The Rise and Fall of the Shah

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Presumed First Edition, First printing. Hardcover. Good/Good. Format is 6.25 inches by 9.5 inches. xiv, 279, [1] pages. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. DJ has some wear, soiling, tears and chips. Rear board weak and restrengthened with glue. Professor Amin Saikal AM FASSA (born 2 December 1950 in Kabul, Afghanistan) is the Director of the Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies (The Middle East & Central Asia) and Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University. Professor Saikal has specialized in the politics, history, political economy and international relations of the Middle East and Central Asia. He has been a Visiting Fellow at Princeton University, Cambridge University and the Institute of Development Studies (University of Sussex), as well as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow in International Relations (1983-1988). He is a member of many national and international academic organizations. Professor Amin Saikal has published numerous articles in international journals, as well as many feature articles in newspapers. Derived from a Kirkus review: Why was the Shah's fall so swift and steep? Saikal stresses economic factors and their political concomitants. Placed on the throne by the Western powers during World War II, the Shah remained an American dependent, becoming increasingly hooked on economic and military aid. He took the evolutionary approach to oil nationalization and spent the next 20 years centralizing his regime around his own personality, and shrewdly instituting the ""White Revolution"": thereby, he neutralized his internal opposition. But when the sudden oil wealth, after 1973, brought the West to Iran begging investment opportunities, the consequences of the Shah's vision of a powerful Iran dispensing military and economic munificence in the Persian Gulf set the social upheaval in motion. The revolution, says Saikal, was the result of a corrupt bureaucracy and a pervasive secret police. His balanced, well-grounded analysis of the Shah's regime provides a secular approach to Iranian history.