The Constitutional Revolution of 1905-09 was a major watershed in Persian history. It ended the traditional system of government in which the Shah, as the Shadow of God on Earth, ruled his people without any legal and institutional limitations. And it introduced the constitutional system of government in which “the people” were sovereign, and their elected representatives made and unmade ministers, laws, budgets, concessions and foreign treaties. In this revolution the political crowd played a prominent role. An organized procession in April 1905 raised the issue whether the Shah could freely choose his administrators. A larger assembly, nine months later, initiated the demand to limit the monarch's arbitrary powers by creating a “House of Justice.” Spontaneous riots in June 1906, and the killing of demonstrators, poured a stream of blood into the wide gap between the government (dawlat) and the nation (millat). A general strike in July, and the exodus of 15,000 from Tehran into the British Legation, forced the court to grant the country a written constitution with an elected House of Parliament.

To state that the bibliography of Iranian studies is accumulating at an alarming rate is perhaps to belabor the obvious. It is an impression most students of the field will share. The project described in the following few pages was undertaken in part to explore this impression, and to test a solution to the problem implicit in it. Whatever small part impressionism may have thus played in its conceptual phase, the project's findings are strictly empirical. Our general finding has been that the accumulation of bibliography in Iranian studies is faster than its students dare imagine, and is accelerating. For all practical purposes, it is beyond the control of the traditional methods of compiling and publication. Only the application of modern automated methods of data storage and control can allow the individual scholar to keep abreast of developments in his field, and save him an appreciable amount of time-consuming drudgery.