Dr. Viktor Forian-Szabo

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Institutional Crossroads: Economic Law and Fiqh in Pahlavi Iran. Agency, Path Dependence, and the Making of a Legal Order

I seek to explore the evolution of economic institutions in Pahlavi-era Iran (1921–1979) through a historical institutionalist lens, focusing on the interplay between economic law, fiqh, and state-building. Challenging deterministic narratives that attribute legal modernization solely to external geopolitical pressures, this project emphasizes institutional choice, asking why Iranian elites adopted specific legal models — particularly in the areas of taxation, commercial law, banking, and insurance — while discarding others. By combining process tracing with historical analysis, the study investigates how early legal reforms produced path-dependent trajectories that shaped the foundations of modern Iranian governance. This approach makes it possible to examine how different institutional models were selectively adapted in a context that, while deeply affected by foreign influence, was never formally colonized — highlighting the agency of local actors and the contested, often hybrid nature of institutional development in non-colonial settings.