Historians of the Middle East have, for some time now, paid special attention to projects of infrastructure, and “new materialism” is already a topic of hot debate in the field.1 But few infrastructure projects have the potential to evoke as much emotion as railways and few occupy as outsized a place in official national histories as the Iranian railways. Built during the reign of Reza Shah, founder of the Pahlavi Dynasty (r. 1925–41), the Trans-Iranian Railway (TIR) is seen by many official and popular views of history as an embodiment of Iranian sovereignty that has helped realize the building of a modern nation-state. (As my late grandfather worked for more than forty years for the national railway organization and my father and his family thus grew up in between many railway towns, this history is particularly close to my heart.)By choosing to study such a charged topic, Mikiya Koyagi has thus engaged in a daring project. Basing himself on a careful study of primary documents while also engaging with the existing historiography, Koyagi delivers: He offers a fresh history of the railways that expands on our knowledge in three particular ways. First, he breaks down the process of building the railways and shows how they helped transform space and mobility in Iran. Second, he challenges conventional periodization by weaving both the pre-Pahlavi intellectual antecedents and post-1941 continuities into the TIR’s history. Third, and most fruitfully, he offers a more transnational history of the railways that highlights the global networks upon which the project has relied.Koyagi acknowledges the central role of the Trans-Iranian Railway to Reza Shah’s “centralization programs” (4) and its building “in the context of various nation-building projects by the centralizing state, including conscription, sartorial regulations, [etc.]” (4). But he regards “historians’ exclusive attention to Reza Shah’s state” as emblematic of what Cyrus Schayegh has critiqued as the “methodological statism” of Iranian historiography (6–7), a focus that is maintained both in accounts that praise the railways or those, like that of scholar Homa Katouzian, which view them as “an unmitigated economic folly” (cited on 23).Schayegh and Katouzian are far from Koyagi’s only references. From pioneering studies of the Reza Shah period by Afshin Marashi and Stephanie Cronin to Nile Green’s positing of an alternative geography in studies of Iran, Koyagi usefully engages with historiography of Iran, and his acknowledgment of this historiography helps us to better situate his work. For instance, the book’s second chapter, an examination of how the imaginations of Iranian travelers was transformed “in the context of discursive production of Iranian national space” (41) begins by building on Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet’s “seminal study on nationalism” (4) in her Frontier Fictions.2Koyagi’s account doesn’t deny some of the mainstays of the dominant national narrative about the Trans-Iranian Railway. His account seems to confirm that the Iranian railways were indeed unique, compared to many of their counterparts in the colonial world, in that a sovereign national government built them to serve a national purpose. The Iranian railways were also distinctly late-coming and thus the culmination of a “seventy-year dream” (61). (As Koyagi notes, India’s Bombay-Thana’s line in 1853, Egypt’s Alexandra-Suez line of 1858, and the Ottoman 1866 Izmir-Aydin line all predated the Trans-Iranian Railway by many decades.)More importantly, if the particular routes of the Indian railways, which connect the hinterland to ports as hubs of the colonial economy, have long been a subject of postcolonial critiques, in Iran the reverse is true as the north-to-south route was explicitly opposed by the main colonial power of the region, Britain. Indeed, Koyagi’s account shows the ardent struggle waged over the routes of the railway: for instance, the dogged insistence of British diplomat Percy Lorraine that they should run east to west so as to counter “Russian infrastructural networks” (67). Based partially on the state monopoly on tea and sugar, as opposed to colonial loans, the Iranian railways were also unique in their noncolonial source of funding. The project was initially entrusted to German and American companies before being doled out to the Danish construction firm Kampsax, which “divided the route into smaller sections” and tendered it to various companies from Italy, Germany, Austria, Britain, and, significantly, Iran itself (66–68).But Koyagi goes beyond established narratives in his decentralized account of the processes in which the railways were built. He unpacks the national expediencies of the project along the way. We read, for instance, of the claims for compensation for confiscated lands, both those afforded and those denied (86–88), based on a study of petitions the author has found in Tehran’s parliamentary library. The unusually high accident rate of the railways, partially attributable to the national focus of the railways’ building, is the focus of chapter 5. Whatever the railways did for the Iranian nation as a whole, their consequences for particular Iranians, and their mobility, could thus vary. We also see that in picking the Caspian Sea terminus, Bandare Gaz (and not the more obvious Anzali) was chosen as it would “give the Iranian army easy access to the tribal areas of the Torkaman Desert, as well as create employment for the recalcitrant tribes, facilitating their pacification” (75). Indeed, one of Koyagi’s main achievements is the place his account gives to Iran’s tribal areas. Pointing to Valeska Huber’s account of the Suez Canal, and her study of the Bedouin, Koyagi asserts that “as with the case of the Suez Canal, we cannot talk about a single experience of the Trans-Iranian Railway project” (94). Yet despite this unevenness, “we can characterize the goal of the railway project regarding the tribal question as the conversion of tribal mobility to labor mobility, paralleling the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s (AIOC) attempt to create a permanent workforce out of villagers and nomads” (94).Some of the richest parts of his accounts are his studies of the famously restive Lorestan, a central province in between Tehran in the north and the railway southern terminus in Arab-majority and oil-rich Khuzestan. While the “pacification” of the Lor tribes dated to Reza Shah’s earlier years and predated TIR’s construction, Koyagi shows the emergence of “an unequal yet interdependent relationship between the Pahlavi state and some Lor tribes like the Papis by creating employment in return for a semisedentary life” (102).The book’s transnational approach is on display in a variety of ways. Koyagi reminds us how the railway would not be made without international vessels carrying its construction material from all over the world: “Japanese, Italian, Soviet, German, and Iraqi cement; Soviet, German and Polish rails and tracks; Soviet and German dynamite; Australian jarrah wood; and French telegraph poles” (86).More important, Koyagi looks at the role of the “regional circulations of labor” (103) in the building and operations of the railway. Historians such as Touraj Atabaki and Peyman Jafari have looked at the transnational labor’s role in AIOC. Koyagi looks at the parallel process in the railway industry (121) where workers from Soviet Caucasia and British-held India had crucial roles. Managers of the railways had also studied in places as diverse as the Swiss railway, Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, and the Ford factory in Michigan (122).TIR’s crucial role in the Second World War is studied in chapter 6, “Workers of the Victory Bridge.” Following the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941, the railways were run by the Allies to help the war efforts and had a central role in the Lend-Lease program in which the United States provided the Soviet Red Army with supplies. Koyagi focuses on the pride that Iranian workers took in the role they had played in this world-historic effort and the defeat of Hitler’s fascist armies. This showed itself in the changing language of petitions of workers for rights: If in the 1930s they often asked the Iranian monarch for kingly justice, in the 1940s they emphasized the sacrifices they had made “for the path to freedom” (137), which had helped TIR earn the well-known moniker of “Victory Bridge.” The official nation railway histories, however, obfuscated the actually transnational labor force and “non-Iranian workers were effectively erased from the postwar narrative altogether” (153). The establishment accounts also warned against “divisive groups,” such as the communist Tudeh Party that continued to organize the railway workers after the war (154).Transnationalism and communism are both central to chapter 7, where Koyagi focuses on the role the railways played in the networks utilized by two distinct but surprisingly intersecting set of travelers: Shiʿi pilgrims and communist revolutionaries. Iranian communists would often use the railway to find their ways to the northern neighbor, the Soviet Union (180), while the railways also allowed for “sacred mobility” (183–84) of pilgrims who would take the railways to their terminus in the Khuzestan province on the Iraqi border, and then proceed with taxis or motorboats to the southern Iraqi port of Basra, from which they could take the railway to Shiʿi shrines in Iraq or travel further toward the core holy cities of Islam in Saudi Arabia. (Many decades and a few wars later, there is currently a project to finally connect the Iranian and Iraqi railways to each other by building a short line from Khuzestan’s Shalamcha to Basra.) The transnational mobility of both set of these travelers was a cause of anxiety for both the British colonial officers and the Iranian state. Some noted figures of Left history enter Koyagi’s narrative as passengers on the TIR: Yusuf Eftekhari, veteran communist labor activist (and later a critic of Stalinism), made his way south on the journey back from the Soviet Union (187). Yusuf Salman Yusuf, better known as comrade Fahd, legendary leader of the Iraqi Communist Party from 1943 to 1949, crossed the Iraqi-Iranian border multiple times and met up with Iraqi communists in Khorramshar (187–88).In the conclusion Koyagi thoughtfully reminds us that Iran’s oil nationalization movement of the 1950s was presaged in the previous decade by celebrations of TIR as a national economic asset. “The railway industry arguably provided a rehearsal for Iran’s struggle for decolonization that erupted in 1951,” Koyagi writes (196).By offering a decentralized history that’s at once attentive to a variety of locales around the Iran and recognizant of the transnational networks that made the Trans-Iranian Railway possible, Koyagi has made a distinct contribution to studies of modern Iran.