In this book, Mohammad Gholi Majd argues that Persia was the greatest victim of World War One and also the victim of possibly the worst genocide of the twentieth century. Using U.S. State Department records, as well as Persian and British sources, Majd describes and documents a veritable holocaust about which practically nothing has been written.

At least 8–10 million Iranians out of a population of 18–20 million died of starvation and disease during the famine of 1917–1919. The Iranian holocaust was the biggest calamity of World War I and one of the worst genocides of the 20th century, yet it remained concealed for nearly a century. The 2003 edition of this book relied primarily on US diplomatic records and memoirs of British officers who served in Iran in World War I, but in this edition these documents have been supplemented with US military records, British official sources, memoirs, diaries of notable Iranians, and a wide array of Iranian newspaper reports. In addition, the demographic data has been expanded to include newly discovered US State Department documents on Iran’s pre-1914 population. This book also includes a new chapter with a detailed military and political history of Iran in World War I. A work of enduring value, Majd provides a comprehensive account of Iran’s greatest calamity.

The death by famine of tens of millions of human beings in Asia and Africa during the Victorian era (1837–1901) is “the secret history of the nineteenth century” about which Western history books contain nothing. The Great Famine of 1869–1873 in Iran took 10–12 million lives, or two-thirds of the population, and is part of this secret history. While the famines that ravaged China and India during 1876 to 1902 have received some recent scrutiny, the precursor of these cataclysmic famines, the Great Famine of 1869–1873 in Iran, has remained practically unknown. This study is the first monograph on the subject in the English language. This famine in Iran killed on a scale similar to the 1876–79 famine in China, which has been called the worst to afflict the human species. This study is based on British diplomatic reports and semi-official sources, European travel accounts, Persian documents and writings, British and American newspapers, and the reports by American missionaries who witnessed the famine. These sources enable one to provide a chronological and numerical account of the death and suffering as the famine spread from the southern and central regions to the rest of the country. The population statistics and rich micro-level data on famine losses in rural and urban areas indicate that during the nearly five years of famine, two-thirds of the population had perished. Not until 1910 did Iran come close to recovering its 1869 population. Soon after, Iran was plunged into the Great Famine of 1917–19, which claimed another 8–10 million, and again the 1942–43 famine and typhus epidemic that carried off an additional 4 million persons. In the seventy-five year span of 1869–1944, Iran had suffered three famines that had taken 25 million lives. Iran’s 1944 population of 10–12 million was unchanged from 11 million recorded in 1841, a perfect case of a Malthusian catastrophe. It is difficult to find another country in which a century of population growth had been wiped out by famine. Having previously described and quantified the 1917–19 and 1942–43 famines, Majd does the same for the 1869–73 famine. This book is the third of a trilogy on famines in Iran during the last 150 years.

Coming shortly after the British occupation of Iraq and the German invasion of Russia, the Anglo-Russian occupation of Iran secured a vital route for supplies to Russia and assured British control of the oilfields. To save the Pahlavi regime, Reza Shah was replaced by his son and Iranians were given a "New Deal." The Allied occupation thus ushered in a brief period of democratic freedoms. Having described the rise of Reza Shah in a previous work, Majd completes the story by describing his downfall. The author has made an extensive search of the widely scattered U.S. diplomatic and military records and these are supplemented by reports in the The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Chicago Daily Tribune, as well as other press accounts. More than seventy years later, this interesting story has remained untold. August 1941 is the first detailed and documented account of the affair.

Drawing primarily from US State Department archives and the four volumes of the official British history of World War I in Mesopotamia (published during 1923-1927), Majd reconstructs the political and military history of Iraq in World War I, a period that began with fierce Iraqi resistance against the British and ended with the consolidation of British control under the mandate system. In addition to documenting the military ebb and flow of Britain's colonial project in Iraq, Majd also presents two chapters considering the aftermath of the war in terms of Iraq's commercial decline and the impact of disease.

Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.

Sanctions as War is the first critical analysis of economic sanctions from a global perspective. Featuring case studies from 11 sanctioned countries and theoretical essays, it will be of immediate interest to those interested in understanding how sanctions became the common sense of American foreign policy.

A succinct and highly readable narrative of modern Iran from the mid-nineteenth century to the present.

While most studies on gentrification focus almost exclusively on its causes and consequences through an examination of housing, class conflict, and the displacement of residents, this book analyzes the process of gentrification. Gentrification and Inequality in Brooklyn examines the ways in which the established working-class and lower-income residents of Greenpoint, Brooklyn remain socially segregated from the incoming gentrifiers, with both groups forming parallel cultures within the shared physical spaces of the community. Desena broadens the typical analyses of gentrification to include the grass roots dynamics which create social class relations that lead to residential segregation created by social class relations. Drawing upon areas traditionally under represented in urban sociology, including families, women, children, and local institutions other than housing, this study explores the ways in which working-class residents, in the course of their everyday lives, negotiate change in their neighborhood and dissimilarity with their new (gentry) neighbors. Gentrification and Inequality in Brooklyn touches on issues familiar to anyone who has lived in a multi-class or multi-ethnic community, while offering new perspectives on the ways that such communities develop and maintain the boundaries of social segregation.

This book investigates the historical evolution of 'humanitarian photography' - the mobilization of photography in the service of humanitarian initiatives across state boundaries.