Chapter Eleven: The Independent States, 1923-1948

As we saw in Chapter Ten, most of the Middle East came under direct European rule following the Settlement of 1922. However, three of the region’s states, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Türkiye, managed to retain their independence. Among the small number of non-Western countries to avoid direct imperial control during the interwar era, these states were able to autonomously develop their political institutions, economies, and societies.

Still, all three found the period between the end of World War I and the conclusion of World War II to be a challenging one during which they had only mixed success in maneuvering through the treacherous waters of the Western-dominated, interwar Middle East. Of the three, Iran was by far the least successful. It failed to develop either a strong, modern economy or a political system that enjoyed close connections to the people; worse, it ended up coming under Allied military occupation during World War II. Saudi Arabia fared better thanks to its military power and its possession of substantial oil reserves but still chafed at British dominance of the region. Türkiye was a different story. In contrast to Saudi Arabia and Iran, it appeared to enjoy genuine independence and, for a time, seemed to have blazed a path that other states could follow to achieve autonomy and industrialization. Yet even Türkiye had to walk a very careful line to avoid foreign domination during the Second World War.

Türkiye: Independence and Cultural Revolution

During the interwar period, Türkiye was widely considered to be one of the world’s great success stories. Its leaders had skillfully navigated the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, secured independence, and modernized both the economy and the political system. More dramatically, they had launched a far-reaching, top-down cultural revolution that had succeeded in effecting a radical restructuring of Turkish society and identity. Indeed, under its powerful president, Mustafa Kemal(r. 1923-1938), Türkiye appeared to have successfully undergone a nearly unprecedented nation-building campaign that had fundamentally remade the predominantly Turkish part of the Ottoman Empire into a new nation-state replete with a new Turkish identity to replace the old Ottoman one. The regime’s reform program was so successful, in fact, that it came to constitute an influential model that other independent, non-European states would embrace during the interwar period and that many newly decolonized African, Asian, and Middle Eastern states would adopt following World War II.

Türkiye in 1923

Having been involved in war almost continuously since 1911, Türkiye found itself in a difficult position following the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in July 1923. Demographic and economic evidence make plain the degree to which a decade of intense conflict had affected the country. The fighting, ethnic cleansing, war-induced famine, and genocide had combined to shrink the population of Türkiye from an estimated 16.3 million people in 1914 to only 13.6 million at the time of its first census in 1927, a staggering 17 percent drop. The population was not only much smaller, but also far-more ethnically homogenous. Thanks to the departure of more than one million Greek refugees between 1912 and 1923 and the genocide of between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Armenians between 1915 and 1918, Türkiye emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire an overwhelmingly Turkish-Muslim state that had only one substantial minority, the Sunni Kurds, who accounted for about 20 percent of the population. Economically, the country’s situation following the Treaty of Lausanne was similarly dismal. The strain of more than a decade of continuous warfare, the loss of the comparatively entrepreneurial Greeks and Armenians who had dominated the commercial economy, and the establishment of new borders that disrupted longstanding trade relations left the country with a severely depressed economy.

Consolidating Power, 1923-1927

Perhaps unsurprisingly given Türkiye’s difficult circumstances, the leadership of the resistance movement that had secured independence began to fracture immediately following the ratification of the Treaty of Lausanne. The primary fault line was not, at least initially, ideological or economic in nature; instead, it centered on the amount of power that President Mustafa Kemal would wield in the new government. In this struggle, the Turkish president would win a substantial victory. As savvy a political operator as he was a military commander, he deftly handled the challenge to his authority that emerged following Türkiye’s diplomatic victory in Lausanne by leveraging his status as the main hero of the war for independence to outmaneuver and swiftly neuter the opposition. In the process, he succeeded in transforming Türkiye into an autocratic, one-party state under his tight control.

Latent opposition to Mustafa Kemal had long existed in the national independence movement, but it only took concrete form following the nationalists’ victory. It did so in response to two acts that he successfully forced through parliament in late 1923 and early 1924. First, to foreclose a possible restoration of the sultanate, he exploited his control of the newly created Republican People’s Party (RPP) to secure passage of a law in October 1923 declaring Türkiye a republic. He followed by persuading the legislature to formally abolish the caliphate in March 1924 and to adopt a new, republican constitution the following month, moves that ensured that Türkiye would be a secular rather than religious state.

Many in the independence movement found these actions deeply troubling. Hoping that Türkiye would retain a Sunni Muslim identity, conservatives were furious that Mustafa Kemal had orchestrated the abolition of the caliphate. For their part, many politically moderate veterans of the independence effort shared the president’s belief that Türkiye had to become a republic and abolish the caliphate if it wished to emerge as a modern nation-state, but they found his heavy-handed parliamentary tactics troubling and feared that he was acting less to advance Türkiye’s interests than to consolidate authority in his hands. In response, they moved to form a new political party, the Progressive Republican Party (PRP), in November 1924. A typical, European-style secular-nationalist party, the PRP promoted a moderate, decentralized, and democratic political vision as an alternative to the RPP’s autocratic and more revolutionary approach. It quickly won a substantial following among the public.

Bridling at the growing popularity of the PRP, Mustafa Kemal and his supporters, known as Kemalists, schemed to undermine the moderates’ challenge. A Kurdish rebellion that broke out in southeastern Türkiye gave them just the pretext they were seeking. The revolt was the product of Kurdish anger about the recent changes the RPP had affected. Concerned that Mustafa Kemal’s promotion of Turkish nationalism and secularism would render them second-class citizens, the Kurds rose up in revolt in February 1925 under the leadership of the charismatic dervish leader Shaykh Sait (1865-1925). The rebels enjoyed a few early successes but ultimately could not stand up to Mustafa Kemal’s hardened troops. As a result, by late spring the government had suppressed the rebellion.

The Turkish president and his supporters wasted little time in using the rebellion to move against their political enemies in the PRP. At Mustafa Kemal’s request, the Grand National Assembly passed the Law on the Maintenance of Order in March 1925. Broad in scope, it gave the government sweeping powers to muzzle the press and to ban organizations that threatened to undermine law and order. Though they had justified the law as necessary for the suppression of the Shaykh Sait revolt, the Kemalists quickly exploited it to crush their political rivals. They permanently shuttered all independent national newspapers, abolished the PRP, and arrested 7,500 prominent opponents of the RPP’s secularizing program, 660 of whom the government promptly executed.

A failed assassination attempt against the president in June 1926 gave the Kemalists the chance they needed to finish off their political opponents. Once again making liberal use of the Law on the Maintenance of Order, they first arrested all prominent members of the PRP and then held a series of show trials aimed at discrediting those among the party’s leadership who possessed sufficient popular appeal to challenge Mustafa Kemal. Though discontent in the army compelled the Kemalists to eventually release the many PRP leaders who had served prominently in the national resistance struggle, the tribunals had the desired effect: they ended all organized political opposition to Mustafa Kemal and his platform. Thereafter, the Turkish president ruled without restraint.

Mustafa KEMAL capped his consolidation of power with a multi-day address to the RPP’s Second Congress in October 1927. Known as the Nutuk, or the Speech, its purported aim was to outline the history of the national resistance movement and the early republic. In fact, its goal was to rewrite the past in order to justify the recent purges and to rationalize continued Kemalist dominance of Türkiye. Casting most other leaders of the independence movement as either feckless or traitorous, the Speech presented what came to constitute, in the historian Erik Zürcher’s words, a Mustafa Kemal- centered, establishment master narrative of the national resistance struggle and the early years of the republic, one that diminished the role that others had played in the national liberation movement even as it solidified the Turkish president’s status as the unassailable leader of the republic.

The Nutuk proved enormously successful. Coming from a figure of such prominence, it constituted the starting point for the nationalist history curriculum subsequently taught in Turkish schools. More importantly, it would succeed in establishing the collective historical memory of the Turkish War for Independence that would dominate understandings of the nationalist movement for the next two generations, an interpretation that would transform Mustafa Kemal from the movement’s leading figure into the very personification of the struggle itself. Thereafter, accounts of the war for independence would center almost exclusively on the role that he played in leading the nationalist effort and would downplay or outright erased the often-substantial contributions of other leaders. The Nutuk thus eviscerated the organized political opposition, led, as it was, by prominent veterans of the independence movement, and ensured that Mustafa Kemal and the RPP would retain total dominance of the Turkish government. Indeed, save for a brief period in 1930, Türkiye would remain an autocratic, one-party state through the end of World War II.

The Reforms of the 1920s

The president’s total political dominance of Türkiye permitted him and his supporters to launch a far-reaching reform program in the 1920s. It constituted nothing less than a top-down cultural revolution. Focused on modernizing and, especially secularizing Türkiye, it would, in a remarkably short period of time, sweep away centuries of established practices, mores, and social structures.

The reform program began with a bang in 1924. That year, the government asserted state control of religion by shuttering the madrasas, taking control of education, closing the shariʿa courts, abolishing the office of sheikh al-Islam, and establishing a Directorate of Religious Affairs. It followed the next year by shutting down the Sufi dervish convents, by strongly discouraging women from veiling, and by banning the fez, the hat, ironically, that Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808-1839) had introduced in the 1820s as part of an earlier reform effort. The pace did not let up in 1926. That year, the government switched Türkiye to the twenty-four-hour international clock and required people to abandon the Islamic calendar in favor of the Western Gregorian one. It also adopted a new legal system, the Swiss Civil Code, that outlawed polygamy and formally ended ulema control of family law. The state continued the secularization and modernization drive in 1928 by making the use of European (Arab) numerals mandatory and by removing the clause from the constitution that declared that Islam was the religion of the republic.

That same year, Kemal announced what was perhaps the most far-reaching reform yet implemented. On August 9, 1928, he declared that Türkiye would replace the traditional Ottoman Arabic-Persian script with a modified version of the Latin alphabet. Consisting of twenty-nine-letters, the new writing system was more streamlined and better suited to spoken Turkish than the written Arabic of the Ottoman era. Since it was easier to learn, it also promised to provide a quick boost to Türkiye’s comparatively anemic literacy rate. The Kemalists wasted little time in putting it into effect. Passed on November 1, 1928, the law mandated that the new script would be compulsory for all publications effective January 1, 1929. Thus, the regime gave literate Turks the unenviable task of learning to read and write a new, and very-foreign alphabet in just two months!

Why did Mustafa Kemal and his supporters pursue so many sweeping reforms so quickly? They did so because they believed that they needed to shock the Turkish people into a complete reconstruction of their identity if their country were to truly modernize. By compelling Turks to live according to the Western calendar and the international clock, by making them adopt European modes of dress, and, especially, by forcing them to communicate using the Latin script, the Kemalists aimed to reorient their country away from its Islamic and Ottoman past and toward the dynamic, modern, and powerful societies of Europe. In the process, they believed, the Turkish people would undergo the fundamental mental remapping and thoroughgoing change in identity that the Kemalists believed had to occur if their country was to assume its rightful place among the forward-looking, modern states of the world.

Unsurprisingly, given these aims, support for the secularization program was far from universal. While the reforms were popular with town and city residents, especially those who belonged to the professional, business, and military classes, they generated substantial resistance among the more conservative urban craftspeople and, especially, among the peasantry of rural Anatolia. Perhaps surprisingly, those groups raised few objections to the abolition of formal religious institutions such as the caliphate, the sheikh al-Islam, or the madrasas. Instead, it was the extension of the secularization program to popular religious and cultural practices such as wearing the fez or undertaking pilgrimages to saints’ tombs that fueled their resentment. As we shall see in Chapter Sixteen, their discontent would gradually deepen until, to the shock of the Kemalists, it spurred the emergence of a populist Islamic opposition movement after World War II.

Kemalism

Having solidified their control of the state and implemented the first phase of their reform program, Kemal and his supporters next moved to formally articulate their governing philosophy. They did so in the RPP party platform of 1931, which laid out the so-called Six Arrows, republicanism, secularism, nationalism, populism, revolutionism, and etatism, that were the guiding principles of Kemalism. The first, republicanism, called for sovereignty to emanate from the people rather than from a monarch, though the fact that the Kemalist state was, at root, a fundamentally undemocratic one suggests that the RPP’s embrace of representative government was more theoretical than real. The second arrow, secularism, was, as we have seen, the guiding principle of the reforms of the 1920s. The third, nationalism and the effort to construct a new Turkish identity would in turn dominate the reforms of the 1930s. The fourth, populism, went hand in hand with nationalism. It stressed collective solidarity, called for putting the nation ahead of group or individual interests, and denied both the existence of class conflict in Türkiye and, by extension, the need for class-based political parties.

While the first four arrows enjoyed overwhelming support within the RPP, the remaining two, Etatism and revolutionism, or Inkilapçilik, were more controversial. The principle of revolutionism, which called for the embrace of ongoing change in support of Kemalism, troubled the capitalists and landlords who dominated the party’s conservative wing. Worried that it might result in Türkiye entering a disruptive state of permanent revolution, they responded by choosing to interpret Inkilapçilik as a call not for revolution but instead for reform. Etatism, the statist economic doctrine that the party adopted at its Third Conference, proved similarly unpopular with the RPP’s conservative factions. Their opposition to it was grounded in three fears: that large-scale state intervention in the economy would be inefficient, that it would almost inevitably depress economic growth, and, predictably, that it would threaten their financial interests.

Kemalist Economic Policies

Advocates of etatism were able to overcome these objections thanks to the failings of the more conventional economic policies that Türkiye had pursued during the 1920s. With the nation’s economy having fallen into ruin in the wake of the war for independence and with the Treaty of Lausanne having barred the government from raising tariff rates until 1929, the Kemalists had been compelled in the early 1920s to adopt a fairly conventional economic-development policy that relied primarily on private actors and the market to drive growth.

The stunning, Great Depression-induced decline in international trade that began in 1929 compelled Türkiye to rethink its economic-development strategy. The crisis came on with great suddenness. Following the crash of the American stock market in October 1929, demand for primary products, particularly for wheat, the mainstay of the country’s exports, evaporated. The result was something of a perfect storm for Türkiye. Not only did the staggering, two-thirds drop in wheat prices further impoverish the peasant class that was dependent on the export market, but it also left the country unable to earn the foreign currency that its industrialists and merchants needed to purchase imported capital equipment.

The crisis produced a sharp debate within governing circles in 1931. Arguing that a free-market system would generate higher growth rates, some remained committed to a liberal-capitalist system such as existed in Britain or France. Others, including Prime minister and future president, Ismet Inonu (r. 1938-1950), countered that a market- based system could not resolve the economic crisis and maintained that Türkiye could best deal with the Great Depression by adopting a centralized, state-directed, etatist economic system. The debate did not last long. The combination of the democratic-capitalist world’s inability to achieve a speedy economic recovery and the Soviet Union’s tremendous growth in heavy industries during the First Five Year Plan (1928- 1932) tipped the balance in favor of those who championed a state-led, economic order. As a result, the Turkish government abandoned its earlier laissez-faire approach in 1931 in favor of etatism.

The new economic program centered on three components: the promotion of Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI), direct state involvement in the economy, and central planning. The adoption of Import Substitution Industrialization, a policy wherein a developing state seeks to foster domestic industries by insulating them from foreign competition, was to a substantial degree a case of making a virtue of necessity. With the prices of the commodities that Türkiye produced having fallen far more than the cost of the finished goods that it imported, the government could only meet the demand for many heretofore imported products by ensuring that domestic enterprises manufactured them. It did so by raising tariffs precipitously and by subsidizing domestic producers, the latter beginning with companies that manufactured the so-called “three whites,” clothing, sugar, and flour.

Meanwhile, at the same time that it was nurturing domestic producers, the Turkish government was simultaneously shifting to a system of direct, state involvement in the economy and laying the groundwork for central planning. The expansion of state economic activity came first. Focusing on heavy industries, the government established two holding companies to oversee its investments: the Sumerbank, which managed developments in the manufacturing sector, and the Etibank, which promoted mining.

Well capitalized, they produced a substantial increase in the state’s share of economic activity over the course of the 1930s. Central direction of the economy quickly followed. With Soviet technical assistance, the government launched Türkiye’s first Five Year Plan in 1933 to coordinate state and private investment, a move that further strengthened the government’s control of economic activity.

Despite these efforts, the Kemalist program produced, at best, mixed results. To be sure, Türkiye’s statist approach to the economy did enjoy genuine success in the 1930s. Etatism resulted in Türkiye’s GDP rising by an average of 7 percent in the late 1930s, and it certainly furthered the Kemalists’ efforts to cultivate a modest industrial sector. Its ability to ameliorate the worst aspects of the Great Depression also likely helped the country avoid the descent into regime change and outright dictatorship that the economic crisis had produced in much of Latin America and Europe.

At the same time, however, the RPP’s statist policies failed to live up to the favorable press they received. Türkiye’s economic performance during the early years of etatism was strong, but, coming at a time of broad, global economic recovery, it was hardly unusual. Meanwhile, the ISI model of development would prove incapable of sustaining economic growth in the long term. The problem was one of incentives. By protecting domestic industries, the ISI development model created opportunities for patronage, corruption, and waste and discouraged efforts to control costs. As a result, after World War II, Türkiye would find itself falling further-and-further behind states such as Japan that had instead opted to follow an Export Oriented Industrialization (EOI) strategy that focused on exploiting their comparative advantages to produce goods that were competitive on global markets.

The Reforms of the 1930s

Concurrent with the shift to etatism in the early 1930s, the Kemalists launched the second phase of their cultural revolution. It began where the reform program of the 1920s had left off: with an effort to sever the link between Turkish and the other languages of the Middle East. Building on the adoption of the Latin alphabet in 1929, Kemal and his supporters moved in the early 1930s to purge the language of its many Arab and Persian loanwords in order to emphasize the break with Türkiye’s Muslim and Ottoman past. Part of this effort was the official renaming of Constantinople to Istanbul on March 28, 1930. Officially renaming the former imperial capital was easy, for the rest they founded the Turkish Language Society in 1932 and tasked it with replacing foreign expressions with neologisms, archaic terms, or words derived from Turkish dialects. This campaign met with resistance initially but ultimately proved successful. Indeed, thanks to the efforts of the Turkish Language Society, modern Turkish is so different from that spoken during the late Ottoman Empire or even the early republic that the Nutuk is nearly as indecipherable to Turkish people today as Chaucer is to twenty-first century Americans.

However, Mustafa Kemal’s interest in the Turkish language went much further than merely seeking to purge it of Arab and Persian words. He also sought to enlist modern linguistic studies in support of a larger effort to imbue the Turks with a triumphal narrative that both further distanced them from their Ottoman and Islamic past and rendered them the cultural equals of Western peoples. The Turkish president struck gold in this effort in 1935. That year, he became acquainted with the Sun Language Theory, a pseudoscientific linguistic hypothesis developed by a little-known Austrian academic named Hermann Kvergic. It held that the proto-Turkish of the early Turks of Central Asia was the first spoken language and that all subsequent languages evolved from it. In other words, Kvergic was arguing that Turkish was the mother tongue of all peoples and that it was the Turks who had invented spoken language.

Mustafa Kemal was quick to grasp the benefits that the Sun Language Theory offered in support of his effort to ideologically reconstruct Turkish society. Not only did it give the Turks a glorious past that was wholly separate from and far older than their time as Ottoman subjects or even their history as Muslims, but in arguing that the Turkish people invented something as foundational as the spoken word, it also gave them a cultural and intellectual cachet that even the Europeans could not match. Unsurprisingly, the Kemalists enthusiastically threw their support behind the Sun Language Theory. They required university faculty to embed it in their teaching and research, made it a core component of the curriculum in primary education, and lavished funds on efforts by the Turkish Language Society to promote it.

Along with linguistics, the Kemalists also recruited the field of history in their effort to create a new Turkish national identity. Keenly grasping history’s ability to shape contemporary perceptions of identity, Mustafa Kemal established the Turkish Historical Society in 1931 and tasked it with creating a suitably glorious nationalist past for the republic. This initiative began to bear fruit the following year with the development of the Turkish Historical Thesis. A work of nationalist pseudohistory, it asserted that the Turkish people were a branch of the Caucasian race and the founders of the first sophisticated civilization. Later, facing periodic drought in their Central Asian homeland, they had migrated outward in a series of waves that brought civilization to the peoples of China, Greece, India, and Egypt. In other words, the Turkish Historical Thesis asserted that that the Turks were not just the originators of civilization, but also the founders of what were regarded as the world’s greatest and most influential cultures.

Like the Sun Language Theory, the Turkish Historical Thesis proved central to the Kemalists’ effort to construct a new, modern Turkish national identity. It did so in two ways. First, by establishing that the Turkish people were Caucasian at a time when Eugenics, Social Darwinism, and racism enjoyed broad acceptance, it linked Türkiye to the modern West and accorded it a high place in both formal and informal racial hierarchies. Second, by giving the Turks a heroic past that stretched far back in time, it furthered the goal of creating an identity that was distinct from the older Ottoman and Muslim ones to which many still clung. Placing great stock in these ideological benefits, the state aggressively promoted the Turkish Historical Thesis and made it the backbone of the history curriculum in both primary schools and universities. They also celebrated it through official propaganda. For example, the development banks that the Kemalists had set up, the Etibank and Sumerbank, were named for two of the groups that the Turkish Historical Thesis claimed were among the first to leave Central Asia: the Hittites and Sumerians.

Meanwhile, the Kemalists also moved in the 1930s to bring Türkiye in alignment with the Western European states by legally and socially emancipating women. Scholars refer to this top-down program of reform as “state feminism.” It involved the promotion of female education, the revision of laws that had restricted women’s employment, and the encouragement of activities such as ballroom dancing and beauty contests that broke with traditional Turkish gender norms. It also granted women the right to vote in municipal elections in 1930 and in national ones in 1934, meaning that Turkish women had the franchise before their counterparts in purportedly more-modern Western nations such as France and Switzerland. The Kemalist program of state feminism even abolished laws that had banned women from running for parliament, as seventeen women successfully did in 1935, and opened the door for many urban middle-class women to go into professions such as medicine, teaching, architecture, and the civil service. These were important achievements, and they initiated a genuine process of change in Türkiye.

Unsurprisingly, however, the gains that Turkish women secured in the 1930s were largely cosmetic. Like many of his supporters, Mustafa Kemal was personally quite conservative regarding gender issues and promoted women’s empowerment less to improve their position in Turkish society than to support propaganda efforts designed to reinforce Türkiye’s new image as a modern, Western state. Meanwhile, in rural areas, men and women alike clung tenaciously to traditional gender norms and resisted the new laws and social mores. As a result, while the position of women in Turkish society changed, it did so very slowly.

Finally, the reform program of the 1930s changed how people referred to one another through the Surname Law of 1934. It had two provisions. First, it banned the use of venerable, but-still-popular Turkish and Ottoman noble titles such as effendi and bey that the Kemalists viewed as old fashioned and outmoded. Second, and more far reaching, it broke with the traditional Muslim custom of having only a first name by mandating that all Turks had to adopt a Western-style family name. The law was a key part of the Kemalist cultural revolution. It not only further updated the nation’s image and strengthened its symbolic links with the West but, by requiring people to take a Turkish rather than an Arabic or Persian name, further solidified the emerging Turkish identity that the Kemalists had championed at the expense of older Ottoman and Muslim ones. Mustafa Kemal set the tone by choosing the name Ataturk, or “father of the Turks.”

The Surname Law capped what had been a sweeping, decade-long top-down social transformation of Türkiye. The changes had been enormous. The adoption of family names and the embrace of state feminism had eroded traditional, Ottoman era social practices and had given Türkiye the more modern image that the Kemalists sought. Meanwhile, the Sun Language Theory and the Turkish Historical Thesis had helped both to institutionalize the new, Turkish identity that Ataturk and his allies championed and to undermine the older, Ottoman and Muslim identities that they wished to erase. Finally, the secularization reforms of the 1920s had broken the power of the only group with the credibility and influence to oppose the ruling party: the religious scholars. Thus, at the end of the 1930s, the Kemalists could look back with satisfaction on their efforts to remake Türkiye and to secure broad acceptance of the new modern, Turkish identity that they viewed as essential to the modernization of their country.

Howeer, the driving force behind these changes was no longer there to celebrate those achievements. Afflicted with cirrhosis of the liver, Ataturk had passed away in 1938 not long after the reform program of the 1930s had come to an end. He may have died, but he was most certainly not forgotten. All-but deified as the RPP’s “eternal party chairman,” he became in death the embodiment of the Turkish republic and a powerful and lasting symbol of secularism and Turkish nationalism. Indeed, Ataturk is so revered in Türkiye that, to the present day, it remains a crime to defame him.

Ismet Inonu, the Montreux Convention, and World War II

Ataturk was succeeded by his former prime minister, Ismet Inonu, who would serve as president until 1950. That Inonu rose to the presidency was surprising in light of the fact that he had become something of a rival to Ataturk during the mid 1930s. Indeed, he was a threat of sufficient scale that Mustafa Kemal had forced him out of his post as prime minister in 1937. Despite his fall from the inner circle, however, Inonu’s continued commitment to one-party rule and his determination to see the domestic reforms of the Six Arrows carried through to their conclusion favorably impressed the RPP. Accordingly, the party selected him the Turkish republic’s second president shortly after Ataturk’s death. Ironically, in light of their importance in vaulting him into the presidency, domestic affairs took a back seat during the early part of his tenure. Instead, faced with the existential threat that the rise of fascism and the outbreak of World War II posed to the republic, Inonu was compelled to focus nearly all of his attention on foreign affairs during the early part of his tenure.

Even before Inonu became president, Türkiye had taken steps to secure the country’s territorial integrity and its recently won independence. Concerns about possible aggression from Benito Mussolini’s (r. 1922-1945) fascist Italy had precipitated that effort. Worried that the Italian dictator was casting a covetous eye at Turkish territory, Ataturk had sought to bolster Turkish security by proposing a new regime for the Dardanelles and Bosporus Straits to replace the existing one that the Treaty of Lausanne had established. The resulting agreement, the Montreux Convention of 1936, was a significant diplomatic victory for Türkiye. It restored to Ankara the right both to militarize the straits and to close them to foreign warships when it believed that Türkiye confronted the imminent danger of war.

Inonu followed Ataturk’s success in regaining control of the straits by managing to keep Türkiye from becoming drawn into the Second World War. Doing so required him to pursue a careful balancing act. Fearing German and Italian aggression if Türkiye were isolated, his government initially tilted towards Paris and London. Shocked by Adolph Hitler’s (r. 1933-1945) defeat of France in 1940 and his conquest of the Balkans in 1941, however, he subsequently abandoned his close ties with the Allies in favor of a tacitly pro-German neutrality. Once the military balance had shifted irrevocably back towards the Allies in 1943, Inonu once again reversed course. Even then, he moved carefully and shrewdly. Most notably, he waited until February 1945 to declare war on Germany, early enough to ensure that Türkiye would become a charter member of the United Nations, but late enough to guarantee that its participation in the war was pro forma and that no Turkish troops would take part in the fighting.

Inonu ultimately earned mixed marks from the Turkish people regarding his handling of the Second World War. On the one hand, with memories of the disastrous consequences of the Ottoman Empire’s participation in World War I still fresh in their minds, many applauded his ability to keep Türkiye from becoming embroiled in the conflict. On the other, war-induced inflation, severe material shortages, and the brutally confiscatory Capital Tax Law that the government levied disproportionally on non- Muslims caused many to lose faith in the RPP. As a result, as the war neared its conclusion, support for the Kemalist program slumped badly amid stepped-up demands for political liberalization.

The Turkish Straits Crisis

Inonu’s government faced another serious foreign-policy challenge just after the conflict ended, one that bore more than a superficial resemblance to some of the crises the Ottoman Empire had experienced in the nineteenth century. Angry that Türkiye had permitted German warships to traverse the straits during World War II, Joseph Stalin

(r. 1924-1953) sought to strongarm Türkiye into revising the Montreux Convention to give the USSR joint control of the straits and the right to maintain military bases along them. He also demanded territory along the Black Sea in northeast Anatolia. Given the Soviet Union’s enormous military capabilities, Stalin’s threat was a serious one for Inonu’s government. However, Türkiye did not have to face this renewal of aggression from the north alone. Fearing that Stalin sought control of the straits as a springboard for further aggrandizement, US President Harry Truman (r. 1945-1953) deployed the battleship USS Missouri and the aircraft carrier USS Franklin D. Roosevelt to the region as a show of force in 1946. Faced with involvement of the United States, Stalin had little choice but to back down. As a result, the situation quickly deescalated. Still, despite its quick ending, the straits crisis had a lasting effect on Türkiye’s diplomatic alignment. Indeed, it marked not merely the start of close ties with the US but also the key event that drove Ankara to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1952.

The Kemalist Legacy

As the republic neared its twenty-fifth anniversary in the late 1940s, the Kemalists could take pride in the changes they had made to Türkiye. In less than two decades, they had implemented an innovative and apparently successful economic response to the Great Depression and had launched a successful cultural revolution that seemed to have achieved a clean break with the immediate Ottoman past. They had also erected a cult of personality around the head of state that turned him in both life and death into a powerful symbol of national unity and had skillfully avoided becoming embroiled in World War II until the fighting was all but over. Given the extent of these achievements, Türkiye and the Kemalist program unsurprisingly came to serve as a highly influential model of development that many states in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and, notably, the Middle East would adopt in the decades immediately after the Second World War.

At the same time, however, keen-eyed observers could detect more than a few cracks in the Kemalist façade. By the end of World War II, the ruling party faced growing discontent among both urban liberals, who chafed at limits to political expression, and rural conservatives, who opposed the RPP’s radical secularization program. Ironically, as a result, at the very moment that its international reputation and influence were peaking, Kemalism was beginning to confront mounting protests to its domestic monopoly on political power, challenges that would, as we shall see, succeed in compelling the RPP to relinquish the iron grip on political power that it had held since 1924.

The Historical Debate: Modernization Theory

From the founding of the Turkish Republic through the 1960s, a framework called modernization theory dominated interpretations of Türkiye’s birth and early development. Articulated most clearly by the historian Bernard Lewis in his influential 1961 book, The Emergence of Modern Türkiye, it held that Turkish modernization was an inevitable process that began after World War I when the Turkish people rejected their preindustrial and undemocratic past in the Islamic and Ottoman worlds in favor of modern, Western-style industrialism and republicanism. Lewis acknowledged that the process was not entirely smooth. He noted, for example, that a minority of reactionaries such as rural peasants and, especially, religious leaders resisted these changes. In his view, however, these traditionalists constituted only a shrinking minority, dead enders fated to melt away as the benefits of modernity spread.

Lewis’s study proved enormously influential, and it dominated understandings of Türkiye’s emergence as a modern nation-state for decades. Beginning in the 1970s, however, a growing number of scholars began to challenge both his interpretation and the broader modernization paradigm. They focus their critiques on two core aspects of his argument. First, they reject his contention that the creation of Türkiye was the inevitable product of a newly awakened people seeking to free themselves of their decadent Ottoman and Islamic past in favor of modernity. Instead, they argue that its birth was a function of historical contingency. That is, nearly everyone who took part in the national resistance did so to perpetuate the Ottoman Empire and the caliphate rather than to create a republican nation-state. The move away from the sultanate only became inevitable, they argue, when Ataturk and a small band of co-conspirators used their dominant position in the RPP to force through a law in 1923 making Türkiye a republic. Second, they dispute modernization theory’s binary categorization of Turkish society as either traditional or modern and instead maintain that people then and now embrace elements of both. As the historian Erik Zürcher notes, for example, the Islamist Turkish Welfare Party of the 1980s and 1990s was not simply a reactionary, fundamentalist movement, but instead a political organization trying to address the problems typical of a modern industrial society, in an Islamic context.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf: The Emergence of the Oil Economy

Though it emerged at the same time as the Turkish republic, Saudi Arabia followed a decidedly different path in its development as a state. Like the original Saudi emirate that Muhammad ibn Saud (r. 1726-1765) had founded in the eighteenth century, the modern kingdom developed out of an alliance between the Saudi family, which hoped to secure political control of Arabia, and the Wahhabi ulema, who sought to impose their Salafist interpretation of Islam on the people of the region. Given its modest population and forbidding climate, the Saudi state did not appear likely to be anything more than an impoverished and isolated theocracy at the time of its revival in the early twentieth century. Its prospects changed dramatically in 1938, however, thanks to the discovery of seemingly limitless oil beneath its heretofore valueless desert sands. The result was a paradoxical state, one that would assume an increasingly central role in the modern global economy even as it enforced adherence to an austere religious movement that focused narrowly on the past.

Ibn Saud

That the Saudis emerged as economic kingpins is surprising in light of the family’s weak position at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1891, the rival Rashidi family had defeated the Saudi emir, Abdul Rahman bin Faisal (r. 1889-1891), and had seized control of Riyadh, the capital of the Emirate of Najd that the Saudis had established in 1824. Compelled to flee with his family to Kuwait, Abdul Rahman spent the next few years plotting the recovery of the Saudi state. Those plans came to naught. Defeated once again by the Rashidis in 1900, the dispirited Saudi leader thereafter abandoned all hope of retaking Riyadh and settled into a life in exile.

Astonishingly, the dynasty achieved a stunning recovery under Abdul Rahman’s son, Abdulaziz Ibn Saud (r. 1902-1953). Broad chested and standing six feet three inches in height, the charismatic young Saudi leader was as determined to recover his patrimony as he was physically intimidating. A war between the Kuwaitis and the Rashidis that began in 1901 gave him his chance. Seeking to distract the Rashidis, the Emir of Kuwait sent ibn Saud and a small group of his most dedicated followers to attack Riyadh in early 1902. Their first assault on the walled city failed badly. However, their second effort, a bold night attack that concluded with ibn Saud killing the Rashidi governor, restored Riyadh to Saudi control. It was a critical victory, one that succeeded both in restoring the Saudis to power and in cementing Ibn Saud’s reputation as a daring military commander.

The Conquest of the Najd, 1902-1918

Ibn Saud was not content merely to recover his inheritance or to serve as the emir of a small state. A man of great ambition, he instead wanted to dominate the entire Arabian peninsula. Accordingly, he followed the recapture of Riyadh with a campaign of conquest against the nearby bedouin tribes that ended with him adding much of the Najd to his expanding state. He followed with another war that secured for him control of the large, heavily Shiʿa Eastern Province that lay along the Arabian coast of the Persian Gulf. These victories were substantial, and by the eve of the First World War, they gave ibn Saud a commanding position in central Arabia.

How did ibn Saud achieve such success so quickly? How could the scion of an exiled family lacking in resources and wealth secure legitimacy and build an army strong enough to assume control of such a large territory in only a little more than a decade? Ibn Saud’s leadership skills and charisma certainly played a significant part in the emirate’s expansion; at root, however, his success then and later stemmed from his unique ability to satisfy the aspirations of two very different groups: the Wahhabi ulema who enjoyed substantial sway within Arabia and the British who dominated the peninsula’s periphery.

A shrewd man with a keen grasp of politics, ibn Saud understood that the Saudi family’s traditional relationship with the Wahhabis was central to the dynasty’s power. Accordingly, from the start of his reign he renewed the family’s close alliance with both the politically influential town-dwelling ulema and the mutawwa, a class of Wahhabi religious scholars unique at that time to the Najd who used violence to enforce observance of Islamic rituals like communal prayer and to prohibit banned activities such as drinking. To secure the support of the mutawwa, ibn Saud made them salaried employees of the state and sanctioned their authority to enforce behavior; in particular, he permitted them to impose Wahhabi doctrine on the bedouin tribes. In exchange, they used the newly created Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and Prohibition of Vice to compel submission not only to shariʿa law but also to ibn Saud’s secular authority. The emir followed by having the mutawwa recruit the most zealous bedouin warriors into a new military organization, the al-Ikhwan, or brotherhood, that supplemented his traditional forces. These moves paid multiple dividends. They ensured the continued support of the influential mutawwa clerics, ended disruptive tribal feuds, and ensured his ongoing control of the bedouin. Above all, they gave him a powerful cadre of disciplined and religiously motivated troops that he could use to further expand his territory.

Having deftly used the Saudi family’s traditional connection with the Wahhabis to establish dominance in the Najd, he followed by pursuing a relationship with the British. London was receptive to his entreaties. Seeking to ensure its continued control of the Persian Gulf during World War I, it opened talks with him in 1915 aimed at enlisting the Saudi emirate in the fight against the Ottoman Empire and its local proxies, the Rashidis. The result was the Anglo-Saudi Treaty. By its terms, Ibn Saud pledged to refrain from raiding Britain’s Persian Gulf protectorates and promised to attack the Rashidis. In exchange, London agreed to provide him with arms, £20,000 in gold up front, and a further subsidy of £5,000 in gold per month. The deal was a very good one for ibn Saud. At the modest cost of going to war against his family’s main rival in the Najd and promising to respect the territory of Britain’s protectorates, a course he was wise enough to have followed even if he had not signed a formal treaty with London, he was able to equip his army with modern weaponry and to secure sufficient gold to ensure the absolute loyalty of key tribal leaders. Coupled with the alliance he had struck with the mutawwa and his creation of the powerful al-Ikhwan, he was well positioned to continue his campaign of territorial expansion in the postwar era.

Consolidation, 1919-1932

Acting carefully so as to avoid alarming London, ibn Saud began his consolidation efforts with great skill. He started by finally finishing off the Saudi family’s old enemies, the Rashidis, in 1921. That victory gave him control of the northern Nadj and a common border with Hashemite-controlled Transjordan and Iraq. More broadly, it established that his state was the dominant force in Arabia. Even then, however, ibn Saud was careful to remain on good terms with London. For example, he agreed to ease British concerns about disruptive cross-border raids into Hashemite territory by signing the Uqair Protocol in 1922, which demarcated the frontier between his state and the Mandates of Iraq and Transjordan. He also scrupulously refrained from seizing Mecca and Medina during the early 1920s out of deference to London’s close ties with King Hussein (r. 1916-1924).

Thanks to the rapidly worsening state of relations between Britain and Hussein, however, he did not have to restrain himself for long. Ties between London and the Hashemite king had deteriorated rapidly in the wake of World War I. Believing that the British had reneged on the terms of the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, Hussein had steadfastly refused to sign a treaty with Britain recognizing the new postwar order in the region, a choice that British diplomats found unacceptable. Intuiting that London was giving serious consideration to abandoning Hussein, Ibn Saud realized that he could now invade the Hijaz without angering Britain, he just needed a reasonable pretext to do so. Fortunately for him, Hussein provided the necessary rationale by publicly declaring himself caliph shortly after Mustafa Kemal had abolished the office in early 1924. Ibn Saud jumped at the opportunity. Announcing that the Hashemite king was unfit to hold such an exalted position, he ordered his forces to invade the Hijaz. The ensuing war was entirely one sided. Without British backing, Hussein could do nothing to resist ibn Saud’s powerful al-Ikhwan warriors and soon fled into exile.

He may have defeated his last substantial external rival with his conquest of the Hijaz, but he soon faced a far-more dangerous internal challenge in the form of the al- Ikhwan. By the late 1920s, the brotherhood had become thoroughly disillusioned with ibn Saud thanks to his increasingly pragmatic approach to governance. They resented his attempts to curb the enforcement of Wahhabi beliefs in the Hijaz, bridled at his refusal to permit them to destroy tombs and shrines as their Wahhabi beliefs dictated, and fumed at his realpolitik willingness to extend limited religious toleration to the Shiʿa of the Eastern Province. They also opposed his introduction into Arabia of modern innovations such as the telephone, telegraph, airplane, and automobile on grounds that those devices did not exist at the time of the early umma and thus had no place in a Muslim society. Above all, they were angry with Ibn Saud because his decision to agree to respect the borders that divided his state from the British protectorates that surrounded it had put an end to their jihad to extend Wahhabism. Ibn Saud reciprocated the al-Ikhwans’ frustration. By the end of the 1920s, he had grown unhappy about both the discontent that their strict enforcement of the shariʿa code had caused in the Hijaz and their efforts to assert their autonomy from him. More importantly, he had become increasingly concerned that their desire to extend Wahhabism to new areas through the use of force would antagonize Britain and, in so doing, drag him into a war he could not win.

The growing rift between ibn Saud and the al-Ikhwan finally burst into open conflict in 1929. The proximate cause was a brotherhood attack on an Iraqi police outpost near the Saudi border. The incident set off an escalating cycle of reprisals. Intent on sending a strong signal of resolve to prevent further attacks, Britain retaliated by bombing one of the brotherhood’s encampments. In response, the al- Ikhwan launched a series of raids into both Kuwait and Iraq.

The worsening situation deeply troubled Ibn Saud. Fearing that further reprisals could escalate into a full-scale war with Britain, he pressed the brotherhood to end the conflict. They refused. Instead, to assert their autonomy, they raised the banner of revolt in March 1929 and went to war with the emir. Ibn Saud responded to this challenge with characteristic speed and skill. Determined to ensure his monopoly over the levers of power in his state, he pressured the Wahhabi ulema in Riyadh to issue a fatwa justifying his use of force against the al-Ikhwan. Having covered his religious flank, he followed by swiftly destroying the brotherhood in battle.

Substantially strengthening his domestic standing, the triumph over the al-Ikhwan paid ibn Saud two immediate political dividends. First, in 1932, it permitted him to announce the unification of the Najd and the Hijaz into the new Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Second, the brotherhood’s defeat gave him the strength to compel the Wahhabi religious scholars and the mutawwa to assume a subordinate position in which their authority would remain narrowly confined to education, religion, and social law. Thus, his defeat of the brotherhood marked a pivotal turning point in the emergence of Saudi Arabia. It not only permitted him to establish the kingdom itself, but by transforming his family’s traditional Wahhabi allies into junior partners, it seemed to have ensured that he and his successors would rule without serious internal challenge or constraint.

Appearances in this case were deceiving. Ibn Saud may have won in the short term, but over the long haul, the ulema were able to use their monopoly over education and religious law to transform themselves into a major domestic force in Saudi Arabia, one to which even the ruling dynasty had to defer. Later, as we shall see, they would leverage their influence and the tremendous wealth the kingdom derived from the sale of petroleum to export their fundamentalist views widely. Thus, as the historian Rashid Khalidi argues, the arrangement Ibn Saud worked out with the ulema after the defeat of the al-Ikhwan turned out to be a devil’s bargain that would bring extremist religious ideas and vast oil money together in a way that would permit the Wahhabi to spread their austere teachings throughout the Sunni world.

Fiscal Issues

In the meantime, ibn Saud had a new crisis to deal with. While his domestic political position had improved as a result of his victory over the al-Ikhwan, the fiscal health of his state was deteriorating rapidly. Part of the issue was a steady increase in state spending. The war against the brotherhood, the need to increase subsidies to tribal chiefs to ensure their continued loyalty, the start of a substantial development program, and the cost of ibn Saud’s lavish personal lifestyle had combined to dramatically increase government spending in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Ibn Saud’s government would likely have been able to deal with these rising expenditures had the Saudi economy been growing, but the added expenses coincided with the onset of the Great Depression. The global economic contraction bit hard into the kingdom’s primary source of revenue, the hajj. Thanks to the worldwide collapse in economic activity, the number of pilgrims who visited Mecca fell from 129,000 in 1926 to the hajj’s modern, pre-Covid-19 low of just 20,000 in 1933. The consequences for the Saudi treasury were dire. Between rising expenditures and declining revenues, the country quickly amassed a £300,000 deficit, a figure far beyond its capacity to service.

An astute man, ibn Saud grasped that the fiscal crisis made for a combustible situation. Without revenue, he could neither pay the army that maintained internal order nor continue to offer the subsidies to prominent tribal leaders that had ensured the allegiance of the bedouin. Absent the loyalty of the military and the tribes, in turn, dynastic authority would weaken and the state that he had so painstakingly constructed would collapse. In other words, ibn Saud had to find some way to get his fiscal house in order and he had to do so fast if he hoped to prevent his budgetary problems from evolving into a dangerous political crisis.

The Oil Boom Begins, 1933-1948

One possible solution was to sell mineral rights to Western firms, particularly the rights to any oil located beneath the kingdom’s seemingly limitless expanse of sand. There was an established way to do so. Before World War II, states such as Saudi Arabia typically auctioned rights to mineral deposits such as petroleum to foreign companies through concessions. An oil concession gave a foreign firm the exclusive right to explore for petroleum deposits and to exploit any commercially viable fields that it discovered in an agreed upon territory for a limited, but usually lengthy, period of time. In exchange, the state granting the concession received a lump sum of money up front as well as a comparatively modest annual rent payment on the land on which the company was drilling and royalties on the sale of any oil.

Concerned about the impact of inviting non-Muslims into his kingdom, Ibn Saud had previously expressed doubts about the wisdom of entering into an oil concession. However, his dire fiscal circumstances produced a quick change of heart. Now desperate for funds, he set aside his misgivings and made clear that he would enthusiastically welcome the opportunity to grant a concession to one of the Western oil companies. As he told one of his advisors, “if anyone would offer me a million pounds, I would give him all the concessions he wanted.”

In any event, an oil concession seemed to ibn Saud like a low-risk opportunity. Doubting that his kingdom possessed any petroleum whatsoever, he saw a concession as little more than a way to secure an infusion of quick and desperately needed case, one that came without any long-term costs or consequences. Ibn Saud was not alone in his skepticism about Saudi Arabia’s prospects as an oil producer. No less a figure than John Cadman, the chair of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) maintained that geological surveys yielded “little room for optimism” that the kingdom might contain oil. One of his subordinates was even blunter, declaring that Saudi Arabia was “devoid of all prospects” of possessing petroleum.

However, the discovery of petroleum on the island of Bahrain in 1932 altered perceptions of Saudi Arabia’s potential as an oil producer. Given Bahrain’s similar geology and its proximity, it lies just under twenty miles off the kingdom’s Eastern Province in the Persian Gulf, the presence of oil there suggested strongly that Saudi Arabia might contain substantial deposits. Even then, however, few firms sought the concession. Recent discoveries and a depression-induced collapse in demand for petroleum in the industrialized world had resulted in a persistent, global oil glut and a broad retrenchment in the industry. Coming in such circumstances, any new production from Arabia would merely serve to further depress the already sagging price of oil. As a result, only one comparatively small company, Standard Oil of California (Socal), pursued a concession in Saudi Arabia.

Socal’s bid more than satisfied Ibn Saud. By its terms, the company agreed to provide the king with two interest free loans in gold, a £30,000 one distributed immediately and a second £20,000 one issued eighteen months later, that Saudi Arabia would repay only out of any future royalties. In other words, if Socal failed to find any oil, the loans would become an outright gift to the kingdom. Socal also promised to pay £5,000 annually in rent and to remit royalties on the sale of any oil that it extracted. In exchange, it won the exclusive right to explore for petroleum in a 930,000 square- kilometer swath of the kingdom and to exploit any oil that it found there. The concession’s terms were to last for sixty years.

Socal’s efforts to turn the concession into a profitable venture got off to a rocky start thanks to two significant problems. First, as a relatively small company, it lacked the downstream markets in which to sell any petroleum that its newly created subsidiary, the California-Arabian Oil Company (Casoc) might discover in the kingdom. It solved this problem in 1936 by signing a deal with the Texas Oil Company, later known as Texaco, that brought it and its valuable distribution network into Casoc as an equal partner. That move may have secured the needed markets, but it did not solve the second, more fundamental problem: despite multiple efforts, the company had repeatedly come up empty in its effort to discover petroleum in Saudi Arabia. Indeed, its exploratory drilling in the kingdom’s most geologically promising location near the town of Dammam in the Eastern Province had repeatedly failed to produce commercially viable wells, though it did yield sufficient trace amounts of oil to justify continued exploration. Only in March 1938, a full five years into the concession, did one of Casoc’s wells, Dammam-7, finally strike oil. Producing fifteen times the daily output of the typical US well, it alone made the concession a success. Further wells in the area proved equally productive and, to the delight of the company’s shareholders, confirmed that Casoc had discovered a major field.

Still, it took some time for the oil industry in Saudi Arabia to really take off. Thanks to wartime disruptions and a lack of equipment, Casoc’s daily output only rose from 11,000 barrels per day in 1939 to 21,000 barrels per day in 1944. Thus, at the end of World War II, the kingdom remained a bit player in the global oil market. However, Saudi production crossed an important watershed immediately after the war. Between 1944, when Casoc renamed itself the Arabian-American Oil Company (Aramco), and 1950, the kingdom’s output surged by more than 2500 percent and reached the then-staggering figure of 548,000 barrels per day. Two events explain the massive surge. First, in 1948, Aramco geologists discovered the Ghawar Field southwest of Dhahran. A field of almost unimaginable dimensions, it remains the largest oilfield in the world and alone accounts for roughly half of Saudi Arabia’s current daily production. Second, Aramco brought on Socony-Vacuum and Standard Oil of New Jersey as partners. Large companies that controlled substantial downstream markets, they gave Aramco the capital and distribution networks the consortium needed to fully exploit its massive new find and make Saudi Arabia a major player in global energy production.

Birth of the US-Saudi Alliance

Relations between the US and Saudi governments warmed in parallel with the growing involvement of American petroleum companies in the kingdom. For Washington, the desire for closer ties stemmed from concerns about declining domestic supply. Though America had long been the world’s leading producer of petroleum, policymakers in the administration of Franklin Roosevelt (r. 1932-1945) had grown increasingly worried during the war that a combination of declining domestic production and rising demand might hamstring the US economy following the conflict. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes (1873-1952) provided perhaps the clearest exposition of this view in an article published in American Magazine in December 1943 entitled, appropriately, “We’re Running Out of Oil!” With such concerns in mind, the US government took a series of steps during the latter stages of the war to establish closer links with the kingdom. Most notably, it opened a diplomatic legation in Jeddah in 1942 and began to provide Lend Lease aid to Saudi Arabia in 1943. Ibn Saud was receptive to Washington’s entreaties. Seeking both a patron to protect his kingdom and a counterweight to Britain’s dominant position in the Middle East, he, too, hoped to strengthen bilateral ties.

Accordingly, in 1945 the two nations established close links that would, with occasional hiccups, endure to the present day. The crucial event that solidified the budding relationship was the meeting between Ibn Saud and Roosevelt that occurred aboard the cruiser USS Quincy on the Suez Canal’s Great Bitter Lake on February 14, 1945. It was a momentous occasion for both countries. While Roosevelt and Ibn Saud disagreed over the question of Palestine’s future and while the meeting produced no formal agreement, their brief encounter nonetheless marked the moment at which Saudi Arabia entered the US sphere of interest. Indeed, it was not long after that meeting that the two states signed an agreement that gave the US military access to bases in the kingdom including one at Dhahran from which B-29 strategic bombers could strike targets in the USSR. Later, with Europe’s postwar recovery increasingly dependent on Arabian oil, President Harry S. Truman (r. 1945-1953) established an implicit security guarantee of the kingdom by declaring that Washington was “interested in the preservation of the independence and territorial integrity of Saudi Arabia.” Thus, by the end of the decade, the American special relationship with the kingdom, one in which Saudi Arabia provided a stable supply of oil and a religious sanction of Washington’s conduct of the Cold War in exchange for American military protection, had been firmly established.

The Gulf States

While Saudi Arabia came to lie within the US sphere immediately following World War II, the principalities of the Persian Gulf instead remained firmly in Britain’s orbit. British domination of the region stretched back all the way to 1820 when London compelled the Gulf emirates to adhere to an agreement banning piracy. It had followed by entering into a series of protectorate agreements with the Trucial States, today’s United Arab Emirates (UAE), in 1835 and by subsequently signing similar agreements with Bahrain, Kuwait, and Qatar. Designed to deny hostile European states a foothold in the Persian Gulf from which they might menace Britain’s vital commerce with India, those treaties granted London control of the emirates’ foreign relations in exchange for a promise to provide them with military protection. London supplemented those bilateral agreements with a general statement shortly after the turn of the century. Announced by Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Lord Lansdowne (1845-1927) in 1903, it amounted to a British Monroe Doctrine for the Persian Gulf.

Meanwhile, like Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States’ commercial prospects took a turn for the better thanks to the discovery of oil in the region in the interwar period. Bahrain was the first of the emirates to become a producer state, doing so when Socal struck oil on the island in 1932. Kuwait was next. Here, the timing of the find was peculiarly serendipitous. Only a few years earlier, the pearl-diving industry that had long constituted the mainstay of its economy had collapsed after a Japanese noodle seller invented an inexpensive process for developing cultured pearls. The result was a period of severe economic contraction for the people and government of Kuwait. In 1938, the emirate’s prospects took a dramatic turn for the better when the Kuwait Oil Company, a joint venture of Gulf Oil and APOC, discovered a major field in the country. Qatar followed quickly with the discovery of the Dukhan Field in 1939, while the Trucial States and Oman joined the petroleum producers’ club in 1958 and 1964 respectively.

Rumblings of Discontent

Initially, the leaders of the oil-producing states of the Persian Gulf and Arabian peninsula were happy with the concession system under which the petroleum industry operated. From their perspective, the arrangement was a highly favorable one that had bequeathed upon them fantastical amounts of money at little cost. Indeed, Ibn Saud’s first royalty check was for a then-staggering $1.5 million. To be sure, the system gave companies like Aramco the lion’s share of the profits; however, it also saddled them with all of the costs and uncertainty inherent in the extraction and sale of oil. Those expenses and risks were substantial. The petroleum industry was and is a highly

capital-intensive one that required firms to spend huge amounts of money on tankers, refineries, pipelines, downstream marketing and distribution operations, and storage tanks, sums that were wildly beyond what countries like Saudi Arabia could raise at that time. It was also a capricious business in which many concessions failed to result in commercially viable operations. As a result, Arab rulers such as Ibn Saud were perfectly content during the 1930s and early 1940s with an arrangement that provided them with heretofore unimaginable streams of income while leaving all of the headaches, costs, and risks to the oil companies.

By the late 1940s, however, attitudes were beginning to change. Whatever risks the oil companies had once shouldered were long gone. Instead, having paid off the infrastructure needed to produce and distribute petroleum products, they were reaping what increasingly seemed like windfall profits. By 1949, for example, Aramco’s earnings had grown so much that the company was earning three times the amount that Saudi Arabia was receiving for the sale of its own petroleum. Even more galling, the company paid $43 million in taxes to the United States in 1949 but only $39 million in royalties to Ibn Saud’s government. In other words, that the US government took in $4 million more on the sale of the kingdom’s oil than did the Saudi state!

It was not just the distribution of profits that the petrostates were upset about, moreover. More fundamentally, their governments were increasingly concerned about the question of control. The concession system had rendered the producing states little more than passive participants in the petroleum industry. While they collected regular royalty checks, it was the oil companies that made all of the decisions pertaining to production, including how much petroleum is drilled, and marketing, meaning the price at which the firms sold the oil. Worse, the companies frequently made pricing and production decisions that were clearly contrary to the interests of the host countries. As a result, by 1950 pressure was building for a wholesale restructuring of the petroleum industry aimed, at a minimum, at dramatically increase the share of profits that went to the producing states.

Iran: Contested Independence

Surprisingly, in light of its apparent similarities with Saudi Arabia and Türkiye, Iran had a far more difficult experience during the interwar period than did those states. On the surface, its commonalities with them were strong. Like Kemalist Türkiye, Iran undertook an ambitious modernization program centered on secularization and Import Substitution Industrialization aimed at transforming the country into a Western-style state; like Ibn Saud’s kingdomit was a major oil producer. These similarities ultimately proved superficial, however, and Iran was unable to match their success in navigating the difficult waters of the interwar period. Instead, thanks to a combination of its internal weakness, its strategic location, and the pro-German sentiments of its ruler, Reza Khan (r. 1925-1941), it came under Allied occupation during World War II and emerged from the conflict a shaky and divided country, one that was ill-prepared for the challenges of the mid-twentieth century.

Qajar Iran

To understand Iran’s development during the interwar period, we must first briefly trace its history from the end of the Safavid Dynasty in 1722 through the early-twentieth century. For Iran, the seven-decade period that followed the demise of the Safavid Dynasty was a peculiarly fractious and challenging one. Lacking a powerful central government, it devolved into an anarchic place in which tribal chiefs, high-ranking Shiʿa clerics, and regional warlords divided the country among themselves.

It was only when Agha Mohammad Khan (r. 1796-1797) established the Qajar Dynasty in 1796 that a degree of order returned to Iran. Of Turkic origin, the Qajar appeared on the surface to be powerful rulers cut from the same cloth as the great shahs of the earlier Safavid Dynasty. This image was certainly one that the dynasty sough to project. For instance, Fath Ali Shah (r. 1797-1834) professed to rule Iran as an unchallenged and absolute monarch and went so far as to claim that as shah he owned all of the country’s land.

In reality, Qajar authority was quite limited. Fath Ali Shah may have exercised absolute authority in the territory immediately surrounding the capital of Tehran, but he lacked the military strength and bureaucratic capacity to exert direct control over anything that lay outside that area. Instead, he and his successors could only indirectly influence events in the rest of the country by entering into strategic political marriages with key aristocrats, by exploiting, and at times stoking, conflict among tribes and ethnic groups, and by trading the legitimacy that the dynasty could bestow on local notables in exchange for their nominal subordination to the central government.

One consequence of the dynasty’s political weakness was its tendency to pursue policies that were harmful to the country’s economy. Fiscal issues played a key role here. Perpetually in budgetary arrears, the Qajar were compelled to supplement the taxes they raised directly in the region surrounding Tehran by resorting to the sale of offices, particularly governorships and positions as tax collectors. Holding their posts for terms of only one year, the winning bidders had little incentive to invest in the territories they had acquired and instead squeezed the taxpayers as hard as they could so as to extract maximum profits before their terms expired, as had once happened in the Ottoman Empire. As a result, while the sale of offices secured a quick infusion of cash for the dynasty, it came at the cost of long- term economic growth. Making matters worse, the Qajar devoted precious little of the revenue raised through this system to the construction and maintenance of infrastructure such as roads, irrigation works, or educational institutions that might have contributed to economic development. On the contrary, they devoted the vast bulk of the tax revenue they raised to the military, to the small central bureaucracy and, most notably, to the extravagant lifestyles of the ruling family and its hangers-on.

The Western Onslaught

Qajar weakness would have proven challenging enough for Iran during ordinary times, but it was particularly problematic coinciding as it did with surging Western aggression in the Middle East. The greatest threat to Iran came from the north. Eager to acquire warm-water ports, Russia set its sights on the country beginning shortly after the turn of the eighteenth century. In a pair of conflicts fought during and shortly after the Napoleonic Wars, Tsar Alexander I’s (r. 1801-1825) modern army handily defeated Fath Ali Shah’s outmatched force of undisciplined tribal levies and irregular troops. Unsurprisingly, the agreements that ended those wars imposed stiff terms on the Qajars. They required Iran to cede substantial territory in the Caucasus, to cap Iranian tariffs on imported Russian goods at 5 percent, to exempt the tsars’ subjects from having to pay internal customs, and to accord them extraterritorial legal rights.

Russia was not alone in seeking strategic and commercial advantage in Iran. Eager both to secure new outlets for its industrial goods and to protect its vital Indian colony by preventing St. Petersburg from establishing a presence on the Persian Gulf, Britain, too, sought influence in Iran and access to its markets. London got its chance thanks to a succession dispute among rival Qajar princes following Fath Ali Shah’s death in 1834. In exchange for backing Shah Mohammad Mirza’s candidacy (r. 1834- 1848), the British government secured treaties in 1836 and 1841 that accorded its merchants the same commercial and legal rights that the tsarist government had won for its subjects.

Ironically, it was London and St. Petersburg’s competition for dominance that allowed Iran to retain its independence during the age of imperialism. Determined to prevent each other from assuming a commanding position in a country that each deemed essential to its security, the two powers tacitly agreed in the mid-nineteenth century to turn Iran into a neutral buffer state in the ongoing Great Game. It is important to understand that this situation did not mean that Tehran enjoyed genuine, independence. As Mohammad Mirza’s succession made clear, British and Russian diplomats regularly involved themselves in the country’s internal affairs, a practice that severely eroded the dynasty’s legitimacy in the eyes of Iran’s increasingly nationalistic subjects. As was clear to observers, both domestic and international, the Qajar dynasty only controlled the lands directly around the capital, and those tenuously at best. Russia was supreme in the north, while British interests dominated the south.

The rise in Iranian nationalist sentiment in the late-nineteenth century was, itself, a direct result of the growing Western economic penetration that the commercial treaties with Russia and Britain had made possible. The impact of those agreements was enormous. With Iranian tariff rates limited to a mere 5 percent, inexpensive, industrially produced Western finished goods such as guns, sugar, kerosene, tea, and, most consequentially, textiles, flooded into the country. The result was a sudden, wholesale restructuring of Iran’s economy. Unable to compete with the West’s cheaper, machine- made goods, many traditional businesses rapidly folded; in their place, new, less- profitable extractive industries emerged to supply European factories with the raw materials that they demanded.

The ongoing economic transformation that resulted from the West’s sudden commercial penetration proved deeply unsettling. To be sure, some benefited. Most notably, landlords who switched to the production of cash crops for export and a few far-sighted merchants who were able to successfully navigate the country’s incorporation into the global market did quite well. However, most Iranians fared poorly. Workers in the traditional craft and textile industries lost their livelihood when factory-produced goods began to flood into Iran, while many of the politically and symbolically important bazaar merchants faced bankruptcy in the face of the huge influx of inexpensive Western products. Peasants suffered the most. Already enduring a decline in wages owing to a steady rise in the population and a parallel increase in the labor supply, they suffered long periods of impoverishment over the nineteenth century punctuated by bouts of famine. This combustible mix produced surging Iranian nationalism, rising anger at the Western powers, and growing frustration with the Qajar shahs.

Concessions

Most observers then and now agree that the Iranian people’s dissatisfaction with the ruling dynasty was justified. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the Qajar regime provided little effective leadership in response to the threat that the West posed. Most notably, in sharp contrast to the substantial defensive modernization programs that the Egyptian and Ottoman states pursued in the nineteenth century, the Iranian government made no more than halfhearted efforts to reform or strengthen the country.

Owing to the length of his reign, Nasser al-Din Shah (r. 1848-1896) bears the bulk of the responsibility for this failing. While he did authorize a few modernization initiatives such as the establishment in 1879 of a small, Western-style military unit, the Russian-officered Cossack Brigade, he also ended a promising effort to initiate a Tanzimat-style modernization program by having its leading proponent, his chief minister Amir Kabir (1807-1852), killed in 1852 at the behest of courtiers whose salaries and power his restructuring proposal had threatened. Thereafter, the shah staunchly opposed most reforms and instead focused his efforts on selling concessions to Westerners in order to generate the funds needed to sustain his government and his lavish lifestyle.

At first, the concessions were a boon for the Qajar shah. Though the income raised was modest relative to the privileges that their Western purchasers were gaining, they nonetheless provided the Iranian government with desperately needed funds. Additionally, the concessions seemed to come at little political cost. Early agreements such as one that granted Britain the right to construct a telegraph line across the country did not contribute to the wrenching economic changes that Iran was experiencing or directly impact ordinary people. As such, they aroused neither significant popular attention nor, more importantly, meaningful opposition.

However, beginning in the late-nineteenth century concessions became a lightning-rod issue in Iran. The key event that transformed public perceptions of them was the signing of a new contract between the government and the news agency pioneer Baron Julius de Reuter (1816-1899) in 1872. The concession he secured was as huge as it was one sided. It gave him the exclusive right to construct and operate railroads, streetcars, new irrigation works, mines, and a national bank in Iran; in exchange, Nasser al-Din Shah’s government would receive a modest share of the profits. The concession was to last for seventy years. The leak of the deal’s terms produced an immediate backlash in Iran. Furious at the shah for entering into an obviously detrimental agreement that would directly and adversely affect the lives of many Iranians, his subjects launched spontaneous, nationwide protests demanding its immediate revocation. Faced with this intense and broad-based opposition movement, the shah had little choice but to comply. Accordingly, at great expense, he broke the agreement with de Reuter.

A subsequent concession that granted the British merchant Major G. F. Talbot a monopoly on the sale and production of tobacco in 1891 generated an even fiercer nationalist response. The cultural and economic centrality of tobacco products in Iran explains the intensity of the opposition. With a huge share of the population either consuming or producing tobacco, the concession promised to directly and viscerally affect the lives of millions of Iranians. As a result, news of the agreement spurred the immediate emergence of a new opposition coalition. Broad in composition, it included a diverse array of groups including secular Western reformers, bazaar merchants, and urban workers.

Significantly, it also involved Shiʿa clerics. Their participation in the protest movement marked a significant change. Heretofore, the ulema had refrained from intruding directly in politics. Now, they were not only participating in the protests against the tobacco concession but were leading them. Indeed, the core of the protest effort, a boycott on the production and consumption of tobacco, originated in 1892 with a fatwa issued by the mujtahid Mirza Hasan Shirazi (1815-1895), at the behest of the Islamic modernist Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897).

Iranians of all classes enthusiastically took up the ban. In short order, tobacco production halted, and Iranian smokers went cold turkey. Even Nasser al-Din Shah’s wives honored the boycott. Facing such intense and unified opposition, the shah had little option but to cancel the concession. Doing so proved to be expensive. Breaking the deal with Talbot came at the staggering cost of £500,000, an amount so high that the shah had to borrow funds on international money markets to pay it. In the process he incurred Iran’s first foreign debt.

Iran’s Constitutional Revolution, 1905-1911

The tobacco protest set the stage for further and more far-reaching popular political action under Nasser al-Din Shah’s successor, Mozaffar ad-Din Shah (r. 1896- 1907). The new shah’s reign generated substantial opposition from the very start. With his hands tied by his state’s feeble administrative capacity and by Western-imposed tariff limits, he could neither arrest skyrocketing inflation nor address a serious cholera epidemic then ravaging Iran. Further eroding his support were the three trips he took to Europe early during his reign. Absurdly extravagant, they were so fantastically expensive that paying for them required his government to take out two costly loans with Russian banks and to grant a British subject, William Knox D’Arcy (1849-1917), a sixty-year concession for the exploration and production of petroleum in southern Iran. The oil concession and the loans infuriated the now-politically conscious Iranian people. News of them spurred the quick revival of the tobacco protest coalition century and left the country standing on the brink of a revolution.

It finally came in 1905. Beginning with women protesting food shortages and rising prices in the cities, Mozaffar ad-Din Shah could do little to arrest the revolt’s progress once it got going. Indeed, his government’s transparent effort to scapegoat sugar merchants for the rise in prices not only failed to deflect blame but further infuriated the public. Even the use of force failed to slow the growing size of the demonstrations that rocked the country’s cities. Those protests reached a crescendo in 1906. Early in the year, three leading mujtahids took bast, or sanctuary, at a shrine near Tehran and demanded the creation of an Adalat Khaneh, or house of justice, by which they meant some form of consultative or representative body. Shortly thereafter, 14,000 bazaar merchants upped the ante by taking bast in the gardens of the British legation, where, guided by secular modernizers, they called for the promulgation of a constitution and the establishment of a majlis, or parliament. These events ended any hope that Mozaffar ad-Din Shah might have entertained that he could rein in the protests. Accordingly, the shah capitulated in August and reluctantly agreed to hold elections for a representative assembly.

Convened in October 1906, the National Assembly began by drafting a constitution for Iran. It came in two parts. The first, the Fundamental Law, established Iran as a constitutional monarchy in which parliament was to be the dominant branch of government. The second, the Supplementary Fundamental Law, guaranteed Western- style civil rights such as freedom of the press and assembly and granted all citizens, including religious minorities, equal rights. With great reluctance, Mozaffar ad-Din Shah agreed to abide by the Fundamental Law in December 1906. His successor, Mohammad Ali Shah (r. 1907-1909), was even less enthusiastic about ceding power to the people. Nonetheless, he formally committed the dynasty to observe the Supplementary Fundamental Law in October 1908. It was a heady time in Iran. Only the second Asian country to adopt a written constitution, it appeared to have joined the ranks of the world’s democratic states.

In reality, the push for democracy continued to face substantial challenges from both inside and outside Iran. Within the country, the resistance to constitutional government came primarily from an alliance between the shah and the clerics. It took shape after the revolution when the religious scholars came to realize that the reformers’ vision of democracy was far more sweeping than the more conservative, traditional Muslim system of elite consultation that the ulema had sought when they had called for Adalat Khaneh. The monarchy and the clerical establishment were powerful institutions in Iran; acting in unison, they were able to mount a strong resistance to constitutional government. Indeed, at one point in 1908, the conservatives were strong enough to mount a counter coup that temporarily ended democratic rule in Iran.

The reformers in Iran had the wherewithal to contain the challenges that the monarchy and the ulema posed to representative government, and they quickly restored democratic rule. However, they lacked the strength to overcome London and St. Petersburg’s unified opposition. A recent reconciliation between Russia and Britain had led to the pursuit of a common policy toward Tehran. Fierce competitors for much of the nineteenth century, they had resolved their differences by signing the Anglo-Russian Convention in 1907 so that they could jointly address the common danger posed by Germany. Focused largely on ending their Great Game rivalry in Asia, the agreement dealt with their competing interests in Iran by dividing the country into a northern, Russian-dominated region, a British sphere of interest in the south, and a neutral, buffer zone in the middle of the country, thereby formalizing the pre-existing conditions in the country.

The agreement did not end Iran’s independence. Indeed, the two powers continued to recognize Iranian sovereignty and, for a time at least, accepted its democratic government and nationalist aspirations. What they were unwilling to tolerate, however, were efforts by the Iranian government to challenge their dominant positions in their respective spheres of interest. Accordingly, when the majlis threatened the tripartite division of the country by seeking to enforce tax collection in the Russian zone, the tsarist government, with London’s tacit support, compelled the Iranian cabinet to dissolve the majlis. This intervention in Iranian affairs proved pivotal. With it, Iran’s experiment with constitutional government and representative democracy came to an ignominious end.

The Discovery of Oil

Meanwhile, even during the constitutional period, foreign economic dominance of Iran continued to grow. Most notably, after several years of fruitless searching and worsening finances, D’Arcy and his partner, the Burmah Oil Company, struck oil in the province of Khuzestan in southwest Iran in 1908. This was a major discovery, one that was well beyond D’Arcy and Burmah’s ability to exploit. Consequently, the following year, they formed a new, publicly held corporation, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, to raise the capital needed to extract and market the concession’s petroleum. APOC’s production totals were modest at first; it pumped just 1,600 barrels per day in 1912.

However, the fact that it possessed the only proven, British-controlled source of oil in the world made the company and its concession strategically significant, especially after the admiralty opted in 1912 to convert the fleet from coal-fired powerplants to more flexible and efficient oil-powered engines. Indeed, the navy’s shift from coal to oil rendered the D’Arcy concession so essential to imperial defense that the British government itself assumed a majority stake in APOC in 1914. Thus, from that point forward, the British state directly owned the oil in southwest Iran, a situation that indignant Iranian nationalists could do nothing about.

World War I and Britain’s Play for Dominance

The outbreak of the First World War served to further catalyze foreign domination of Iran. In the north, Russian forces not only fought with Ottoman troops along both sides of Iran’s western border but also regularly intervened in the country’s domestic politics. Meanwhile, in the south, London expanded its sphere of interest and took steps to protect APOC assets in Khuzestan Province from Arab saboteurs incited to action by Wilhelm Wassmus, Germany’s “Lawrence of Arabia.” It did so by organizing a new military formation composed of Iranian troops under the command of British officers called the South Persia Rifles. Numbering 8,000 men at its peak, it proved essential both in safeguarding the oil fields and in ensuring that Khuzestan remained firmly within the British sphere of interest.

Despite being officially neutral, Iran suffered enormously during and just after the First World War. Some of its problems stemmed directly from the fighting that took place on its soil. Most obviously, combat operations in the north between Ottoman and Russian forces resulted in the deaths of substantial numbers of Iranians and impelled many more to flee their homes. Far more consequential for Iran, however, were the indirect effects of the fighting, above all, the war-induced scarcity of food. Stemming from a combination of labor impressment, fighting, and the requisitioning of scarce food supplies by foreign armies, famine killed untold thousands across Iran. Worse, it left millions malnourished and thus susceptible to epidemic diseases like cholera, typhus, and, especially, the Spanish Flu. Demographic data makes clear just how devastating the war was for Iran. Collectively, famine, disease, and combat operations resulted in the deaths of two million Iranians, about 10 percent of the prewar population, between 1917 and 1921.

Britain sought to exploit Iran’s weakness and Russia’s revolution-induced paralysis immediately following the armistice to advance its imperial interests in the region. Indeed, Iran was a central part of Prime Minister Lloyd George’s (r. 1916-1922) postwar plan to establish Britain as the hegemonic power in the Middle East. In contrast to its approach in other parts of the region, however, London did not seek formal control in Iran. Instead, it made a bid in 1919 to establish a de facto protectorate over the country by presenting the Iranian government with a new, bilateral agreement called the Anglo-Persian Treaty. By its terms, London would provide Tehran with a £2 million loan to pay for a powerful army and for transportation infrastructure that would help the central government restore its authority over the country following the war. In exchange, Britain would assume formal control over Iran’s finances and customs collection and would become the country’s sole provider of military equipment and advisors.

Ultimately, London’s gambit failed. Britain’s attempt to implement key parts of the treaty before the Iranian government had formally endorsed it ignited a furious opposition campaign that promised violence against any politician who favored the agreement. That threat worked. Successive prime ministers, even ones supportive of the deal, refused to submit it to the majlis for approval for fear of their lives. As a result, the treaty did not go into effect. In response, London decided to abandon its bid for dominance in Iran in 1921 and to instead consider alternative ways of ensuring its interests in the country. It quickly settled on the idea of sponsoring a strongman who could maintain order and uphold key commercial agreements. Accordingly, British officials in Tehran dropped their efforts to secure passage of the treaty and began searching for a suitably pliable military figure who could impose order on a country that had slid into chaos.

Reza Khan Takes Control, 1921-1925

They found their man in a dynamic, if autocratic, officer in the Cossack Brigade: the modernizing nationalist Reza Khan. With tacit British encouragement, he rode into Tehran in February 1921 at the head of a force of 3,000 troops and deposed the existing government. At first, it appeared that Reza Khan had acted merely to restore order to Iran. Indeed, he did not seize the reins of government himself but instead took the subordinate posts of minister of war and head of the army and helped the journalist and modernizer Sayyid Zia al-Din Tabatabai (r. 1921) become prime minister. At British insistence, he also retained Ahmad Shah Qajar (r. 1909-1925) as head of state. It soon became clear, however, that these actions were little more than window dressing designed to obscure what had in fact been a coup d’état in which Reza Khan had assumed control of the Iranian state.

He devoted the first few years of his rule to consolidating his authority and engaging in state building. These were tall orders. Bereft of an effective central government since the outbreak of World War I, Iran had devolved into a decentralized patchwork of statelets ruled by tribal khans and regional warlords who expressed little more than token fealty to Tehran and who made clear that they would resist any effort to end their autonomy. However, Reza Khan was well position to bring them to heel. Taking advantage of the royalties he was receiving from APOC, he was able to quickly expand the size of the army. He followed by using his strengthened military to expand the proportion of the country over which the central government exercised real authority, and, importantly, to compel landlords who fell under his control to pay both current and back taxes. As a result, in short order he had set in motion a cycle wherein his growing army secured control of territory and new taxes that in turn permitted a further expansion of the military and, with it, the acquisition of additional land and revenue.

By 1925, the process was essentially complete. Thereafter, the central government’s writ extended to all parts of Iran, and Reza Khan enjoyed legitimacy both inside and outside the country. Confident in his position, he chose that time to depose Ahmad Shah Qajar and to arrange for the majlis, which he had reduced to little more than a debating society, to proclaim him the new monarch: Reza Shah Pahlavi. He chose his dynastic name with great deliberation. Dating to the Sassanid Dynasty (224- 651), the term Pahlavi linked his family to one of Iran’s most powerful pre-Islamic ruling houses and thus helped to legitimize his reign.

“Modernization from Above,” 1925-1941

Reza Shah moved aggressively after his coronation to complete the campaign of nation building that he had begun in 1921. An autocratic ruler who was committed to remaking his country along modernist, Western lines, he forcefully pursued a rapid, top- down restructuring program modeled on Mustafa Kemal’s widely celebrated effort to restructure Türkiye. Appropriately, he referred to his reform effort as “modernization from above.”

Like Ataturk, Reza Shah made secularization a central component of his restructuring program. Looking to break the power and independence of the Shiʿa clerics, he pursued secularization along three tracks. First, he stripped the religious scholars of their control over education by establishing a secular public school system patterned on the French lycée model and by gradually folding existing religious schools into it. Second, he ended the clerics’ dominance of the law in Iran by replacing the shariʿa code with new civil, commercial, and criminal legal systems and by requiring judges to possess degrees from secular law schools, a stipulation that effectively barred the religiously educated ulema from serving on the bench. Finally, he undermined the clerics’ financial independence first by promulgating a law in 1932 that forbade them from engaging in the profitable practice of registering legal documents and then, later that decade, by seizing the awqaf that sustained them. By 1941, as a result, the once mighty religious scholars, who, ironically, had been among Reza Shah’s earliest supporters, had lost much of their independence and power.

“Modernization from above” also involved an array of Kemalist-inspired changes designed to turn Iran into a modern country unified by a common national identity. Those reforms ran the gamut. To bring Iran into accord with modern European practices, Reza Shah introduced the metric system, replaced the traditional Muslim lunar calendar with a new, solar one, albeit still dated from the hijra, and required Iranians to adhere to a common time zone. Meanwhile, to unify the people and to bind them to the state, he promoted a series of initiatives aimed at replacing narrow, local identities with a common, nationalist one. Issued in 1928, for example, the Law of Uniformity of Dress sought to weaken competing conceptions of identity by banning people from wearing clothing that indicated their tribe, class, ethnicity, or religion and by requiring all men, save for clerics, to wear Western-style, brimmed hats. Later, and more controversially, he outlawed the practice of veiling. Finally, he implemented a system of conscription in 1925 designed as much to create a sense of shared, national identity as to ensure an adequate supply of recruits for the army.

Like Ataturk, Reza Shah also recruited the social sciences to the task of nation building. To create a strong sense of common identity, he established the Cultural Academy and tasked it with replacing Armenian, Turkish, and Arabic loanwords with archaic Persian terms or neologisms in an effort to purge the Persian language of foreign influence. A more radical attempt to follow the Kemalist example by replacing the Arabic alphabet drew interest for a time, but ultimately foundered because the task was deemed too difficult. History and archaeology also figured prominently in Reza Shah ‘s nation-building program. Looking to weaken Iran’s connection with its immediate Muslim past, he instituted a public-school curriculum that emphasized the country’s rich, pre-Islamic history. Likewise, he sponsored archaeological digs designed to connect Iran to earlier dynasties such as the Achaemenids and Parthians, and he insisted that newly constructed public buildings reference pre-Islamic architectural styles.

He followed with a successful campaign to change Iran’s international image. In 1935, his government formally requested that the Western states cease referring to his country as Persia and instead begin calling it Iran, a term derived from the word Aryan. Doing so would achieve two ends. Domestically, it would deepen the country’s connection to its ancient, pre-Islamic past and thus help to foster a distinct national identity. Second, by casting Iranians as members of the Aryan race, it would elevate his people’s relative standing in the Western racial hierarchies that loomed so large in the interwar period.

“Modernization from above” cleaved most closely to the Kemalist program in its pursuit of economic development. Like Ataturk, Reza Shah promoted a state-led, ISI- development model in which domestic factories sheltered by protective tariffs produced goods for import substitution. He laid the basis for this program in 1927 by unilaterally abrogating the nineteenth-century era unequal treaties that had accorded extraterritorial privileges to Westerners and had limited Iran’s customs duties to 5 percent. He followed in 1933 by creating two holding companies, the Agricultural and Industrial Banks, and by tasking them with determining how state-raised capital could best be allocated for economic development. Between their establishment and 1941, they underwrote the construction of more than three hundred factories, mills, and refineries and thus helped Iran acquire the ability to produce both durable materials like cement and lumber and consumer goods such as cigarettes, sugar, processed foods, textiles, glass, soap, and matches. Concurrently, the state laid thousands of miles of roads to link Iran into a single, unified market. Finally, it imposed taxes on tea and sugar to finance the construction of the north-south, Trans-Iranian Railway.

Though Reza Shah trumpeted his “modernization from above” program as a great achievement, it was, in reality, a mixed success at best. On the positive side, his campaign had fostered the development of a middle class, secured limited emancipation for women, improved transportation infrastructure, and provided almost all of the country’s cities with at-least limited electrical power. More importantly, it had succeeded in unifying Iran and at replacing tribal and ethnic identities with an Iranian nationalist one. At the same time, however, Reza Shah ‘s reform program had a number of substantial shortcomings. Politically, it had imposed a despotic government on Iran and had cleaved the country into two cultures: a small, wealthy, Westernized class of bureaucrats, military officers, professionals, and businesspeople and a much larger and poorer traditional one of bazaar merchants, clerics, and peasants. Economically, meanwhile, his development program had failed utterly to live up to his promises. Marred by corruption, Iran’s nascent industrial sector was inefficient, uncompetitive, and exploitive of labor; it also produced goods that were shoddier and substantially more expensive than the imports that they replaced.

Reza Shah ‘s biggest failure, however, was his inability to achieve a favorable revision of the terms of the APOC oil concession. Like other Iranian nationalists, the shah was dissatisfied with nearly every part of the agreement. He was unhappy that it did not supply Iran with a minimum royalty payment, upset with the company’s discriminatory labor practices, and, above all, angry that the British state earned substantially more from the sale of his nation’s oil than did his government. Accordingly, in the early 1930s, he insisted on opening negotiations with APOC aimed at altering the terms of the concession in Iran’s favor. The discussions went nowhere. While the company was willing to talk, it was unwilling to make more than cosmetic changes to the terms of the concession and was adamant that the profit-sharing arrangement could not be altered. Frustrated, Reza Shah broke off the discussions in 1932 and announced that Iran would unilaterally annul the D’Arcy concession and assume control of the oil fields.

This threat finally got APOC and the British government’s attention. At their request, talks recommenced in 1933. They soon produced a revised agreement that called for Britain to grant a larger share of the profits to Tehran and to train more Iranians for skilled positions in the oil fields, terms that Reza Shah trumpeted as a great victory for his country. In reality, as many Iranians grasped, the renegotiated arrangement was a poor one that offered little more than minor alterations to the terms of the original concession. Most notably, it only raised Iran’s share of the profits from an anemic 16 percent to a marginally better 20 percent, an increase that APOC’s creative accounting succeeded in substantially reducing. Likewise, it offered no more than symbolic changes to the company’s discriminatory employment practices. Perhaps worst of all, Reza Shah was only able to win those modification to the original deal by agreeing to extend the concession’s term by thirty- two years, thus giving Britain control of Iran’s oil through 1993.

Reza Shah ‘s inability to secure a meaningful revision of the APOC concession left him embittered and led him to gradually drift toward Britain’s rival, Germany. Iran’s relationship with the Third Reich blossomed quickly, particularly in the area of trade. Indeed, commerce between the two countries grew so rapidly over the next few years that Germany displaced Britain as Iran’s largest trading partner by the end of the decade. Moreover, Tehran’s ties with Berlin did not remain limited to the economic sphere for long. Seeing Nazi Germany as a potential counterweight to Britain, Reza Shah moved to strengthen political relations during the late 1930s. He permitted German intelligence operatives free rein in Iran, pursued a series of diplomatic policies supportive of Berlin, and even appropriated Nazi racial and nationalist views.

World War II and Reza Shah’s Abdication

Reza Shah ‘s dalliance with Hitler’s Germany proved to be his downfall. During the early part of World War II, Britain had been willing to tolerate his passive animosity and tacitly pro-German position. However, Hitler’s invasion of the USSR in June 1941 drastically altered Iran’s standing in the Allies’ strategic calculus. Providing an important route for the shipment of desperately needed war materiel and resources to the Soviet Union, it was thereafter too important of a country to leave in the hands of someone as unreliable as Reza Shah. Accordingly, the USSR and Britain launched a bloodless invasion in August 1941 in which they assumed control of Iran and deposed the unreliable shah. Joined by the United States after it entered the war, the occupying powers followed by using the Trans-Iranian Railroad to ship war materiel to the USSR. Moscow and London did not, however, end the Pahlavi Dynasty. Instead, they arranged for Reza Shah’s twenty-one-year-old son, Muhammad Reza (r. 1941-1979), to replace his father on the throne.

Young and inexperienced, the new shah lacked the force of will or the political skills to take control of his country. As a result, a power vacuum emerged in Tehran. Taking advantage, a variety of organizations and groups were able to assert themselves culturally and politically. Some were established ones that Reza Shah had suppressed. Most notably, the clerics exploited the shah’s deposition to win back control of both the awqaf that financially sustained them and the religious schools that the government had nationalized. In doing so, they were able to restore much of the autonomy that they had lost in the “Modernization from Above” program. Other groups that gained prominence at this time were new. One of the most important of them was the Soviet-supported, far- left Tudeh Party. Thanks to its support for unionization and call for aggressive land reform, it quickly gained the backing of most workers, many intellectuals, and some peasants. It even secured the support of a significant portion of the Westernized middle class.

Postwar Crises

The instability continued in the years immediately following World War II as Iran became embroiled in an early dispute in the emerging Cold War. The crisis was a product of Moscow’s territorial and economic aspirations. As per the agreements that governed the occupation, British and American soldiers withdrew from Iran within six months of the conflict’s conclusion. However, the USSR did not follow suit. Instead, leaving its troops in place as leverage, it set up pro-Soviet separatist Azerbaijani and Kurdish republics in the northeast and demanded that Tehran grant it a highly favorable concession to exploit oil deposits in Iran’s northern provinces. Given the power imbalance between it and the USSR, Iran appeared to have little choice but to capitulate to these demands.

However, its savvy prime minister, Ahmad Qavam (1874-1955), managed to deftly maneuver his country through the crisis. He did so in stages. First, he negotiated an agreement that seemed to meet most of Moscow’s demands. In exchange for the withdrawal of Soviet troops, he agreed to respect the autonomy of the Kurdish and Azerbaijani republics and to submit a bill to the majlis granting the USSR an oil concession. It looked like a good deal for Moscow, which responded by promptly pulling the Red Army from Iran. Qavam followed the Soviet withdrawal by implementing the second phase of his plan, which involved crushing the Kurdish and Azerbaijani republics and their leftist governments. Moscow was unhappy with this move but was willing to tolerate Tehran’s betrayal so long as it got its oil concession. Here, too, however, Qavam double crossed the Soviets. Aware all along that strident nationalist sentiment rendered the oil-concession bill a dead letter in the majlis, he effected the final stage of his plan in October 1947 when he formally submitted the legislation only to see it quickly and predictably go down to defeat, thus permitting Iran to meet the obligations of its agreement with Moscow while simultaneously freeing it from having to make any real concessions.

The crisis significantly altered the political balance in Iran in two ways. First, it greatly weakened the heretofore rapidly growing Tudeh Party. While the party had achieved new levels of popularity as a result of a successful strike it had organized against APOC in the spring of 1946, the party’s willingness to defend the USSR’s actions in Iran severely damaged its nationalist credentials and cost it much of its support. Second, the crisis solidified the emerging view in Washington that Iran was a critical component of its broader Cold War effort to contain the USSR and thus spurred the US to step up its engagement with the country. Notably, Washington agreed in 1947 to extend the terms of an existing military advisory mission under the command of Colonel Norman Schwarzkopf (1895-1958) and to provide Iran with $60 million in military aid.

Conclusion

As Iran’s experience makes clear, the interwar period was a challenging time for the sovereign states of the Middle East. During that period, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Türkiye struggled to transform themselves into stable, fully independent states and to develop their economies. These were difficult enough goals to achieve on their own, but they were rendered even more challenging by the huge power imbalance that existed between those states and the Western powers. Indeed, Iran proved unable to maintain its independence in the face of Allied pressure during World War II while Saudi Arabia was compelled to settle for a smaller share of the profits generated by its oil wealth than received by either Aramco or the US government. Even Türkiye had to walk a very careful line to retain its independence during the Second World War. Still, even with these limits, the citizens and subjects of these states enjoyed vastly greater autonomy than did the majority of the people of the Middle East, who lived not under independent governments but instead under de facto European colonial rule. It is to their very different situation and their efforts to change it that we shall next turn.