Bread and Justice in Qajar Iran: The Moral Economy, the Free Market and the hungry Poor

This paper examines the evidence which supports the notion that Iran experienced a “golden age” of bread riots in the 1890s and early 1900s, just before and indeed contributing to the outbreak of the constitutional revolution. It argues the existence of a link between the destruction of market regulation in Iran, the result of increasing anger and bitterness of those most affected, the urban poor, and their eventual readiness to participate in large numbers in the revolution. It then suggests, in explanation of the intensity of the popular conflicts over bread raging in Iran’s cities in the late nineteenth century, a parallel with eighteenth century England. Although a century of chronological time separates the two cases, each country experienced, at their different moments, a similar collapse of an older paternalist socio-economic and political order, with market regulation at its core, and its suppression by modern capitalism, exemplified by the free market. In each country, this provoked a similar response from the urban poor. The Iranian and Middle Eastern bread riot had functioned reasonably effectively in pre-modern economic and political contexts, where the “politics of negotiation” were still salient. As the free market replaced paternalism, however, so did unmediated class conflict replace older methods of bargaining, albeit occasionally by riot between unequal partners within a social pact.