222 Between Private and Public
protected regions.^55 The prominence of offshore import-export opera-
tions, both legal and illegal, has also contributed to the transforma-
tion of the bazaar’s role. Rather than entering via the air and sea ports,
many consumer goods enter the country on speed boats that crisscross
the Persian Gulf and dock at makeshift jetties and unregistered ports;^56
rather than using letters of credit, traders began to use import allowances
given to Iranians working abroad and tourists returning to the mainland
from these zones. Since the outset of the revolution and the Iran–Iraq
war, trading companies in Dubai have been the principal importers, with
merchants in Tehran reduced to dependent clients. Thus, Tehran and its
bazaar are no longer Iran’s primary commercial nexus.^57 State policies,
therefore, have facilitated and mediated the process of globalization and
regionalization.
n the context of these and other government policies aimed at I
expanding state control over resources for the war effort, consolidating
the postrevolutionary regime, and redistributing wealth, entrepreneurial
capital has moved to new and unrestricted places—on the outskirts of the
city, in Iran’s border region, and internationally. The repositioning of the
bazaar in the commercial economy was incremental, but deeply conse-
quential. In the words of one merchant in the china and glassware sector,
“The distribution of goods is like a funnel. Whereas the narrow stem of
the cone used to be in the Tehran bazaar and the funnel distributed goods
out to the rest of the country, now there are a whole series of channels and
none of them begin in the Tehran bazaar.” Rather than flow, imports skip
and hop via a value chain that begins with importers in Dubai and leads
(with the help of quasi-legal processes) to wholesalers in border markets
and free trade zones, arriving at the warehouses and stores of wholesalers
and retailers in Tehran, with the bazaar housing only a portion of these.
At the level of national trade, the resituating of the networks has under-
mined the Tehran bazaar’s focal position. Many retailers in southern Iran
are no longer part of the Tehran-based commercial network. Instead, they
directly purchase their goods from these new cross-border commercial
networks. Enterprises in Shiraz have redirected their trade channels south
and west to the Persian Gulf ports (Bushehr and Bandar Abbas), those
in Kerman look east and south to the Pakistani border region (Chabahar
and Zahedan), and Tabrizi traders eye the northern and western borders