220 Between Private and Public
(e.g., ministries, procurement boards, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard
Corp, and free trade zones) and quasi-state organizations (e.g., founda-
tions or bonyād) for trade licenses, subsidized hard currency, and credit.
While in terms of form this sort of clientelism is not different from that
of the Pahlavi regime, in terms of breadth it is far more pervasive, directly
impacting the bazaar. In the shadows of this bureaucracy and crony cap-
italism, merchants have manipulated and evaded the bazaar’s limits by
patronizing transnational smuggling networks, shifting assets and activi-
ties to disparate loci (e.g., new commercial areas in Tehran, free trade
zones in Iran and Dubai). Commerce has been both deterritorialized and
reterritorialized, in the process displacing the networks of the bazaar.^50
ver the past quarter century, the combination of trade regulations, O
technological innovations, and new national and regional trade entrepôts
have extended and reconfigured the set of commercial and social rela-
tions needed to participate in the import, export, and distribution of
commercial goods and services. Today bazaaris communicate with and
travel to locales across Tehran and even to distant locations in the frontier
regions of Iran and the new commercial mecca of Dubai. My interviewees
reflected a distinct generational difference when expressing their views
on the new spatial coherence of the commercial network. For the genera-
tion of merchants that took up their trade in the past two decades, the
Shams al-‘Amareh and other old landmarks of the bazaar area are irrel-
evant to discussions about national, let alone international, trade. Younger
bazaaris adamantly and correctly insisted that by studying “only the
bazaar, one would miss out on the main commerce that was outside the
bazaar area.” Even from the perspective of the younger bazaaris the com-
mercial world is divided into “inside” and “outside” the bazaar, the differ-
ence now being that commercial interactions and relations, or at least the
significant ones, span across “the bazaar’s borders” and must engage with
the world beyond.
e factors of such decentralization are many. Urbanization and its Th
accompanying sprawl and congestion, improvements in telecommunica-
tions and transportation, increased levels of industrialization and con-
sumerism, and a rise in literacy and nuclear families have transformed
the communication and spatial organization of the city and the bazaar
and hence the flow of goods and information through it, as well as its