This chapter traces British American cities as distinctive political spaces that helped pioneer the concept of citizenship, a term that originally meant a city resident, and stood at the forefront of much of the political protest leading to the war for independence. However, from their inception, most American cities were subordinated to their provincial legislatures which were dominated by rural interests. Meanwhile the concept of citizenship came to be associated more with a set of actions rather than a place people lived. All the largest cities were occupied during the war, forcing residents to make difficult decisions and heightening the distrust leveled against them after the war. After the war, most urban residents remained minorities subordinated to the interests of mostly rural polities. Once the cradles of citizenship, most cities were not further empowered as polities by the American Revolution, but continued to be or were more sharply constrained by rural elites after the war concluded.

In 1971, E. P. Thompson published a seminal article on eighteenth century English bread riots which was to become a foundational text for the study of such protests. Challenging older elite notions of the irrationality, illegitimacy and even criminality of the ‘mob’, Thompson situated popular direct action in times of food crises within a very specific historical, economic and, most importantly, cultural context. This context produced a deeply held adhesion among the poor to the concept of a ‘moral economy’ and an equally profound rejection of the free market as enshrined in the new political economy of the eighteenth century. This chapter returns to Thompson's original text in order to assess to what extent his paradigm may be useful in understanding bread riots in Iran. It seeks in particular to identify the sources on which the poor drew to reinforce their sense of their own legitimacy. These sources included the Islamic, notably fiqh and the hisba manuals derived from it, elite notions of paternalism, especially the Circle of Justice, and popular folk culture. The chapter then examines the evidence which supports the notion that Iran experienced a ‘golden age’ of bread riots in the 1890s and early 1900s, just before, and indeed contributing to, the outbreak of the constitutional revolution.