Iran in Motion: Mobility, Space and the Trans-Iranian Railway by Mikiya Koyagi

Abstract

Iran in Motion is an important contribution to the history of railway construction and its wider socio-political impact in a non-colonial context. At a related level, the volume also adds to our understanding of the diverse impetus behind railway building in the twentieth century. Broadly speaking, the history of railway building and its wider influence is largely a nineteenth-century story. But by focusing on the twentieth century, this book shows how the technology transfer related to railway construction and operation was adapted in Iran and was deployed to suit the changing needs of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s Iran.The book has seven chapters, excluding the introduction and the conclusion. The introduction sets out the analytical and methodological parameters of the book, including a “roadmap” with handy chapter summaries. The first two chapters underline how different visions—those of the late-imperial British and Iranian state in the early decades of the twentieth century—coalesced in imagining railways as a solution for creating a nation and national space. Chapter 3 develops this theme by illustrating how the Pahlavi state produced through imagery and actual construction a railway network (or the beginnings of one) that was expected to engender “national territorial space” (16). The fourth chapter focuses mainly on the construction of the trans-Iranian network, and the remaining three chapters analyze the ways in which the commencement of railway operation “produced new mobilities and new subjectivities” (16).The book’s scope is ambitious. At one level, it tells the story of the planning, building, and operation of the Trans-Iranian railways; at another, it tells what happens after railways become operational. Did it create a new nation space underpinned by diverse mobilities? Given this wide scope, the book methodologically straddles two distinct disciplinary boundaries, history and mobility studies. This interdisciplinarity, most notably evident in the conceptualization of the chapters, is largely successful. The flavor of the book, however, is primarily unembellished history. Though this approach is not necessarily a drawback, the volume, which explicitly claims to tell the history of Trans-Iranian railway as “stories of mobilities that the project facilitated” (14), does not draw substantially from the theoretical and analytical framework developed by mobility studies. Moreover, despite its use of traditional historical methodologies, the book’s empirical evidence is thin, as is clearly evident in the range of petitions and travelogues that it examines (Chapters 4–7). The copious newspapers, contemporary magazines, and similar other printed sources that document elite sensibilities cannot compensate for the striking dearth of empirical evidence about how railways affected non-elite mobilities and attitudes. Admittedly, mining archives for non-elite engagement is a daunting task, but the few petitions and other sources about railway workers, the traveling public, and the like are too sparse to justify Koyagi’s claim to cover “all sorts” (14).Nonetheless, the book theorizes and interprets its evidence well, showing that railway-induced mobilities were both diverse and instantiated in ways not intended by the Pahlavi state. The main achievement of the book is its ability to underline the wide and varied effect of technology transfer on different groups and individuals. Nowhere is this effect more obvious than in how people in contemporary Iran envisage their railways as a vehicle for pilgrimage and as an extension of the nation’s religious basis, beyond what it was projected to be when built under the Pahlavi regime. Overall, the volume adds to the expanding literature on technology transfer and its socio-cultural afterlife in Asia and beyond.