Pen to the Tiller: Land Reform and Social Mobility across the 1979 Iranian Revolution

Publication Year
2019

Type

Journal Article
Abstract

From Journal of Agrarian Change:

"Giovanni Arrighi joined together questions of agrarian political economy with questions concerning the livelihoods of rural migrants and the fate of peasant communities as they dissipated. This article applies Arrighi's concerns to the case of Iran to examine how processes of agrarian transformation link with trends in social stratification and upward mobility. 

Through the use of a new survey dataset from the Iran Social Survey, it shows how pre‐1979 land reform in Iran favored segments of the peasantry, not for those who remained in rural agricultural production, but instead for those who utilized landholdings as a means to transfer status and opportunities to their children after the 1979 Iranian revolution."

Journal
Journal of Agrarian Change
Volume
19
Start Page
465
Issue
3
Date Published
07/2019