Chapter 4 unpacks the conundrum faced by Restoration acting companies. Audiences wanted new works, spectacle, and theatrical innovation, but the unforeseen consequences of the duopoly hobbled the ability of the companies to respond nimbly to changing conditions. Strapped for money and shackled by the costs of maintaining their expensive, high-tech playhouses, the acting companies were hard pressed to keep up with rival entertainments and products now enticing Londoners. Coffeehouses, spas, pleasure gardens, dance recitals, and music concerts all offered convenience, variety, and value for money. Goods in expanded bourses also tempted consumers. The theatre largely responded to the new world of goods and pastimes through allusion and imitation, oftentimes to brilliant results. Intermedial exchange between the worlds of music and theatre resulted in the gorgeous dramatic operas still staged today. The new consumerism featured in the sparkling, witty comedies spoofing the London elite. Nonetheless, allusiveness could not rival actual experiences and commodities, which often could be had for less money and greater convenience than an afternoon at the playhouse.

Aiming to highlight the agency of ordinary people in Tehran’s transformation, I mostly scrutinized the shifts in two seemingly independent but inherently interconnected socio-spatial relationships: the spatiality of social life and social movements. Throughout the main storyline of this book, I illustrated that the transformations of these two relationships shared four common characteristics. First, there is an apparent departure from communal to class-based identities. As I discussed in Chapter 1, the social spaces of nineteenth-century Tehran were the outcome of the shared communal identity of their users; people’s communal ties colored coffeehouses, bathhouses, takīyyihs, and zūrkhānihs. In the same vein, communal ties played the main role in the formation of political public spaces and the public sphere during the Constitutional Revolution. However, the structural transformation of Iranian urban society resulted in the demise of the communal sphere and the rise of class consciousness based on shared economic and political interests. As Chapter 5 demonstrated, the modern middle class produced the main social spaces of mid-twentieth-century northern Tehran. Chapter 6 illustrated the role of this class alongside the urban working class in the production of political public spaces of the city in the 1940s and the early 1950s.

Religious differences also shaped the voluntary social interactions that formed the basis of the burgeoning culture of eighteenth-century England. Chapter 4 looks at some of these practices – drinking, dancing, and coffeehouse culture – through the lens of Dissenting engagement with them in a context of continuing religious stereotyping. Although Dissenters were not excluded from the social practices of the eighteenth century, religious affiliation was an important determinant of how contemporaries interpreted their own, and others’, social interactions. Looking at Dissenters’ differing engagements with contemporary culture, and how others reacted to them, helps us to recognise the diverse ways in which contemporaries could make meaning from the common cultural modes and spaces of eighteenth-century England. This approach not only encourages a more expansive understanding of the varieties of cultural interaction in eighteenth-century England, but also highlights some of the crucial ways in which awareness of religious differences shaped social and cultural behaviour.

Chapter 5 focuses on the elusive boundary between the lazy and the industrious in the post-1908 Young Turk era. In this tumultuous period, the Ottoman culture producers employed the concepts of work and laziness to further develop the exclusionary language characteristic of the culture of productivity against their rivals. Surveying political pamphlets, journals, memoirs, and the daily press, this chapter shows how various ideological camps entered into a cultural struggle over who should be regarded as lazy and useless based on a putative association with “super Westernization” or with “anti-progressivism.” In the relatively open political atmosphere immediately following the 1908 revolution, the polemics between various political agents, usually dubbed “Westernists” and “Islamists,” signalled a vital debate on the ideal citizen required by the nation. Their views of these issues diverged greatly, as did the question of who should be labeled lazy and unproductive. Such labels marshaled the exclusionary language that has been in development, revealing a variety of models of reform in the public sphere and how each one regarded the other as the cause of laziness.

First, this chapter analyzes the non-elite socialization places in which anti-secular opinions were produced and expressed such as mosques, Qur’an courses, houses and coffeehouses. It shows the people’s insistence on their religious practices by receiving secret Qur’an courses or by disobeying the Turkish call to prayer. Second, it outlines a wide range of ways people expressed their critical views, ranging from seditious conversations, rumors, placards and anonymous critical letters to authorities, to writing on walls, doors and trees. Third, this chapter examines the rhetoric and discursive strategies anti-secular talks used. Fourth, it reveals how those social groups or individuals who had lost their authority or economic advantages due to secular reforms or those people who were discontented with economic conditions took part in the production and dissemination of anti-secular and anti-regime discourses. This chapter also shows how the non-elite daily socialization places contested the state’s secular propaganda and socialization spaces such as People’s Houses and Rooms.