Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

At the end of World War II about 80 percent of the population were peasants, in spite of the fact that geographic and social conditions made agriculture a most difficult way of life. Only about one-tenth of the land was tilled (and only half of that at any one time), while another tenth was used for grazing. The rest, amounting to four-fifths, was almost entirely useless, being either mountainous or arid. Moreover, the peasants who tilled the land were much oppressed by heavy rents to absentee landlords who also controlled, as separate rights, essential access to water. Only about a seventh of the land was owned by the peasants who worked it, and that was either more remote or of poorer quality. These burdens on the land were often so heavy that peasants retained little more than a fifth of what they produced. In consequence many peasants had to supplement their incomes by work as laborers, as small traders, or by village handicrafts. Generally the rigid categories of economic activities in which we think did not exist in Iran, so that most people had a variety of activities as peasants, herdsmen, traders, government employees, laborers, and soldiers moving seasonally or intermittently from one activity to another. Even the landlords were, as often as not, government employees, moneylenders, traders, or all combined.

This fluidity of economic functions was more than canceled out by social rigidity. Family and personal relationships were rigid and hierarchical, and the former were often tribal in nature. The whole of Iranian life was imprinted with leader-follower characteristics of a very personal character, with loyalty and honor two of the outstanding features of all human relationships. Where these did not operate, human relationships were precarious and filled with suspicion, so that many of the patterns of life which form the modern world, such as political or public relationships and impersonal business relationships, were very weak, and, without stable principles, fell readily into nepotism and corruption.

This “leadership” principle in Iranian social life supported a privileged ruling group, or elite, which dominated the country. Made up of landowners and gentry, with substantial interests in business (especially government contracts), it was also the chief source of high government officials and of army officers. The members of this elite, mostly resident in Tehran, have, in most cases, powerful local interests of an economic, family, and social kind ,in various provinces and are usually the leaders of these districts. Between this elite and the peasantry is a small middle class of businessmen, professional persons, bureaucrats, and educated people who generally differ from the elite because they are less wealthy, have few if any personal followers, and, lacking personal support in land or family, are much less likely to be associated with local districts. This middle class is the principal source of nationalist feeling; one of the chief features of recent Persian life has been the way in which the shah has shifted the basis of his support from the elite landed group to this growing middle class and to those whose social position is based on know-how and training rather than on wealth and family. Chief roles in this shift have been played by the army and the agrarian question.

A century ago, political power in Iran was concentrated in the hands of the autocratic shah supported by the interlocking elite of landlords and army officers. At that time the shah, in fact, was not Persian, but Turkic, the Qajar dynasty of 1796-1925. It was a period in which Persia was a zone of political conflict between the imperialism of czarist Russia and that of Victorian Britain. On two occasions, in 1907 and again in 1942, these two Powers made agreements setting up spheres of influence in Iran. Since these agreements were reached because of their common enmity toward Germany, it was almost inevitable that these agreements would break down and rivalry be resumed on the defeat of Germany in 1918 and again in 1945. It was almost equally inevitable that Iran should seek support from some outside Power against the joint or parallel Anglo-Russian pressure, as it did from Germany before 1914, before 1941, and from the United States since 1946.

Iran’s ability to resist any outside pressure was reduced by the general weakness and confusion of its own governmental system. This was a personal royal autocracy resting upon a feudalized substructure of tribal chiefs, great landlords, and religious leaders, even after the establishment of a constitutional government and a National Assembly (the Majlis) in 1906. The strong role played by personal influence, especially that of the shah, prevents the formation of real political parties or the functioning of the governmental structure as a system of principles, laws, conventions, and established relationships.

In the days of his autocratic power, before 1914, the shah sought to raise funds for his personal use by selling concessions and monopolies to foreign groups. Most of these, such as those on tobacco or sugar, were exploitative of the Iranian peoples and were very unpopular. Of these concessions the most significant was one granted in 1901 to William Knox D’Arcy for the exclusive right to exploit all stages of the petroleum business in all Iran except the five provinces bordering on Russia. The control of this concession shuffled from one corporate entity to another until, in 1909, it came into possession of the new Anglo-Persian Oil Company. This company established the world’s largest refinery at Abadan on the Persian Gulf and, by 1914, signed an agreement with the British government which made it the chief source of fuel for the British Navy. It gradually extended its activities, through a myriad of subsidiary corporations, throughout the world and simultaneously came to be controlled, through secret stock ownership, by the British government.

At the end of World War I, Iran was a battleground between Russian and British armed forces. By 1920 the withdrawal of British forces and the Bolshevization of Russia left the anti-Bolshevik Russian Cossack as the only significant military force in the country. The chief Iranian officer in that force, Reza Pahlavi, in the course of 1021-1925, gradually took over control of the government and eventually deposed the incompetent, twenty-eight-year-old Shah Ahmad.

Reza Shah Pahlavi followed the pattern of modernization established by Kemal Atatürk in Turkey but was constantly hampered by inadequate financial resources, by the underdeveloped economic system, and by the backward social development of the area. Nevertheless, he did a great deal of uncoordinated modernization, especially in education, law, and communications. His chief aim was to break down tribalism and localism and to establish national loyalty to a unified Iran. To this end he defeated the autonomous tribes, settled nomadic groups in villages, shifted provincial boundaries to break up local loyalties, created a national civil service and police force, established a national registration with identity cards for all, and used universal conscription to mingle various groups in a national army. One of his chief efforts, to improve communications and transportation, culminated in the Trans-Iranian Railway from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea, built in eleven years (1929-1940) at a cost of about $150 million. Roads were constructed where only local paths had existed before, and some effort was made to establish industries to provide work for a new urban class.

All these projects required money, which was very difficult to find in a country of limited natural resources. The chief resource, oil, was tied up completely in the concession held by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later called Anglo-Iranian or AIOC), with the inevitable result that it became the target of the Iranian nationalist desire for additional development funds. In this struggle the older elite of Iranian life, including the shah, the army, and the landlords would have been satisfied with a renegotiated deal with AIOC yielding additional funds to Iran, but the newer urban groups of professional and commercial origin combined with the religious agitators to demand the complete removal of foreign economic influence by nationalization of the petroleum industry.