“Revolution in Premodern Eurasia”

Half a century ago, students of Anglophone political anthropology were commonly taught (e.g. by Max Gluckman) to distinguish rebellion from revolution. The former, often highly ritualized and characteristic of tribal societies in Africa, did not transform the structures and institutions of the society. Revolution, by contrast, meant substantive discontinuity and was characteristic of more developed political systems in Europe and Asia. Its study was the domain of political science, rather than anthropology. The literature was dominated by the study of relatively recent cases of political transformation, exemplified by John Dunn’s 1972 Modern Revolutions. Without noting this particular contribution, Arjomand sets out to correct an unwarranted temporal restriction and thereby to fill a huge gap in historical social theory. His book is a sophisticated exploration of revolution in pre-modern Eurasia. Revolution is conceived (following Koselleck) “as a coherent collective singular serving as a regulative principle of knowledge” [4] in the centuries that have elapsed since the Great French Revolution. Acknowledging the anachronisms that inevitably follow from applying a modern concept in earlier centuries, Arjomand examines ten cases in detail, beginning with “The Akkadian Constitutive Revolution and the Establishment of Universal Monarchy in Mesopotamia” and concluding with “The Mongolian Integrative Revolution in Eurasia.” A lengthy Introduction and a much shorter Conclusion expound the author’s typology. In an Epilogue entitled “Revolutions of the last Hundred Years in the Light of My Typology” he discusses the rise and fall of socialist regimes in various parts of the world, as well as Islamic revolutions from Iran in 1979 to the Islamic State and the Arab Revolution of 2011. Arjomand defines revolution formally as “a culturally significant and complex event that greatly increases the political mobilization of society and thereby results in many changes in its political organization or the structure of authority (the state, when the term applies)