Law, State, and Society in Modern Iran: Constitutionalism, Autocracy, and Legal Reform, 1906-1941

Like the neighboring Ottoman Empire, Iran escaped foreign rule in the age of imperialism. Its continued sovereignty notwithstanding, European powers did not treat Iran as an equal. The most visible manifestation of the country’s subaltern status in the international society of states were the so-called capitulations, imposed treaties in which Iran (like the Ottoman Empire) exempted the subjects of foreign countries from its own jurisdiction, without securing a similar treatment for its own subjects from the other side. These unequal treaties were justified, in Iran and elsewhere in the non-Western world, by the absence of a rational legal system, because of which a European could not expect to have a fair trial in a local court. For Iran to emancipate itself internationally, therefore, a new legal system had to be created as a necessary precondition for the abolition of the capitulations. But this was far from being the sole impetus for creating a modern legal system. Modernists held Iran’s traditional absolute monarchy responsible for the weakness that had allowed foreign powers to impose their will on Iran in the first place.