ABSTRACT
It will be useful to stand back now from the empirical detail of our historical narrative and attempt to draw together the theoretical and sociological threads of the underlying analysis, so that the relationship between the two orders of explanation can be once again made clear. The ground covered so far has focused on three principal moments in the history of social change in Iran from 1500 to 1800—the seventeenth-century peak, the fall of the Safavids in 1722, and the eighteenth-century watershed.
