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The Modes of Production Approach to Seventeenth-Century Iran

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2009

John Foran
John Foran
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology University of Califronia, Berkeley
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A number of the basic works on Iranian history have attempted to characterize seventeenth-century Iran as a whole, usually from a non-Marxist perspective. Vladimir Minorsky, for example, employs the term “tribal feudalism” to describe the pre-'Abbas I system, and speaks of the “great transformation” in the period to 1630 from tribal feudalism to “patrimonial absolutism.” These leads have been followed by Nikki Keddie, with “tribal feudalism”; Alessandro Bausani, with “pastoral nomadic feudalism”; and Amin Banani, with “patrimonial absolutism.” James Reid offers the term “uymaq system” (tribal state), while Hafez Farmayan notes the transition from Isma'ils “theocratic-feudal form of government” to 'Abbass “military and bureaucratic” centralized state. Marshall Hodgson's panoptic view of Islamic history provides the general term “agrarlanate citied society” and specific characterizations of Safavid Iran as heir to “military patronage state,” as a “bureaucratic absolutism” and as an “agrarian absolutism.” Each of these conceptualizations has its merits, not the least being that their authors include some of the most perceptive and empirically well-informed twentieth-century historians of Iran, Islam and the Middle East. While it is impossible to discuss their theoretical approaches in detail here, it should noted that the terminology tends to disclose two basic (if somewhat overlapping) orientations: (1) these are largely political conceptualizations—patrimonial absolutism, agrarian absolutism, theocratic feudalism, tribal state, military patronage state, and (2) a number of them suggest hybrid economic entities—tribal pastoral nomadic feudalism, agrarianate citied society. Without denying the interest of the first, primarily political approach to characterizing seventeenth-century Iran as a total system, it is the second set of terms—those of Minorsky, Bausani, Keddie and Hodgson—that is of particular significance for the present analysis, since each hints at the mixed economic bases of the Iranian social formation, to which we shall return after a look at the standard Marxist approaches.

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International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , August 1988 , pp. 345 - 363
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1988

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References

NOTES

1 Anonymous, Tadhkirat al-mulūk: A Manual of Safavid Administration (circa 1137/1725), Persian text in facsimile (B.M. Or. 9496), translated and explained by Minorsky, V., Gibb, E. J. W. Memorial Series, New Series, 16 (London: Luzac & Co., 1943), pp. 13–14.Google Scholar This invaluable manuscript is now known to have been the work of Mirza Sami'a: see Keyvani, Mehdi, Artisans and Guild Life in the Later Safavid period: Contributions to the Social-Economic History of Persia, lslamkundliche Untersuchungen, Band 65 (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1982), p. 7.Google Scholar

2 Keddie, Nikki, Roots of Revolution: An Interpretive History of Modern Iran, with a section by Richard, Yann (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 12–13, 20–21;Google ScholarBausani, Alessandro, The Persians from the Earliest Days to the Twentieth Century, Donne, J. B., trans. (London: Elek Books Limited, 1971), pp. 124, 125, 143;Google ScholarBanani, Amin, “Reflections on The Social and Economic Structure of Safavid Persia at Its Zenith,” Iranian Studies, 11 (1978), 83–116: pp. 101, 105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Emphasis on patrimonialism draws on a Weberian tradition of sociological analysis: see Weber, Max, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Roth, Guenther and Wittich, Claus, eds. (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1978), I, pp. 231–32.Google Scholar

3 Reid, James J., Tribalism and Society in Islamic Iran, 1500–1629, Studies in Near Eastern Culture and Society of the von Grunebaum, G. E. Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA (Malibu, Calif.: Undena Publications, 1983), pp. 66–67;Google ScholarFarmayan, Hafez F., The Beginnings of Modernization in Iran: The Policies and Reforms of Shah Abbas I (1587–1629), University of Utah Middle East Center, Research Monograph No. I (Salt Lake City, 1969), p. 25.Google Scholar

4 Hodgson, Marshall G. S., The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, Vol. 3: The Gunpowder Empires and Modern Times (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1974), pp. 5, 50.Google ScholarCf. also his interesting remarks on the earlier decentralized “a'yan amir system” of urban notables and military commanders, at its height in the eleventh through fifteenth centuries: The Venture of Islam, Vol. 2: The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods, pp. 64ff., 91ff.Google Scholar

5 Reid's discussion of Iran's economic organization likewise identifies several sectors—the urban market, agriculture and pastoralism: Tribalism and Society in Islamic Iran, 1500–1629, p. 58.Google Scholar

6 See Pigulevskaya, N. V., Yakobsky, A. Yu., Petrushevsky, I. P., Belnitsky, A. M. and Striyeva, L. V., Tarikh-i Iran az dauran-i bastan ta payan-i sadeh-i hijdahomin-i miladi [History of Iran from ancient times till the end of the eighteenth century AD.], trans. Keshavarz, Karim (Tehran: Payam Press, 1354/1975), passim, especially pp. 489–92, “Feudal Relations in Iran in the Safavid Period”; pp. 525–31, “Feudal Relations in Iran in the Eleventh (Islamic)/Seventeenth Century A.D.”; and pp. 561–630, “The Decline of Feudal Society in Iran in the Eighteenth Century.”Google ScholarSimilarly, Kuznetsova, N. A. writes that Iran from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries had a “feudal system of production,” though she makes this point only in passing, as her focus is on the guilds and not the whole system: “Urban Industry in Persia during the 18th and Early 19th centuries,” Central Asian Review, 11, 3(1963), 308–21: p. 308.Google Scholar Likewise, M. S. Ivanov characterizes the Safavids as “feudal” and nineteenth-century Qajar Iran as feudal, with some “patriarchal” or patrimonial [pedarsalari] pockets, referring to the tribes: Tarikh-i novin-i Iran [Modern History of Iran], translated from the Russian by Tizabi, Hushang and Qacempanah, Hasan (Stockholm: Tudeh Publishing Centre, 1356/1977).Google Scholar The noted Marxist historian Ehsan Tabari also refers to pre-capitalist traditional “feudal-patriarchal society” (jam'eh-yi sunnati-yi feudal-patriarkal): Forupashi-yi nizam-i sunnati va zayesh-i sarmayehdari dar Iran (az aghaz-i tamarkuz-i Qajar ta astaneh-yi inqilab-i mashrutiyat) [The disintegration of the traditional order and the growth of capitalism in Iran (from the beginning of Qajar centralization till the outbreak of the Constitutional Revolution)], vol. 2, part I of Jahanbiniha va jonbeshha-yi ijtima'i dar Iran [World-views and social movements in Iran] (Stockholm: Tudeh Publishing Centre, 1354/1975), pp. 7, 9.Google Scholar

7 Nomani, Farhad, “The Origin and Development of Feudalism in Iran: 300–1600 A.D.” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1972, pp. 67, 70–72, 117. This dissertation is misleadingly subtitled; the analysis stops in the 1400s.Google Scholar

8 Petrushevsky, I. P., “The Socio-Economic Condition of Iran under the Il-khāns,” in Boyle, J. A., ed., The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. 5: The Saljuq and Mongol Periods (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), pp. 483–537: p. 514. Elsewhere he refers to Iran's “Asiatic feudalism”: p. 515.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Shaygannik, Hassan, “Mode of Production in Medieval Iran,” Iranian Studies, 18, 1 (Winter, 1985), 75–94: p. 85.CrossRefGoogle ScholarThis article is insightful in some respects, noting both “substructural” similarities between feudal Europe and medieval Iran (p. 83), but admitting the differences in “social, political, juridical, religious, and cultural characteristics, the whole philosophy of life, and national Stratification” (p. 85), and arguing that Iran possessed all three pre-capitalist forms of ownership discussed by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology—tribal, communal/state and feudal (p. 87). But Shaygannik remains within the framework of searching for a single mode of production (p. 77), expressing fear of the “confusion and chaos” that result from studies of Latin America that have so far yielded some twenty-five different pre-capitalist modes of production (pp. 89–90). It is hoped that the present article's assessment of seventeenth-century Iran as a social formation in which three modes of production existed simultaneously will prove a “reasonable” alternative approach.Google Scholar

10 Saleh, Jahangier, “Social Formations in Iran, 750–1914,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 1978, p. 88. See also pp. 15, 48, 162–63 on the pre-Safavid periods.Google Scholar

11 Ibid., pp. 97, 121.

12 Turner, Bryan S., “Capitalism and Feudalism: Iran,” in his Capitalism and Class in the Middle East: Theories of Social Change and Economic Development (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1984), pp. 153–89: p. 154.Google Scholar This article however also gives indications of a far more supple approach that nevertheless appear to contradict its own main conclusions: “One of the persistent errors of many standard approaches to Iranian history is the presupposition that the Iranian social formation can be characterized by one mode of production … A more adequate approach would be to study the Iranian social formation as constituted by overlapping modes of production”: p. 165. Turner thus comes quite close to the perspective adopted in the present article, though he sees Iran more in terms of political than economic concepts (centralization vs. decentralization); only two rather than three modes of production (pastoral/nomadic and feudal); and as embodying a temporal “oscillation” rather than a synchronic articulation of modes of production.

13 Ricks, Thomas M., “Politics and Trade in Southern Iran and the Gulf, 1745–1765,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of History, Indiana University, 1975, pp. 6, 9, 12.Google Scholar

14 Anderson, Perry, Lineages of the Absolutist State (1974; rpt. London: Verso, 1979), p. 407.Google Scholar For other Marxist approaches see Hilton, Rodney, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1978), p. 30;Google Scholar and Resnick, Stephen and Wolff, Richard, “The Theory of Transitional Conjunctures and the Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism in Western Europe,” Review of Radical Political Economics, 11, 3, (Fall, 1979), 3–22,CrossRefGoogle Scholar with the reply by Gintis, Herbert, “On the Theory of Transitional Conjunctures,” pp. 23–31Google Scholar in ibid.; and Resnick and Wolff, “Reply to Herb Gintis,” pp. 32–36Google Scholar in ibid. For non-Marxist discussions of feudalism, see Weber, Economy and Society, 11, 1070–1100; the works of Bloch, Marc, including Feudal Society (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961);CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Critchley, John, Feudalism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978).Google Scholar A recent discussion of both approaches and their sub-types is offered by Holton, R. J., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Macmillan, 1985).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, p. 401.Google Scholar

16 Ibid., pp. 405, 408.

17 Ibid., p. 424, and pp. 405–7 for Marx on India, based on his marginal notes on the Russian historian Kovalevsky.

18 Lambton, Ann K. S., “The Evolution of the Iqta' in Medieval Iran,” Iran (Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies), 5 (1967), 41–50: pp. 41, 43, 46, 47, 49, and 50;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Lambton, Ann K. S., Landlord and Peasant in Persia: A Study of Land Tenure and Land Revenue Administration (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 53–54.Google Scholar See also Cahen's, Claude more ambivalent discussion of the iqta' as tending to become a feudal institution: “Réflexions sur l'usage du mot de ‘féodalité,’” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 3, 1 (04 1960), 2–20: pp. 16–17. This classic article –all of which is relevant –argues however that feudal tendencies in the Middle East were limited by (1) bureaucratic states, (2) urban development, and (3) certain rural arrangements as well. In sum, Cahen takes a moderate position –there were in his view no real feudal societies or states in the Islamic world, but there was some more limited development of certain feudal institutions.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Minorsky, Vladimir, “A Soyūrghāl of Qāsim b. Jahāngīr Aq-qoyunlu (903/1498),” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 9 (1937–1939), 927–60: p. 944 n. I.Google Scholar

20 Hodgson, , The Venture of Islam, II, 49, n. 7; 80–81.Google Scholar

21 The following very compressed observations are based on my own empirical work on Iran in a dissertation in progress, “Social Structure and Social Change in Iran, from 1501 to 1979,” Department of Sociology, University of California at Berkeley, and in particular, on Chapter Two, “The Iranian Social Formation, ca. 1630.” I shall draw more heavily on this research in the section on “The ‘modes of production’ approach,” below.Google Scholar

22 It is true that peasants were called on at times and in certain places to do work on qanats (underground water channels), roads, bridges and in gardens belonging to the landlord, but the prevailing form of surplus extraction was a share of the crop grown by the peasant, not labor services performed on a landlord's manor.Google Scholar

23 Marx, Karl, “Preface” to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (published 1859), in Tucker, Robert C., ed., The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed. (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), p. 5.Google Scholar

24 Some of Marx's key statements are found in Marx, Karl and Engels, Friedrich, Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence (London: Lawrence and Wishart, Ltd., 1975), pp. 80–81, 82, 85–86;Google ScholarMarx, Karl, Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, trans. Cohen, Jack, with an introduction by Eric J. Hobsbawm (New York: International Publishers, 1964), pp. 69–70;Google Scholar and Marx, , Grundrisse, Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. and with a foreword by Nicolaus, Martin J. (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 473–74.Google Scholar Anderson cites most of these, and offers his own list of Marx's main elements of the Asiatic mode of production in Lineages of the Absolutist State, p. 483.Google Scholar

25 Godelier, Maurice, “The Concept of the ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’ and Marxist Models of Social Change,” in Seddon, David, ed., Relations of Production: Marxist Approaches to Economic Anthropology (London: Frank Cass, 1978), pp. 204–57: p. 224.Google Scholar

26 Krader, Lawrence, The Asiatic Mode of Production: Sources, Development and Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum & Company, 1975), pp. 286–96, 299–300.Google Scholar

27 Taylor, John G., From Modernization to Modes of Production: A Critique of the Sociologies of Development and Underdevelopment (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 179. Taylor contrasts this ideological level with the “feudal mode, where the noble's right to surplus in the form of ground-rent is achieved through a political intervention”: p. 182. It strikes me that the Asiatic mode of production relies on not only ideological, but also kinship, political and military means to extract its surplus, while feudalism relies on a somewhat different combination of political, military and ideological means.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Mehrain, Fattaneh, “Emergence of Capitalist Authoritarian States in Periphery Formations: A Case Study of Iran,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1979, pp. 58–59; see also pp. 73–74, 112. Mehrain implies at other points that there may have been two or more pre-capitalist modes of production (tribal and feudal in addition to the Asiatic), but this is never explicitly drawn out and the result is a certain amount of conceptual unclarity in the analysis of the pre-capitalist social structure: pp. 260, 272. This work is nevertheless a source of provocative and generally fruitful attempts at reconceptualizing Iran in a sophisticated Marxian framework.Google Scholar

29 Abrahamian, Ervand, “European Feudalism and Middle Eastern Despotisms,” Science & Society, 39, 2 (Summer, 1975), 129–56: passim, especially pp. 155–56.Google Scholar

30 Mahdi, Ali-Akbar, “The Iranian Social Formation: Pre-Capitalism, Dependent Capitalism, and the World System,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Sociology, Michigan State University, 1983, p. 7.Google Scholar

31 Ibid., pp. 104, 107–8, 111, 112. While I shall be arguing that seventeenth-century Iran was neither feudal nor Asiatic, and possessed no single dominant mode of production, it should be noted that Mahdi's research pursues a theoretical project roughly similar to the present essay.

32 Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, p. 486.Google Scholar

33 I have written a paper analyzing these three empires and taking the Asiatic mode of production seriously, which finally led me to the conclusion suggested in this paragraph, and represents a step in my own evolution towards a modes of production approach. See John Foran, “Modes of Production, European Impact and Social Change in the Pre-Capitalist Middle East and South Asia: A Comparative Survey of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal Empires from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” paper presented at the annual meetings of the Middle East Studies Association in San Francisco, California (December, 1984).Google Scholar

34 An excellent discussion of the issues raised by the modes of production approach is provided by Foster-Carter, Aidan, “The Modes of Production Controversy,” New Left Review, 107 (01–02, 1978), 47–77.Google Scholar

35 See Althusser, Louis and Balibar, Etienne, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1970),Google Scholar and Poulantzas, Nicos, Political Power and Social Classes, trans. O'Hagen, Timothy (London: New Left Books, 1973).Google Scholar

36 Taylor, From Modernization to Modes of Production, pp. 106ff. See also Marx's similar comments on modes of production in Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, pp. 94–95.Google Scholar

37 Rey, Pierre-Philippe, Les alliances de classes: Sur l'articulation des modes de production, followed by Materialisme hissorique et luttes de classes (Paris: François Maspero, 1973), p. 15, translated and cited by Foster-Carter, “The Modes of Production Controversy,” p. 56.Google Scholar

38 Balibar, Etienne, “Elements for a Theory of Transition,” in Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, pp. 307–8. A slightly different version of this passage is cited by Foster-Carter, “The Modes of Production Controversy,” p. 54, who notes, interestingly enough, that the reference to Lenin is unsourced.Google Scholar

39 The percentage of the population within each mode of production is based on my own rough calculations: Foran, “The Safavid Social Formation, ca. 1630,” pp. 55–56, 62–63, 77–78.Google Scholar The total population of seventeenth-century Iran is likewise rather difficult to know; estimates vary from about five or six million to as high as ten million, which would be equal to the population as recently as about 1900: see Lockhart, Laurence, The Fall of the Safavi Dynasty and the Afghan Occupation of Persia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), p. 11;Google ScholarMinorsky, , Tadhkirat al-mulūk, p. 186;Google ScholarEmerson, John, “Ex Occidente Lux. Some European Sources on the Economic Structure of Persia Between About 1630 and 1690,” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge, 1969 pp. 229, 267;Google Scholar and Issawi, Charles, “Population and Resources in the Ottoman Empire and Iran,” in Naff, Thomas and Owen, Roger, eds., Studies in Eighteenth Century Islamic History (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1977), pp. 152–64: p. 162.Google Scholar

40 Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, p. 405.Google Scholar Cf. also Anderson, , Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London: New Left Books, 1974), pp. 217–28: It is fairly clear that Marx himself believed nomadic pastoralism to constitute a distinct mode of production, as can be seen from his comments on pastoral societies in his 1857 Introduction: Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (Einleitung), pp. 19, 27.Google Scholar (Ibid., p. 222 note 3.)

41 Saleh, “Social Formations in Iran, 750–1914,” p. 59,Google Scholar referring to Krader, Lawrence, Social Organization in the Mongol-Turkic Pastoral Nomads (The Hague: Mouton and Co., 1963), p. 317.Google Scholar

42 Reid, Tribalism and Society in Islamic Iran, 1500–1629, p. 1.Google Scholar

43 The detailed analysis on which these schematic comments are based is found in my “The Iranian Social Formation, ca. 1630” pp. 56–62. The basic works drawn on for the analysis of the pastoral nomadic sector include Minorsky, Tadhkirat al-mulūk; Reid, Tribalism and Society in Islamic Iran. 1500–1629; Reid, , “Rebellion and Social Change in Astarābād, 1537–1722,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 13, 1 (02 1981), 35–53;CrossRefGoogle ScholarReid, , “The Qajar Uymaq in The Safavid Period, 1500–1722,” Iranian Studies, 11 (1978), 117–43;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMcChesney, R. D., “Comments on ‘The Qajar Uymaq in The Safavid Period, 1500–1722,’” Iranian Studies, 14, 1–2 (Winter–Spring, 1981), 87–105;CrossRefGoogle ScholarHelfgott, Leonard M., “Tribalism as a Socioeconomic Formation in Iranian History,” Iranian Studies, 10, 1–2 (Winter–Spring, 1977), 36–61;CrossRefGoogle ScholarReid, James J., “Comments on ‘Tribalism as a Socioeconomic Formation,’” Iranian Studies, 12, 3–4 (Summer–Autumn, 1979), 275–81;CrossRefGoogle ScholarHelfgott, Leonard M., “Tribe and Uymaq in Iran: A Reply,” Iranian Studies, 16, 1–2 (Winter–Spring, 1983), 73–78;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Petrushevsky, “The Socio-Economic Condition of Iran under the ll-khāns”; Bausani, The Persians; Monshi, Eskandar Beg, History of Shah 'Abbas the Great (Tarīk-e 'Ālam.ārā-ye Abbāsī), 2 vols., trans. Svory, Roger M. (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1978);Google ScholarDickson, Martin B., “Sháh Tahmásb and the Úzbeks (The Duel for Khurásán with 'Ubayd Khán: 930–946/1524–1540),” Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Oriental Studies, Princeton University, 1958.Google Scholar

44 Marx, Karl, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (1852), in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 594–617: p. 608;Google Scholar and Chayanov, A. V., “On the Theory of Non-Capitalist Economic Systems,” trans. Lane, Christel, in Thorner, Daniel, Kerblay, Basile and Smith, R. E. F., eds., A. V. Chayanov on The Theory of Peasant Economy (Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 1966), pp. 1–28: passim, especially p. 25.Google ScholarIn chapter 47, section V of vol. 3 of Capital, Marx also discusses “Share Farming (Metairie System) and Small Peasants' Property.” While he (unfortunately) has little to say about sharecropping here, the passage on small peasants’ property is significant for establishing a “new” mode of production in the agrarian sector that is neither feudal nor capitalist.Google Scholar

45 Tuyul was state land whose tax revenues were assigned to the provincial governors, army officers and court officials; it was theoretically attached to the office, not the person, and the right to extend it to a holder's son was contingent on the shah's decision. Vaqf was an endowment of land for some charitable or religious purpose, whose income thus often supported judges, high-ranking ulama, sayyids, and a designated administrator; it could not be sold or transferred, and paid no taxes to the state. Another type of tax immunity/land grant was the soyurghal, a usually hereditary exemption from taxes or right to the revenue on crown or vaqf lands. On it, too, share-cropping was the prevalent form of extraction of surplus.Google ScholarThe empirical discussion on which the remarks in this paragraph are based is made in Foran, “The Iranian Social Formation, ca. 1630,” pp. 62–77. Sources for the study of agrarian relations in Safavid Iran include Minorsky, Tadhkirat al-mulūk; Minorsky, “A Soyūrghāl of Qāsim b. Jahāngīr Aqqoyunlu (903/1498)”;Google ScholarMinorsky, , “Tiyūl,” The Encyclopedia of Islam, 1st ed. (London: Luzac, 1934), 799–801;Google Scholar Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia; Lambton, “The Evolution of the Iqtā' in Medieval Iran”; Lambton, , “Two Safavid Soyūrghūls”, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 14 (1952), 44–54;CrossRefGoogle ScholarBausani, The Persians; Monshi, History of Shah 'Abbas the Great; Petrushevsky, “The Socio-Economic Condition of Iran under the Il-khāns”; Nomani, “The Origin and Development of Feudalism in Iran: 300–1600 AD.”;Google ScholarChardin, Jean, Voyages du Chevalier Chardin, en Perse, et autres lieux de l'Orient, 10 vols. (Paris: Le Normant, 1811);Google ScholarMartin, B. G., “Seven Safawid Documents from Azarbayjan,” in Stern, S. M., ed., Documents from Islamic Chanceries, 1st series, Oriental Studies, 3 (Oxford: Bruno Cassirer, 1965), pp. 171–206;Google Scholar Banani, “Reflections on The Social and Economic Structure of Safavid Persia at Its Zenith”; Busse, Heribert, Untersuchungen zum islamischen Kanzleiwesen an Hand turkmenischer und safawidischer Urkunden (Cairo: Sirović Bookshop, 1959).Google Scholar

46 On the existence of such a mode of production, we have Marx's comments on “petty capital” and craft production in, among other places, Pre-Capitatist Economic Formations, pp. 117, 118, as well as Hobsbawm's statement in the introduction to this work: “Take away lords from serfdom and what is left is small commodity production,” p. 42. In more recent Marxist writing, Hilton speaks of ‘simple commodity production”; Dobb of “the petty mode of production”; and Sweezy of “precapitalist commodity production”: in Hilton, The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, pp. 27, 49–50, 58–64, 166, 168. As in the case of the “peasant crop-sharing” mode, more theoretical work needs to be done on the petty-commodity mode of production as well. One implication of the present analysis is that it may well prove useful to try reconceptualizing feudal Europe in terms of a combination of an agrarian feudal mode of production and an urban petty-commodity (guild) mode of production.Google Scholar For the case of Iran, Mohammad Reza Afshari has come close to identifying a “small commodity [mode of] production” in the urban bazaars, and gives a good brief account of this in “The Pīshivarān and Merchants in Precapitalist Iranian Society: An Essay on the Background and Causes of the Constitutional Revolution,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 15, 2 (05, 1983), 133–55: pp. 134–35.Google Scholar

47 For an extended discussion of the available information for seventeenth-century Iran, see Foran, “The Iranian Social Formation, ca. 1630,” pp. 77–95. Sources for the study of the Safavid urban economy include Minorsky, Tadhkirat al-mulūk; Keyvani, Artisans and Guild Life in the Later Safavid Period; Chardin, Voyages; Petrushevsky, “The Socio-Economic Condition of Iran under the Il-khāns”; Kuznetsova, “Urban Industry in Persia during the 18th and early 19th centuries”; Emerson, “Ex Occidente Lux”; Saleh, “Social Formations in Iran, 750–1914”; Banani, “Reflections on The Social and Economic Structure of Safavid Persia at Its Zenith”;Google ScholarLambton, Ann, Islamic Society in Persia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954);Google Scholardu Mans, Raphaël, Estat de la Perse en 1660 (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1890);Google ScholarSavory, Roger, Iran under the Safavids (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980);Google ScholarGregorian, Vartan, “Minorities of Isfahan: The Armenian Community of Isfahan, 1587– 1722,” Iranian Studies, 7, 3–4 (Summer–Autumn, 1974), 652–80;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFerrier, R. W., “The Armenians and the East India Company in Persia in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, 26, 1 (02, 1973), 38–62;CrossRefGoogle ScholarFragner, Bert, “Social and Internal Economic Affairs,” in Jackson, Peter and Lockhart, Laurence, eds., The Cambridge History of Iran, Vol.5: The Timurid and Safavid Periods (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 491–567.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48 For the interdependence argument: It is well to remember that historical and ethnographic evidence together suggest that there has never been a totally pastoral society, but that non-pastoral products have always been an important part of the diet of pastoralists, and activities associated with acquiring them have figured largely in their annual cycle and division of labor. Spooner, B., “Towards a Generative Model of Nomadism,” in Anthropological Quarterly, 44 (07, 1971), p. 201, cited by Helfgott, “Tribalism as a Socioeconomic Formation in Iranian History,” p. 5.CrossRefGoogle ScholarFor the limits to accumulation: No major increases in productivity comparable to those of arabic farming were possible, because the means of production was not soil—qualitatively and directly malleable—but herds which depended on land, that was not itself touched by nomadism, and which therefore essentially permitted only quantitative augmentation. The fact that in the nomadic mode of production the basic objects and means of labour were largely identical—livestock—posed insuperable limits to the yield of labour. Pastoral cycles of production were much longer than agricultural, and lacked interludes for the development of rural crafts: moreover all clan members participated in them, including chiefs, thereby preventing the emergence of a division of manual and mental labour, and hence of literacy. Above all, nomadism by definition virtually excluded the formation of towns or urban development, where sedentary agriculture always ultimately promoted them. Beyond a certain point, the nomadic mode of production was therefore vowed to stagnation. Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, p. 222. These comments should be nuanced: such “stagnation” does not preclude the economic viability of the nomadic economy on its own terms, or the longevity of tribal empires.Google Scholar

49 See Foran, “The Iranian Social Formation, ca. 1630,” pp. 95–113, 125–29.Google Scholar

50 This idea is suggested by Mehrain, “Emergence of Capitalist Authoritarian States,” p. 75,Google Scholar and Katouzian, Homa, “The Aridisolatic Society: A Model of Long-Term Social and Economic Development in Iran,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 15, 2 (05, 1983), 259–82: p. 270.Google Scholar

51 It must be stressed that the strong central absolutism of the seventeenth century differed a great deal from the more fragmented state of affairs in both the sixteenth century (especially 1524–1533 and 1574–1588) and the tribal civil wars of the eighteenth century (especially the 1720s and 1750s–1790). Whereas Europe witnessed a non-reversible progression from feudalism to absolutism (cf. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State), the Iranian social formation rested on different (more tribal, urban and crop-sharing) bases, and saw only a series of temporarily successful absolutisms (1501–1524, 1530s–1570s, 1590–1690), none of which issued in the direction of capitalism. Capitalism ultimately came from the outside in the nineteenth century and disaggregated the Qajars' far weaker centralizing efforts, definitively ruling out any tribal alternative as well. The issue of incipient indigenous capitalist development in the seventeenth century needs further analysis, and is touched on briefly again at the very end of this essay.Google Scholar

52 See Taylor, From Modernization to Modes of Production, p. 106, and Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, p. 403.Google Scholar

53 Foran, “The Iranian Social Formation, ca. 1630,” pp. 114–25. It is certainly true that some mujtahids came increasingly to challenge Safavid religious claims in the seventeenth century. Those who did so may be considered members of the “bazaar ulama” in Figure I.Google Scholar

54 For an analogous formulation but from a “monistic” theoretical perspective see Wittfogel's, Karl remark on “Three Functional Aspects, But a Single System of Total Power,” in his Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (1957; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1981), p. 100.Google Scholar

55 Banani, “Reflections on The Social and Economic Structure of Safavid Persia,” p. 105, and more to the point, Reid, Tribalism and Society in Islamic Iran, 1500–1629, pp. 6, 66–67;Google ScholarKeddie, Roots of Revolution, p. 36;Google Scholar and Keddie, “Iran, 1797–1941,” in Keddie, Nikki, Iran: Religion, Politics and Society (London: Frank Cass, 1980), pp. 137–57: p. 137.Google Scholar

56 Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 608.Google Scholar

57 Marx uses the term “a class for itself” in this sense in the conclusion to The Poverty of Philosophy (1847): see Tucker, The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 218.Google ScholarLukacs, Georg makes an argument along the lines I have suggested in his essay, “Class Consciousness,” in History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Livingston, Rodney (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1971), pp. 55–59.Google Scholar One might also consult de Ste Croix, Geoffrey, “Classes in Marx's Conception of History, Ancient and Modern,” Monthly Review, 36, 10 (03, 1985), 20–46, who emphasizes that class is “a relationship of exploitation” and that “The individuals constituting a given class may or may not be wholly or partly conscious of their own identity and common interests as a class, and they may or may not feel antagonism toward members of other classes as such”: pp. 27, 28. Here, as in his path-breaking The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (lthaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1981), Ste. Croix is concerned with establishing the class nature of slavery in antiquity.CrossRefGoogle ScholarThompson, E. P. has a rich discussion of what constitutes class in the preface to The Making of the English Working Class (1963; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1966), pp. 9–10, which at first sight seems to put predominant emphasis on the need for the presence of class-consciousness as a criterion for the existence of classes, but which also makes clear that class-consciousness varies even in similar economic circumstances and is not predictable but must be taken as it is. Studies of the consciousness of classes in seventeenth-century Iran would be invaluable, but as yet hardly exist, and sources for such studies are few and far between.Google Scholar

58 'Abbas followed mercantilist policies in his international trade, particularly with respect to encouraging Iran's silk exports (and monopolizing them), while attempting to limit the export of bullion.Google Scholar