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He “was the very embodiment of a traditional masculine character.” So Ashraf Pahlavi remembered her father Reza Shah, founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. “Although I feared my father, I shared some of his qualities: his stubbornness, his fierce pride, and his iron will,” wrote his powerful daughter, the twin sister of Mohammad Reza Shah, the second and the last Pahlavi ruler of Iran. Reza Shah left behind no autobiographies, but as Amin Banani notes, he “had to perfection the politician's talent for opportunism.” While still uncertain in his power, for example, “he knew how to play upon the religious emotions of the people.” He was “antagonistic toward the clergy,” although he was “basically apathetic to religion.” There was also “a definite ideological motivation” in his political actions. Dedicated to nationalism and statism, he sought a rapid adoption of “the material advances of the West [by] a breakdown of the traditional power of religion and a growing tendency toward secularism.” He built a modernizing, Westernizing, and centralizing state in Iran, a state that was based on a strong army and repression, not the consensus of the governed. Reza Shah introduced policies that altered the lives of Iranian women. For the first time, some women entered into the modern sectors of the economy, public and non-sex segregated schools were established, family laws were modified, and unveiling was enforced forcibly in 1936. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

“Since American military and other aid has brought my country such important direct and indirect benefits,” declared Mohammad Reza Shah in an autobiography written a few years after the CIA returned him to the throne, “I hope I shall not sound ungrateful if I state my conviction that we have been receiving glaringly inadequate amounts of it.” In fact, the Cold War brought American military and economic aid to Iran by the late 1950s, helping the Shah consolidate his power against communism and the secular and religious opposition. He expressed his own preeminence in a 1973 interview with Oriana Fallaci: “Where there's no monarchy, there is anarchy, or an oligarchy or a dictatorship.” Iran's integration into the world market and the ensuing economic growth based on rising oil revenues bolstered the state's power. Unleashing the unpredictable forces of change and expediently defending the throne with either co-optation or repression, the state launched several projects that changed the structure of the economy, the labor force, and the gender division of labor. Urban communities expanded with migration from rural areas, and the enlarging industrial and service sectors absorbed even more workers. More women, unveiled and educated, followed Western fashions and joined the growing labor market. Many began working in gender mixed occupations, while experienced the “double day,” working both inside and outside the home. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Territory and Population The Soviet Union succeeded the Tsarist reign after the revolution of October 1917. The Union lasted seventy-three years, after which it collapsed and was dismembered in 1990–1. During its existence, the Union's socioeconomic and juridical framework underwent a number of crucial transformations. Immediately after the revolution, during the Civil War, the Bolsheviks in power established what came to be known as the rule of War Communism (1917–21), which aimed on the economic plane at eliminating market relations and replacing them with an all-out system of centralized commands and controls. This system was in turn discarded in 1921 and replaced by a new coordinating mechanism called the New Economic Policy (NEP) (1921–8), which aimed at economic recovery and reconstruction and which for the purpose combined centralized command with the reestablishment of certain market relations. The NEP was followed in 1928 with an all-embracing policy of massive industrialization and of collectivization of the peasantry, inaugurating the era of Central Plans. After World War II, various attempts at reforming the planning system were undertaken, notably in the 1960s and then in the 1980s. The first became known as “The New System of Planning and Economic Incentives,” the second, much vaster in scope, named perestroika (restructuring), aimed at eliminating many aspects of the inefficient and disintegrating central planning system and at returning in some respect to the organizational concepts of the NEP. I will examine in detail each of these phases later on. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior to the 1980s, Mexico and Kenya had strong reputations for effective state-led economic development and sustained state-dominated political stability in their respective continents. This chapter documents the extent to which expectations based on these reputations eroded and then broke down. The experiences of the two countries differ, yet the combined effect of economic and political change altered the context for state action in similar ways. In Mexico, the interaction of economic and political conditions indicates that economic crisis sharpened and accelerated an emergent political crisis. In contrast, Kenya provides a case of a country whose political crisis contributed significantly to deepening its economic problems. Deep and sustained economic crisis has farreaching consequences, as the case of Mexico explored here demonstrates. Although most frequently measured and discussed in terms of stagnant or declining rates of growth and indices of social welfare, extended economic crises also stimulate critical reassessment of the intellectual underpinnings of national development strategies. Such crises encourage citizens, policy makers, and politicians to question prior growth strategies and policy regimes, even those that had produced positive results in the past. In consequence, long-accepted notions about how development is best achieved become subject to greater skepticism and at times are held responsible for creating current conditions. Along with this questioning of appropriate routes to development, sustained economic crisis also has a profound impact on the economic interests supporting and benefiting from existing policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 1980s and 1990s witnessed economic and political crises of historic significance in Latin America and Africa. Throughout both regions, economies that were already fragile were almost destroyed by debt, inflation, low commodity prices, high interest rates, and devastating natural disasters. Political systems faced grave challenges to their right to govern societies that were themselves torn by division and unrest. Regime changes, civil wars, civic protest, and demands for human rights and accountable public officials characterized the political history of this era. The evidence is extensive and unambiguous: economic and political distress were hallmarks of an unsettled and unsettling era. Repeatedly, crisis exposed the weakness of existing state capacities to manage economic and political relationships. This chapter uses data from sixteen countries in Latin America and Africa to explore the scope, nature, and implications of economic and political crisis. It addresses four questions. First, what was the scope of the dual crises of economic and political development facing countries in these regions? Second, what factors explain the nature of the problems that confronted a wide range of governments? Third, what impact did economic and political collapse or near collapse have on various dimensions of state capacity? Finally, what consequences did crisis have for state–economy and state–society relationships? Subsequent chapters deal in greater detail with the same issues in Mexico and Kenya; this chapter indicates the extent to which these two countries shared in region-wide political and economic trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Setting the stage Was city growth too fast or too slow during the First Industrial Revolution? Such questions are rarely posed of British historical experience, even though implicit judgments are being made all the time. Answers hinge on an assessment of the behavior of private labor and capital markets, on the one hand, and the provision of public social overhead, on the other. Most historians have taken the view that fast city growth was a Good Thing. After all, Britain underwent the industrial revolution first and was also more urbanized than her competitors. That historical correlation implies for most historians that Britain's fast-city-growth regime must have been optimal, that slower city growth would have been a mistake, and that faster city growth would have been infeasible. Anthony Wohl (1983) takes the contrary view. He argues that British authorities were unprepared for and surprised by the rapid city growth that carried the industrial revolution, with disastrous results. City governments didn't plan for the event, public-health officials were unprepared for the event, and city social overhead technologies were too backward to deal with the event. Furthermore, entrepreneurial and technological failure in the public sector, and rising land scarcity in the private sector, both served to breed levels of crowding, density, mortality, morbidity, and disamenities that were high even by the standards of the poorest Third World cities. Britain was simply unable or unwilling to house itself properly during the First Industrial Revolution. So much so that the 1830s and 1840s are seen by Michael Flinn (1965, p. 14) as a Malthusian retribution by disease. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two competing views Did factor markets fail during the British industrial revolution? Did distortions in capital markets serve to starve industrial firms for finance and suppress accumulation there? Did urban-rural wage gaps, inelastic city-labor supplies and lack of integrated labor markets serve to drive up the cost of labor in the cities, thus choking off the rate of industrialization? With regards to labor-market failure, the literature is of two minds. Labor markets did fail An extensive traditional literature takes the view that migrants were reluctant to move, wage gaps were large, and regional labor markets were fragmented. A century ago, Earnst Ravenstein (1885, 1889) published his classic work on internal migration, subsequently augmented by Arthur Redford (1926) and Alex Cairncross (1949, 1953). Ravenstein asked how many migrated, when they migrated, who migrated, where they migrated from, and where they migrated to. The same questions dominate modern migration studies. Thus, for example, the literature has been busy substantiating Ravenstein's and Redford's observation that the majority of migrants went only a short distance, and often by steps. Such observations have encouraged the belief that workers failed to move to the highest wage areas and thus that the perfect labor-market thesis must fail. There is an equally long tradition among British labor historians that there was a multiplicity of labor markets between 1750 and 1850, that regional labor markets were very poorly integrated, and that local autonomy reigned (Pollard, 1978). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How did city labor markets work? The Todaro model Debate over Third World urbanization generates the same gloomy pessimism that characterized Britain in the early nineteenth century. Even the rhetoric is the same, Victorian and modern critics both citing urban underemployment, primitive housing, inadequate public services, poverty, and inequality (Williamson, 1988). As we have seen, many modern analysts view the Third World as “overurbanized,” a position shared by many Victorian reformers in nineteenth-century England. According to this view, the cities are too large and too many, and they got that way somehow through perverse migration behavior. Pushed off the land by technological events in agriculture, by famine, and by Malthusian pressure, rural emigrants flood the cities in far greater numbers than modern-sector jobs can be created for them. Attracted by an irrational optimism that they will be selected for those scarce high-wage city jobs, the rural emigrants keep coming. Lacking high-wage jobs in the growing modern sectors, the glut of rural immigrants spills over into low-wage service sectors, unemployment, and pauperism, while their families crowd into inadequate housing blighting an otherwise dynamic city economy. The cities find it difficult to cope with the immigrant influx, and authorities look for ways to close the cities to new immigrants. By focusing on expected rather than current earnings differentials, Michael Todaro (1969) developed a framework that could account for the apparent irrationality of rural immigrants rushing to the city even in the face of unemployment and underemployment. The Todaro framework and its extensions (Harris and Todaro, 1970; Stiglitz, 1974; Corden and Findlay, 1975; Cole and Sanders, 1985; Hatton and Williamson, 1989) has enjoyed considerable popularity over the past decade or so. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internal migration between farm and nonfarm employment The previous two chapters have focused on migration between city and countryside. What about migration off the farm? After all, the countryside offered nonfarm employment opportunities, and these were quite significant in most parts of England. Under such conditions, rural emigration and off-farm emigration need not have been the same. Not too long ago, Sidney Pollard (1978) offered estimates of emigration from British agriculture over the century following 1751, concluding that “only about one-fifth of the additional working force in nonagrarian occupations was derived from the direct transfer out of agriculture,” and by comparison natural population increase was of “immense importance” (Pollard, 1978, Table 34 and p. 141). Pollard's conclusion would appear to be at variance with Chapter 2, in which we found that immigration contributed to about half of city growth (Table 2.5). However, Pollard made his calculations based on simplifications that matter to his conclusions. First, he ignored external migrations in his calculations, the Irish in particular. In effect, he treated the Irish as part of the nonagricultural natural increase. Second, Pollard assumed that the rate of natural increase was the same everywhere. I am sure that Pollard would be the first to agree that the natural rates were quite different in agriculture and nonagriculture. As we have seen in Chapter 2, the rate of natural increase was much higher in the countryside. The natural rate differentials were, in fact, much higher than in the contemporary Third World, making the problem of matching excess urban labor demand with excess rural labor supply all the more difficult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do we care about the urban demographic transition? A reconstruction of the demographic dimensions of the urban transition should help improve our understanding of the First Industrial Revolution. Certainly it is essential in searching for answers to any of the following questions: Did English cities grow more by natural increase than by migration? Did city immigration rates rise as industrialization accelerated? Did rural emigration rates respond vigorously to the employment demands of rapid city growth, or were rural Englishmen more attached to the land than has been true of other industrial revolutions? Was migration selective? If so, what was the impact of the selectivity on the city economy? What role did push and pull forces play in rural and urban labor markets? These questions have always been at center stage in debates about the First Industrial Revolution. The answers will hinge on an assessment of those forces creating and displacing jobs in the two labor markets, as well as on the migration behavior thought to link them, assessments which cannot be made without the prior demographic reconstruction performed in this chapter. Consider, for example, the Third World overurbanization debate which was initiated by Bert Hoselitz in the 1950s. His thesis was that urbanization was outpacing industrialization in the sense that urban populations were large relative to industrial jobs, at least when compared with late nineteenth-century experience (Hoselitz 1955, 1957). The implication was that urban labor was moving into low-wage, residual service underemployment by default. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]