A Critical Review of the Book " The Persian Land Reform" by Ann Katharine Swynford Lambton

The present work seeks to evaluate the book The Persian Land Reform by professor Lambton. In general the available literature on agrarian change in Iran can be classified into two broad categories, the first category contains general studies of land reform and asserts that the break-down of oppressive landlord-peasant relationships was the main consequences of land reform, and the second broad category consist of authors who followed Modernization Theory in understanding the transformation of “traditional’’ rural Iran to a “modern” one. Typically, this approach attributes the causes of under development to structural- functional inadequacies within society. Professor Lambton's major study that concerns rural life in Iran landlord and peasant in Persia is a comprehensive study of peasant life in Iran. Her second book, which is more relevant to the aim of this article is The Persian Land Reform that is written from an oriental historian perspective and concludes that the land reform meant the emancipation of the peasantry from the oppressive landlord- peasant relationship. Even though Lambton observed several villages, the book does not provide a systemic qualitative analysis of the economic and social life of rural people. Here two points should be cleared up. The villages which were observed were among the prosperous villages, where the government official prepared the ground for her investigation in Iran. Furthermore, an assessment of the consequence of land reform in Iran cannot be made merely based on a less than two hours visit.