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Despite the variety of goods traded in the Tehran Bazaar, its large number of shops, its expansive physical size, and disparities in wealth among bazaaris, the Bazaar is generally treated as a single unit. Looking back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this treatment may be reasonable. There was less specialization and lower levels of capital accumulation among the bourgeoisie. The historical weakness of guilds, a weakness measured in terms of independence from the state and capacity to set prices and control entry and exit, also limited sectoral cleavages. In the late Pahlavi era, we saw that a corporate identity was generated by the crosscutting and multifaceted relations that often bridged sectoral, ethnic, and class lines to create a corporate entity. However, this conceptualization masks underlying sectoral distinctions in larger marketplaces such as Tehran's, sectoral variations that refine our analysis of the Bazaar's internal governance and state–bazaar relations. In particular, this chapter considers the consequence of group size, ethnic composition, relations to the world economy, modalities of geography and economic development, and state regulations under the imperial and revolutionary regimes. This chapter investigates the hand-woven carpet, tea, and china and glassware sectors in the Tehran Bazaar under the Pahlavi monarchy and Islamic Republic to assess the socioeconomic factors and specific state institutions and development agendas that may have molded their forms of governance. The differences in these bazaars are noteworthy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A complete victory of society will always produce some sort of “communistic fiction,” whose outstanding political characteristic is that it is indeed ruled by an “invisible hand,” namely by nobody. Hajj Ahmad is a gruff middle-aged man with an appearance befitting a stereotypical bazaari – portly with an unshaven full visage, pudgy hands emblazoned with bulky carnelian rings, and a well-worn set of prayer beads constantly in motion. His head and eyebrow gestures were expressive, and his measured words betrayed his Azeri roots. I met him at an early stage in my research on the Tehran Bazaar during the summer of 1999. A carpet seller who dabbled both in production and export, he was quite willing to share his experiences and opinions. Over several cups of tea and cigarettes, he patiently and quite enthusiastically answered my questions about the carpet trade, all the while keeping a watchful eye on the happenings in the caravanserai. Since he was from a long line of carpet dealers centered in the Tehran and the Tabriz bazaars, I turned our conversation to the practices and life in the Tehran Bazaar. Immediately, however, our roles as interviewer and interviewee were reversed. Hajj Ahmad matter-of-factly asked, “What do you mean by the Bazaar?” I quickly responded by explaining that I meant this marketplace and not the broader abstract notion of the market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the Shah, the bazaar could wreck the regime if it decided to close down for three days. But … the bazaar is not the bazaar any more, it's just a name, a symbol. I had recently arrived in Tehran to conduct exploratory research for my dissertation. It was July 1999, a time when the students at Tehran University were in the midst of challenging the judiciary for banning Salam, a leading independent newspaper that called for political reforms. As the Persian expression goes, “The university was sholugh,” meaning that there was political dissent and disorder. Tehran was in the throes of the largest political protests since the revolution that had swept aside the Shah. The pro-reformist protests had spread to campuses in Tabriz, Isfahan, Shiraz, and other cities. With President Mohammad Khatami having recently defeated the candidate believed to be the regime insider in a surprising landslide victory, supporters of the newly forming reformist platform were hopeful and energized. For supporters of reform the mass protests only boosted their expectations; for beneficiaries of the status quo, the students' vociferous daring was horrifying. When I went to buy groceries, the corner grocer, who liked to chat about the newspaper headlines, smiled and beckoned me over. Knowing that I visited the Bazaar, he asked, “So you go to the Bazaar. Tell me, is the Bazaar sholugh?” I answered that it was not, and we were both surprised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why have the guilds, which play an influential socio-political role and are ready to cooperate economically with the government, fallen out of favor …? [T]he constitution of political forces relates to various and shifting bases of social solidarities, but crucially, these varieties and shifts often result from changes in political and economic conjuncture, including state structures and policies … . Chapter 3 outlined the change in the form of governance in the Tehran Bazaar and demonstrated that the cooperative hierarchies of the prerevolutionary era have given way to coercive hierarchies. In the process of elucidating this transformation it also pointed to the symptoms and immediate causes of this shift – political uncertainty, the increased use of cash, the acute problem of bounced checks, the rise of smuggling activities, the change in composition of bazaar members, and the demise of network producers such as brokers. These proximate causes and effects can be explained by generally accepted economic theories and straightforward political logic. When import monopolies are created and licenses are distributed, one expects rent seeking, corruption, and smuggling; when state institutions are up for grabs, especially in the case of a rentier state, it is unsurprising that competition over their design and the control of organizations that distribute power and wealth will ensue. What still remain as questions are what underlies the shifts in the Bazaar's governance and what propelled these dynamics to take place specifically in the postrevolutionary era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If the “bazaar economy” is seen as an economic type rather than an evolutionary step toward something more familiar to people used to other ways of doing things, and, more importantly, if a deeper understanding of its nature can be obtained, perhaps, just perhaps, some relevant and practicable suggestions for improving it, for increasing its capacity to inform its participants, might emerge and its power of growth be restored and strengthened. Iranians say that the Tehran Bazaar is the “pulse of the city” or “the pulse of the economy.” The metaphor is appropriate, for it evokes a sense that the circulation of commodities, credit, and information in the Bazaar's networks is a palpable effect of the workings of Iran's urban life and political economy. By documenting the interaction between the two recent regimes and the Bazaar, as well as tracing the process through which state–society relations have been redesigned and renegotiated since the 1979 revolution, this study extends this metaphor by arguing that the Bazaar is an apt gauge of how state-level policies dialogue with organizational-level politics. It is an initial foray into mapping how visions of development set the parameters for the networks within this group, and consequently their ability to turn their grievances into collective claims against the state. In order to create a coherent and analytically compelling narrative it is necessary to recast a conception of the Bazaar, treating its organization and solidarity as a conundrum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Law and order arise out of the very processes they govern. But they are not rigid, nor due to any inertia or permanent mould. Solidarity has to be constructed out of little pieces, rather than found already waiting, in the form of an ur-langauge which all of us recognize when we hear it. I cannot remember the number of times that bazaaris complained to me that they could not trust their exchange partners, but it seemed to me to be the grandest of tropes. Their protests were articulated through a comparison between the past and the present. “The past” was a time when a man's word was as good as gold. It was a time when the maxim that a truly honest bazaari “places his mustache as collateral” (or even “places a strand of his mustache as collateral”) was a fact of daily life. No contracts or checks were signed. Instead a handshake was exchanged and honor was placed as a security deposit. Then came “the present,” when even checks and legal documents are not honored, and the threat of shaming and gossip is not a viable sanction. The refrain was “all the checks bounce.” The social scientist in me doubted this nostalgic narrative of a lost golden past and sought some form of independent, if not direct, verification. Even though non-bazaaris and the secondary literature reaffirmed these narratives, I was still skeptical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We have a saying, “There is one Iran and one Tehran and only one Sara-ye Amin (Amin Caravanserai),” meaning that anything that happens in Iran can be captured right here in the Tehran Bazaar. A year after his fall from power, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, recalled, “I could not stop building supermarkets. I wanted a modern country. Moving against the bazaars was typical of the political and social risks I had to take in my drive for modernization.” Meanwhile, three years after the establishment of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini stressed that “We [the Islamic Republic] must preserve the bazaar with all our might; in return the bazaar must preserve the government.” Given this drastic change in the state's outlook toward the bazaar, it is not surprising that the Tehran Bazaar had radically different experiences under these regimes. What is startling, however, is that the transformation is not as we would expect – the Bazaar survived and remained autonomous under the modernizing Pahlavi regime (in fact so much so that it was one of the leading actors in the Revolution), while it was radically restructured and weakened under the unabashedly “traditionalist” Islamic Republic. By comparing how the last Shah of Iran sought to “move against the bazaar” and how the founder of the Islamic Republic “preserve[d] the bazaar,” it will be the burden of this book to depict these outcomes and to examine why they followed these counterintuitive trajectories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]