The Iranian Village before and after land reform

Datos Bibliográficos

ID10073574
AutoresNikki R Keddie (autor de correspondencia)
Año1968
Volumen3
Número3
Páginas69-91
Fecha de publicación1968-07-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaJournal of Contemporary History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0022-0094 • E-ISSN: 1461-7250
EditorialSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/002200946800300305
OpenAlexW1898871343
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas16

Agriculture in Iran, as in most of the Middle East, has traditionally produced a surplus that has gone to support city dwellers with only the barest minimum of investment returned to the countryside. The 'city feudalism' of the Middle East and much of Asia, where the major landlords dwelt in, and often dominated, the cities, has been seen as one of the reasons why modern capitalism did not develop indigenously in these areas. In the discussion of this question, stress has usually been put on the lack of independent municipal communes in Asia and on the stifling economic effects of landlord domination of the cities. Whatever the merits of this argument, recent research would indicate that the agricultural part of the pattern was perhaps even more important. The manorial system of western Europe and Japan, and the increasing productivity of agriculture in these areas of heavy soils and rainfall, seem to have produced an expanding agricultural surplus. In both Europe and Japan men with agricultural origins played a key role in the development of modern capitalism. In the arid Middle East, however, agricultural production seems to have shown a general decline over many centuries, due in part to deforestation, soil erosion, and the salinization of irrigated lands. There appear to have been no major agricultural improvements in the area for many centuries before the recent imports from the West. Perhaps improvement was more difficult in the Middle East than in the West such an important European innovation as the heavy wheeled plough is useless on most of the soils of the Middle East. One may also suspect that the residence of landlords in the cities and the vulnerability of the villages to nomadic and other pillaging were positive obstacles to the building up of a surplus or of heavy investment in the countryside. Investment was confined to such things as the traditional irrigation networks, which were essential

Agricultural economics · Agricultural productivity · Agriculture · Archaeology · Capitalism · Development economics · Economic growth · Economics · Economy · Feudalism · Geography · Investment (military · Landlord · Middle East · Political science · Productivity · Rural area · Eurasian Exchange Networks · Islamic Finance and Banking Studies · Islamic Studies and History · Law