Roham Alvandi notes in the introductory chapter to the volume under review that the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi “marked the high-point of Iran’s global interconnectedness” (p. 1). As editor, Alvandi issues a call for scholars “to escape the boundaries of national history and examine the international and transnational threads that connected Iran to the world.” The Age of Aryamehr succeeds in contributing to “the globalisation of the historiography of modern Iran” (p. 26) and reveals the emerging interpretive schisms in that historiography.

Eight contributors fuse questions from Iranian studies with frameworks from international history, a field that examines multidirectional global flows and “power” in its many forms. Most chapters are interested in the power and prestige of the Pahlavi dynasty, mainly, but not exclusively, during its final two decades. In the introduction Alvandi offers a framework that can be described as the “global Cold War” meets “Pahlavism.”Footnote ¹ More important, the book embodies two schools of “Pahlavi Revisionism.”Footnote ² The first sees the shah as an “autonomous” actor on the world stage, and the second makes the case that Pahlavi elites were “cosmopolitan.”

“Autonomy” has multiple meanings in the historiography. Mark Gasiorowski utilized the concept to demonstrate how the US–Iran relationship empowered the shah to “resist political pressures from domestic social groups” and become “divorced from the interests and needs of society.”Footnote ³ This is not the kind of autonomy discussed in Alvandi’s volume. Instead, the contributors collectively contend that the shah broke free from patron–client relationships to become a tour de force on the international scene during the 1960s and 1970s. At least three authors explicitly situate their arguments within this framework (pp. 38, 95–6, 260n. 1).Footnote ⁴

Whether in economic or drug policy, Ramin Nassehi and Maziyar Ghiabi demonstrate that “the Iranian state often adopted the modernization impetus on its own terms” (p. 103). Nassehi’s most original contribution relates to how Iran’s technocrats lost faith in Walt Rostow’s modernization theory after the economic crisis of 1960, turning instead to the ideas of Raúl Prebisch and Import Substitution Industrialization. Ghiabi explains how the shah’s drug policies ebbed and flowed in relation to his relative dependence on, or autonomy from, the United States. Opium and heroin prohibition began in 1955 but was repealed for a “coupon system” in 1969, “most symbolically, when the newly-elected US President Richard Nixon declared a ‘War on Drugs’” (p. 95).

A third example of the autonomy argument can be found in Cyrus Schayegh’s chapter on “the shah’s worldwide political diplomatic offensive” (p. 264). To illustrate the point, Schayegh explains how the shah engaged with all Cold War blocs and established relations with North Vietnam in 1973, despite the views of “Iran’s US patron of old” (p. 263). In deconstructing the tamaddon-e bozorg, or Great Civilization, Schayegh offers new insights by shifting the focus away from the “forces emerging victorious from the 1970s” (pp. 281–2). Left unaddressed is how, precisely, the shah’s domestic autonomy may have been a prerequisite for such alleged international autonomy.

A second school of revisionism is inspired by Abbas Milani, whose detailed biographical portraits have humanized the major figures of the Pahlavi period.Footnote ⁵ Four chapters move beyond the autonomy argument and portray the royal family as flagbearers of what Alvandi describes as “elite cosmopolitan worldliness in an era characterised by populist nativism” (p. 22).

These chapters are biographical and/or center on major cultural projects of the late Pahlavi period. Robert Steele’s well-researched chapter on Persepolis, October 1971, is based on the assumption that “the sustained media scrutiny and vociferous domestic opposition to the Celebrations give the impression that they were a resounding failure” (p. 111) and, for that reason, are in need of revision.Footnote ⁶ Such an approach appears more subtly in the two chapters by Houchang Chehabi. He turns first to Prime Minister Amir Abbas Hoveyda, a “cosmopolitan dandy” (p. 147), and then to the Shiraz Arts Festival and Empress Farah Diba. Chehabi finds that the shah’s “autocratic formality” stood in contrast to her approach “that was reflected in the atmosphere that reigned at Shiraz and Persepolis” (p. 197). In another chapter, Samine Tabatabaei argues that the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in 1977 under the direction of the empress’ cousin, created a “cosmopolitan coevalness” (p. 203) between Iran and the world.

A problematic inherent to both schools of Pahlavi revisionism, but especially the second, is their elitism.Footnote ⁷ The most important actors in Age of Aryamehr are, not surprisingly, the shahanshah and shahbanou alongside their relatives, confidants, and servants. The only exception is Claudia Castiglioni’s excellent chapter on the ties between European intellectuals and anti-shah Iranian organizers. Some chapters sidestep key historical issues in attempts to rehabilitate the memory of the monarchy. Most chapters portray the Pahlavis, not as “frustrated democrat[s],”Footnote ⁸ but as enlightened elites managing change in “the post-liberal age of Aryamehr” (p. 13). One is reminded of Arthur Marwick’s provocative global history of the “long sixties” in which the preferred change agents were those who exercised “measured judgement” against radical movements that, to Marwick, championed the “Great Marxisant Fallacy.”Footnote ⁹

To Alvandi, an elite-driven “dialogue of civilisations” signaled “the state’s response to the narrative of gharbzadegi” (p. 22). However, when writing about the Great Civilization, Alvandi oddly reminds readers that “Pahlavi Iran was hardly unique amongst sultanistic regimes of the era in seeking legitimisation through such invented forms of nativism” (p. 14). These contradictions reveal the false binary that drives the interpretive framework, tilts the history unnecessarily toward Pahlavi elites and away from transnational social movements, and ignores the possibility that both the regime and the opposition borrowed from cosmopolitan and nativist discourses. Moreover, without engaging with scholars such as Hamid Dabashi and Ramin Jahanbegloo, readers are left wondering what exactly is meant by “cosmopolitanism.” Dabashi’s protagonists were certainly not the Pahlavis, but rather the country’s writers, artists, intellectuals, and others that defied the state and contributed to a revolutionary praxis that defies simple categorization.Footnote ¹⁰

Interpretive questions aside, the rich bibliographies display how these scholars so ably globalize the history of late Pahlavi Iran. There is a range of Persian-language material, including issues of Ettelāʿāt, records from the Central Bank of Iran, speeches and writings by the royal family, and SAVAK reports. Diplomatic documents from the United States, Great Britain, and the Netherlands are used in creative ways. The records of intergovernmental organizations are featured, especially those of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The Paris-based UNESCO archives and the Bibliothèque de Documentation International Contemporaine are cited, as are the papers of Fred Halliday located at the London School of Economics. Multiple chapters utilize the English- and Persian-language interviews in Harvard University’s Iranian Oral History Collection, along with those with the Foundation for Iranian Studies.

Are the 1960s and 1970s best described as “the Age of Aryamehr”? Probably not. But the chapters make a compelling case for globalizing the historiography of modern Iran, and the book makes an important intervention by adding the Iranian case to international histories of the 1960s and 1970s. Both are welcome developments.