“Histories” shows how Persian literary histories emerged from modernizing historiographers’ engagement with the tazkirah, a premodern Persianate genre of literary anthology. The contradictions the tazkirahs posed served as an invitation to produce literary history, in opposition to what modernizers saw as deficiencies in the premodern tazkirah tradition. These contradictions and deficiencies included the fact that tazkirah writers did not see history as linear, progressive, and teleological, nor was historical accuracy necessarily a concern of theirs. This chapter examines how modernizing intellectuals changed conceptions of "history," turned premodern Persian literature into national heritage, and transformed premodern scholars into national heroes.

What drives Islamists’ democratic commitments? Does modernization turn them into committed democrats? Or do institutions rein in their authoritarian tendencies through political socialization and democratic habituation? This chapter critically reviews three theories that define the scholarly debate surrounding these questions while providing a historical and political context to all three cases. It first explores the history of modernization in Turkey, Egypt, and Tunisia and discusses the role of socioeconomic factors on the democratization of Islamist parties. Then it discusses the impact of institutions on party behavior and ideology, specifically the inclusion–moderation thesis to test its claims against the evidence we now have with the rise of Islamist parties to power. This survey reveals the limits of the institutional and ideational effects of inclusion. The final section turns to the strategic calculations of Islamist actors to discuss the role played by external factors, including regional and international developments. The central claim of the chapter is that existing accounts offer only a partial explanation failing to address diversity of perspectives and internal conflicts within Islamist parties.

Flush with American aid and rising oil revenues, in the late 1950s the shah’s government embarked upon a new and ambitious development program, the Second Seven-Year Plan. Directed by Abolhassan Ebtehaj, the plan drew in a large number of American developmentalists. Chief among them were David E. Lilienthal and Gordon R. Clapp, former directors of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Lilienthal, Clapp, and Ebtehaj launched a special project to develop Khuzestan, Iran’s oil-province, into a petrochemical paradise where oil, water, and soil would be transformed together, raising living standards and burnishing the prestige of the newly re-empowered shah. The costly project revealed the extravagances of the Second Plan and eventually fell to the political whims of the shah, who turned against the Americans and the plan itself in the early 1960s, using Ebtehaj and Lilienthal as scapegoats for his government’s broader economic and political failures.

In the twentieth century, Western oil companies worked to combat the oversupply of oil on world markets through oligopolistic management of production and competition. At the same time, they attempted to contain petro-nationalism in the oil-producing Global South. The rise of the Pahlavi regime in Iran threatened the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, until World War II led to the abdication of Reza Shah and the occupation of Iran, including its oil fields, by Allied forces. American advisors came to Iran determined to “cure” what they saw as a sick and unstable country, while US oil companies attempted to break the British monopoly on Iranian oil. The Azerbaijan Crisis and Cold War clarified US policy, producing an American commitment to safeguarding Iran’s territorial integrity by backing the young shah, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, and ensuring the smooth flow of Iranian oil into the global market managed by the oil oligopoly.

Latin America in 1870–1930 initiated many modernization projects, and “First Wave” feminism resulted from expanded education, a modernizing strategy. Feminism engaged in emancipation strategies and legal and labor reforms. Suffrage was not its primary aim. Periodicals showed feminism’s impact in culture, commerce, civil rights, and public health, and films showed women in daring roles. Early leaders were professionals (Moreau de Justo) and labor activists (Capetillo, Muzzili). Feminism was first successful in cities (São Paulo, Buenos Aires), changing education, labor practices, and child protection. The Mexican Revolution produced new contexts for women in the arts (Campobello). The US presence in Cuba and Puerto Rico reordered Caribbean racial and social hierarchies. Women writers and activists of varied social classes, feminist or not, showed the costs and benefits of urbanization, family, and immigration. Teaching and writing allowed “middlebrow” access to the public sphere (Mistral, Storni). Literature brought women’s issues to the public sphere.

This introduction offers background problematics and theoretical frameworks of this book, in addition to introducing all other chapters. First, I note that the minimum core of human dignity can be captured by such conceptions as elevated rank, intrinsic worth, and anti-humiliation. Since the 1970s autonomy has risen to prominence. Second, populism and polarization in Western democracies, insofar as it is related to what Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris call “cultural backlash,” signals tension between dignity as individual autonomy and other competing social and communal values. Third, in the post-Asian-values-debate era, a great part of Asia has progressed toward or become liberal democracies, and human dignity and human rights are embraced as universal values. This book regards culture as contestable and fluid set of meanings and symbols that is subject to change, even though cultural changes may be path-dependent and cultures cannot be totally fluid in its entirety at a limited historical period. Fourth, Asian countries have already and will continue to work out the full implications of these universal values by applying different conceptions of dignity to concrete issues.

This chapter examines Protestantism’s relationship with human dignity in South Korea against the backdrop of the country’s modern history from the early stage of Protestant mission to the country’s democratization. Protestantism enshrines the biblical view of humankind as God’s creation. Since the first Protestant missionaries were sent to Korea in the late nineteenth century, Protestantism has influenced Koreans to respect the intrinsic value of every person. Protestant churches even played a vital role in protecting and promoting human dignity during the course of the country’s modernization, democratization, and economic development. This chapter demonstrates how Korean Protestants adopted and practiced the idea of human dignity, mainly focusing on their complicated responses to the country’s unstable political and social situations. Despite the risk of oversimplification, the chapter investigates this crucial topic by dividing the history of modern Korea into the three distinct periods: 1) early Protestant mission through Japanese colonization, 1884–1945; 2) independence through the Korean War, 1945–53; and 3) postwar national reconstruction through democratization, 1953–87.

This chapter explores the ways that postcolonial governments of India and Pakistan attempted to homogenize governance arrangements within their territories; this project was not entirely successful, but did lead to substantial revision of colonial categories. It begins with a discussion of the foreclosed possibility of Home Rule arrangements in which distinctions in governance practice might have persisted in practice after independence in a united India; the politics of Partition instead led to the formation of two sovereign states, but with significant variation in the power and authority of the state in each. It explores the particular politics in India and Pakistan that limited each country’s ability to undertake fundamental reform of the state and the homogenization of governance procedures, including differing perspectives among political leaders on how best to deliver security and development, and the persistence of bureaucratic structures. It also outlines the roots of a more even political geography in Bangladesh, an exception to the patchwork states of India and Pakistan. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how the colonial forms of governance translates into a postcolonial typology of governance arrangements, with distinctions in state capacity and state-society relations.

The Federal Writers’ Project’s experiment in documentary modes points to the wealth of African American documentary texts offering responses to the welfare state and its attendant ideologies. These texts – neither properly belonging to a single decade nor fitting conveniently with forms of literary production we usually study – challenge the way we periodize and categorize African American literature. This chapter explores several of these intertexts: Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices (1941), Roi Ottley’s New World A-Coming (1943), Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy’s They Seek a City (1945), and Henry Lee Moon’s Balance of Power: The Negro Vote (1948). It illuminates their dialogue with the New Deal cultural projects and how Black writers reoriented how they engaged with history, urban space, and culture between the Harlem Renaissance and the Civil Rights era.

For over two millennia, China has sustained the largest single human society on the planet through the development of one of the most sophisticated agrarian systems in history. Even until quite recent, agriculture occupied a central place in the Chinese economy, commanding a dominant 60 to 70 percent of the total economy throughout. Agricultural institutions define the Chinese economic system and agricultural production drove long-run economic change or growth in China. Agriculture was at the center of the Great Divergence debate. Agricultural harvest or failures sometimes spelled the rise and fall of dynasties throughout history. Moving to the modern era, Chinese agriculture became the scapegoat for China’s modernization failure and was regarded as the incubator for Communist revolution. However, given its overriding importance, research on modern Chinese agriculture has been surprisingly understudied for the last few decades.

The Soviet Union’s official ideology, Marxism-Leninism, was universal, aspiring to explain all humanity’s past and future. It claimed to be a science, applicable to social relations, economics, and international politics. Culture, religion, and traditional social structures, Marxism-Leninism taught, would be swept away by economic and social change. This was true in Soviet domestic politics, where "feudal" practices such as religion and patriarchy were supposed to be replaced by the Party and the State. It was also true, experts in Marxism-Leninism taught, in international politics, where class not culture would determine the future. In the 1970s, however, Soviet experts, analysts, and officials began to question the supposed irrelevance of culture, religion, and tradition. In foreign policy, culture seemed of enduring relevance in explaining how countries in Asia and Africa interacted with the Soviet Union. In domestic politics, "traditional structures" in regions like Central Asia and the Caucasus seemed to persist generations after Soviet power had been established. This paper traces Soviet and later Russian belief in the importance of cultural, ethnic, national, and civilizational factors in politics from the 1970s to the present via several influential intellectuals who drove the shift. It connects the rising Soviet belief in the importance of clashing civilizations to declining faith in Russia in universalistic politics in general. In the West, the Cold War’s end was associated with Francis Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis. In Russia, the Cold War’s demise corresponded with a rejection of Marxist-Leninist universalism and a new emphasis on cultural and civilizational difference.