Author: Abbas Amanat
Publisher: Yale University Press
Pages: 1028
Publication date: Sept 17, 2019
ISBN: 9780300248937
About this book:
Iran: A Modern History by Abbas Amanat offers a wide-ranging account of Iran from the rise of the Safavid dynasty in the sixteenth century to the present day. Rather than presenting events as a simple political timeline, the book traces how institutions, beliefs, and everyday life evolved alongside dynastic change, imperial encounters, and modern state formation.
Amanat places major moments — reform movements, revolutions, constitutional debates, and the emergence of modern nationalism — within longer cultural and social continuities. Religion, intellectual life, economic change, and relations with global powers are examined together to show how modern Iran developed through both internal dynamics and external pressures.
Written with narrative clarity while grounded in scholarship, the book serves both general readers and students seeking historical context for contemporary Iran. It offers a framework for understanding how the country’s present political and social realities grew out of centuries of transformation rather than isolated events.