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ID:
172010
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article focuses on the development of early modern consumerism in a part of the Middle East that historians of consumer culture are yet to fully explore. Making use of a wide variety of unexplored and underexplored original sources, the article contends that early modern consumer culture in Iran was grounded deeply in the ever-widening patterns of exchange and use that had developed slowly over the course of the previous centuries. The discussion below takes the growing popular interest in a few key psychoactive substances as a useful barometer of the dynamics of mass consumption, and chronicles how the slow and ever-expanding use of alcohol, opium, and cannabis (or a cannabis-like product) in the medieval period led to the popularity of coffee, tobacco, older drugs, and still other commodities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The aim here is to use the history of drug culture as an entry point to scrutinize the emergence of early modern consumerism among the elites and the non-elites in both urban and rural areas of the Middle East. In doing so, this article reconstructs the cultural and social history of recreational drugs prior to and during the early modern period, and elucidates the socio-economic context that helped bring about a ‘psychoactive revolution’ in the Safavid state (1501–1736).
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| 2 |
ID:
146784
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article enquires into the socioeconomic causes of recurrent food scarcity in the nineteenth-century Middle East. Focusing on Iran as a case study, the paper shows that certain categories involved in the production and distribution of grain engaged in profiteering schemes and thereby contributed to the making of food shortage in urban settings. The most important of these groups were the government officials, the landed classes, and the grain merchants. The local bakers were also involved, but they did not have as decisive a role as the other groups. In showing how these categories engaged in market manipulation, the paper contends that food scarcity cannot be explained without a proper understanding of the commercialization of grain and the economic integration of the Middle East in the nineteenth century.
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| 3 |
ID:
145928
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article focuses on the development of the tobacco industry in Iran during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It uses this discussion as an entry point to inquire about the early modern Iranian economy. Using a wide range of primary and secondary sources, it makes several historiographical interventions. In explaining what the development of a completely new agrarian industry means in Iranian society, the paper suggests that innovation and intensification may not have been completely absent in agriculture and that in contrast to the way some of the available literature tends to argue, the Iranian economy may not have experienced continuous decline in all sectors throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In addition, this article contends that the tobacco industry helped bring about the rise of merchants and landowners in Iranian society, and with that the further development of mass consumption and ever-increasing cycles of production and accumulation that expanded the commercialization of agriculture, domestic and international trade networks, and Iran's agrarian economy.
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