TAHQIQAT-E TARIKH-E EJTEMAI (SOCIAL HISTORY STUDIES)
Year:2013 | Volume:2 | Issue:2|Papers Count:6

Iran’s constitutional movement from the intellectual and political view is a turning point in history of Iran, and also is a new age from the social point of view. The most important manifestation of this fact is the formation of city societies and administrative institutions that is the beginning of new municipalities. City societies were a beginning of the first steps toward collective management of city and people’s participation in urban management. But this experience faced with some problems and these new institutions failed to work effectively. The main question of present article is what the causes of this inefficiency were. To answer this question we use the descriptive analytic method and concluded that the absence of needed morality of social life is an important cause of that problem.

So far there is not an appropriate inquiry about social history of Iran. The main cause of this is the shortage of historical sources and often historicians’s indifference to peasant’s lives. But from this age numerous varied sources remained that many of them paid attention to the peasant’s lives.The goal of this inquiry is to analyze the causes of economical regress and its impact upon social situation of this town in that period from the point of view of social history studies and local history. Here we try to recognize the influencing causes of the process of economical and social development of Damghan in the beginnings and the middle of Qajar age.

Exploring non-historical and non-chronological sources, especially fictional sources (oral and written), which are in fact the collective mentality of common people and are a significant part of folk literature, can be a helpful approach to illuminate the dark and ambiguous atmosphere of social history, this article will explore different aspects of Iran’s social history in Safavid era. Considering the time of emergence and public distribution of this story, the present article can be helpful in the illumination of the history of Safavid era especially first Shah Abbas.

Western travel writers, particularly in two recent centuries, have been the outside reporters of situation in Iran that can be interpreted as situation of civilizational cultural decline and backwardness. Special climatic and geographical condition in Iran, drought, shortage of water and hydraulic foundation particularly qanats were phenomena which made them pay attention to. In to recent centuries which have been the period of insecurity and chaos, building and keeping the hydraulic foundations faced a lot of problems. So numerous foundation especially qanats and following that many villages and agricultural fields were going to destroy. Foreign travel writers who looked outside sensitive, informed, and curious inspectors recorded most careful and influenced reports about this process and mutual relationship with current process of decline in Iran.The purpose of this article is presenting regular and systematic analysis of those reports. According to those reports, natural and historical events; despotism; lawlessness; management crisis; spread of oppression and insecurity; the successive attacks of internal and marginal tribes; cultural, moral, and educational conditions; a kind of questions related to politics and foreign relationship such as land burning policy and some territorial and marginal difficulties related to recent era; numbers of neighboring countries and government; and at last damaging results and consequences of world wars in 20th century have been the most important factors of extinction of water foundations and following that damaging of Iran’ s villages, rural areas, and towns. In this article, this process is interpreted as the process of decline and downfall of hydraulic or qanat civilization.

During World War I, the Iranian province of Gilan witnessed rise and, after the collapse of Tsarist Russia, domination of the popular armed movement of Ittihiad-i Islam, also known as Jangal movement that sought independence of Iran on the basis of Pan Islamism as well as nationalistic stand points. Despite their success in Gilan, the Jangalis’ attempt to penetrate into other regions of the southern shores of the Caspian failed. This study examines the obstacles to expansions of Ittihiad-i Islam movement to the neighbouring Caspian province of Mazandaran (former Tabaristan) in 1918/1336 A.H. when the movement was experiencing its zenith of purity, popularity and success. The findings demonstrates that in Mazandaran, in spite of existing potentials for revolutionary activities, the Jangalis met with opposition of Ittihad-i Milli of Tabaristan (Pan Tabaristanism), a novel unpopular political organization that claimed autonomy to govern and develop the province. Ittihad-i Milli of Tabaristan, originally a respond to Ittihiad-i Islam movement, was founded by local large landowners with military ranks and forces. In its short life, Ittihad-i Mill of abaristan successfully prevented penetration of the Jangalis and their ideas not only into Mazandaran but also into the Caspian province of Astarabad. The findings also reveal that Jangalis’ pragmatism itself kept Mazandaranian progressive forces and activists aloof from Ittihiad-i Islam movement.

Even though the inquiry about constitutional revolution have been always an interesting idea but till now there isn’t any severe attempt to explaining this important historical event at least in Persian language. Since, here we try to analyze the economical -social causes of constitutional revolution in the form of Chalmers- Johnson’s functionalist theory.This theory that built upon social balance and solidarity climes that if the social system can’t keep its balance in environmental conditions and new phenomena, faced with crisis and finally leads to revolution. We can see this imbalance in Qajar age on the one hand in confrontation with west, and on the other hand new reforms leads to an opposition between native customs and western values, and following that, the old order disintegrated.