Running the Corridor

Fletcher, Robert S. G.

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198729310.003.0004

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“…As Robert Fletcher has recently argued, Bedouins also entered this market by deploying their preindustrial knowledge as guides and protectors along the motor "corridor" through the Syrian Desert. 78 As for Kettaneh, he remained in the automobile business after selling his company; he began importing and selling American vehicles. A 1930 advertisement in the Persian newspaper Ittila'at shows him as the Tehran distributor of Dodge motor cars.…”

Section: O T O R I N G O U T O F I R a Nmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fordist Connections: The Automotive Integration of the United States and Iran

Green¹

2016

Comp Stud Soc Hist

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This essay unravels the intertwined emergence of “Fordist” connections and conceptions of America in Iran during the 1920s. By focusing on the interplay of infrastructure and information, I use a Persian travelogue to chart the impact of motor transport that, in the wake of the First World War, connected a formerly isolated Iran to the Arab Mediterranean and thence to America. Compared to the extensive Levantine encounter with the Americas that from the 1870s generated an Arab diaspora and Arabic emigration literature from Buenos Aires to Detroit, the Iranian encounter with the United States was much later and more limited. This changed rapidly, however, with the opening of the “Nairn Way” and the importing of American automobiles, developments that tied Iran to the Levant at the very moment American strategists were coining the unitary spatial concept of a “Middle East.” In Iran, this conjunctural moment coincided with the rise of Riza Shah and the nationalist search for a third-power strategy to negate a century of Russian and British influence. Expanding the recent literature on Middle Eastern globalization, this essay uses ‘Abdullah Bahrami's 1926 travelogueAz Tihran ta Niyu Yurk(From Tehran to New York) to reconstruct what Iran's new nation-builders hoped to learn from the United States during the formative decade of U.S.-Iran relations. From behind the better-known story of petropolitics, Bahrami's travelogue captures the turning point when the United States first rose on the globalizing horizons of Iran's modernizing nationalists.

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Section: O T O R I N G O U T O F I R a Nmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fordist Connections: The Automotive Integration of the United States and Iran

Green¹

2016

Comp Stud Soc Hist

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

Running the Corridor

Cited by 1 publication

References 0 publications

Fordist Connections: The Automotive Integration of the United States and Iran

Fordist Connections: The Automotive Integration of the United States and Iran

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