Iran

Both revolutionary and reactionary, the Islamic Republic of Iran has long been a conundrum for Western observers. A theocracy that aspires to a popular mandate; an anti-colonial state with imperial pretensions of its own: modern Iran is in many ways a reflection of its struggle to reconcile its traditions with the challenges of modernity.

In this book, Ali Ansari takes readers on a journey through Iran’s turbulent history. Beginning with the country’s fall from grace as a Great Power in the nineteenth century, he explores its repeated attempts to modernize in a series of revolutionary movements from the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 to the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the civil unrest that is breaking out today. In so doing, he reveals how the experience of history and Iran’s encounter with ’modernity’ have come to define it - and set it on an authoritarian path in confrontation with the West and, often, its own people.

Ali Ansari is Professor of Iranian History and Founding Director for the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews. He is a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2016. A regular contributor to the international media on political developments in Iran, he has also published widely on Iranian history.