke a good deal of critical debate. On a purely moral level, it is unsettling insofar as it implies that Iran has been a sauve qui peut kind of place where people are by nature incapable of self-government, and tyranny is acceptable if it leads to “order.” Katouzian defines the “just ruler” as a strongman who imposes discipline and security even if it means “taking harsh measures and striking fear into the hearts of the people” (p. 119), and consequently he often sounds like an apologist for some of the most brutal and repressive figures in Iranian history. One may well ask if this is actually what Iranians meant by “just ruler” and whether they were really so oblivious to the ideal of a law-based government. The famous Seljuk vizier Nizam al-Molk, for example, is quite clear that order is the product of justice, not the definition of it, and that rulers are expected to be benevolent, respectful of traditional practices, and faithful to divine law. At a more general historical level, it might also be objected that Katouzian is taking a model that works fairly well for certain modern events and projecting it back on earlier periods where it is much less appropriate or convincing.

As part of his effort to dismiss the significance of class in Iran (and thus the possibility that the state is the agency of a ruling class), as well as his view of the uniqueness of Iranian history, Katouzian is particularly insistent that “there was no feudalism at any time in Iran” (p. 94) and includes an appendix to further explain his point. He is no doubt correct if by “feudalism” one means an exact counterpart to the socioeconomic system of medieval Europe or an intermediary stage between slaveholding and capitalist societies. However, there are some fundamental aspects of feudalism that are not as alien to certain periods of Iranian history as Katouzian implies. In any case, it is hardly the only Eurocentric terminology that bears some scrutiny—not least the concepts of “state” and “law” as Katouzian uses them. A “state” is surely something more than a ruler along with some armed thugs and bureaucratic bandits, and it could certainly be argued that there was no “state” in Iran until perhaps as late as Qajar times. In this book, the “state” is something that exists as far back as Achaemenid times, and even revolts such as that of Babak Khorramdin are said to be directed at “the state” (p. 81). What distinguishes “state” from “ruler” or “government” is thus anything but clear. At times, “law” seems to be a synonym for “constitution” and on other occasions a term for an idealized and utopian way of regulating society as practiced in modern Europe and to which Iran aspires. There is very little if any consideration here of exactly how laws are supposed to be made or of how they can be used not to protect individual life and property but rather to expand governmental power and to suppress individual freedoms. The importance of the shariʿa is acknowledged (e.g., pp. 8–9), but it never seems to be taken very seriously as the foundation for a “law-based government” desired by Iranians.

In other respects, there is little to criticize in this ambitious, provocative, and largely successful work. The number of typographical errors, particularly for a book published by Yale University Press, is surprisingly large (to give but one of many examples, the name Golshaʾian is spelled three different ways on page 230) though mostly inconsequential apart from being potentially confusing to casual readers. Some slips may involve a bit more than typography: for example the historian al-Tabari is cited as having said that Sasan “married the local king Barzangi's daughter” (p. 54), and the Arabic text of al-Tabari actually says that Sasan's wife, Rambehesht, was from “a royal family in Fars called the Bazranjin” (which could be a place name rather than a personal name). The book is accompanied by twenty-eight photographic plates, but there is no obvious reason for why one of them, of the Malwiya minaret in Samarra, Iraq, has been included.

Although one might be hesitant to recommend this book as a survey to someone with no previous knowledge of Iranian history, it will certainly be of interest to more advanced readers and specialists; it could serve very well as a focus of discussion and debate in undergraduate classes or graduate seminars.