The Qajar Pact explores new perspectives on the nineteenth-century Iranian state and society, and is the first broad study of lower social groups in this period. Vanessa Martin argues that Qajar government was certainly despotic, but was also founded on a consensus based on the Islamic principles of consultation and negotiation. The author focuses on the role of the non-elite groups in urban society up to the years before the Constitutional Revolution.

Vanessa Martin is Professor of Middle Eastern History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of 'Creating an Islamic State' and 'Islam and Modernism' (both I.B.Tauris).