Takaddī-zudāyī: az inqilāb-i mashrūṭah tā intihā-yi Pahlavī-i avval

This urban social study traces how begging in Īrān was transformed from an age-old presence into a problem to be policed, measured and managed by the modern state. Spanning the period from the Constitutional Revolution to the abdication of Riz̤ā Shāh, Furūzān Afshār reconstructs a now-forgotten administrative and discursive apparatus through which officials sought to reshape the relationship between the state and the urban poor. Drawing on the sparse bureaucratic records, press reports and travel memoirs that survive, the author examines the rounding-up of beggars, the financing and running of almshouses, workhouses and shelters, and the recurrent flight of inmates from these institutions. Far from a simple tale of success or failure, the book reads this machinery as a tense and uneven historical formation, and in doing so reframes the obscure origins of welfare and social policy in modern Īrān. A meticulous and analytically alert contribution to the social history of poverty.