 He has published extensively on twentieth century Iranian history and has been responsible for a number of cases of historical revisionism, for example that the 1921 coup in Iran was not engineered by the British government; that the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919 was not intended to turn Iran into a British protectorate; and that the Iranian-Azarbaijani political leader, Sheikh Mohammad Khiyabani was not a separatist, was not pro-Bolshevik and was not opposed to the 1919 agreement.Apart from writing descriptive and analytical history, Katouzian has put forward "the theory of arbitrary rule, and the fundamental state-society conflict in Iranian history" which has led him to comparative studies of the sociology of Iranian history with that of Europe.The theory has been described virtually in all of his major writings on Iranian history, but, within a single volume, it is propounded in his Iranian History and Politics, the Dialectic of State and Society (2003).