The Qajar dynasty held the Iranian throne for 129 years, longer than any other dynasty since the Safavids. Of its seven shahs, the first (Agha Muhammad Khan) was a cruel and effective restorer; the second (Fath Ali Shah, r. 1797-1834) was an ornamental and largely incompetent figure; the third (Muhammad Shah, r. 1834-1848) was sickly and ruled mostly through his vizier; the fourth (Naser al-Din Shah, r. 1848-1896) reigned for forty-eight years and is the central figure of the dynasty; the fifth (Mozaffar al-Din Shah, r. 1896-1907) signed the constitutional charter and immediately died; the sixth (Mohammad Ali Shah, r. 1907-1909) tried to revoke it and was deposed; the seventh (Ahmad Shah, r. 1909-1925) was a teenager when he came to the throne and an exiled figurehead when he lost it. The story of the dynasty is the story of how a still-substantial Iranian state lost its strategic autonomy to two foreign powers without ever quite losing its formal independence.
The first decisive event was the loss of the Caucasus. The Russian Empire under Catherine, Paul, and Alexander I had been advancing south through the Caucasus throughout the late eighteenth century, and the Qajar wars to recover the lost provinces ended in two complete defeats. The Russo-Persian War of 1804-1813 ended with the Treaty of Gulistan, by which Iran ceded modern Georgia, Dagestan, and most of modern Azerbaijan to Russia. The Russo-Persian War of 1826-1828 ended with the Treaty of Turkmenchay, by which Iran ceded the remainder of Azerbaijan, the khanates of Yerevan and Nakhchivan (in modern Armenia and Azerbaijan), and paid a war indemnity of twenty million silver roubles, financed largely by mortgaging the future revenue of the northern provinces. The Treaty of Turkmenchay also imposed extraterritoriality: Russian subjects in Iran were exempted from Iranian courts. The pattern would be extended, by treaty, to all the European powers over the next thirty years.
Naser al-Din Shah
The reign of Naser al-Din Shah (1848-1896) is the longest of any Qajar monarch and the most consequential. He was crowned at sixteen, under the regency of the reforming chief minister Amir Kabir. Amir Kabir attempted, in three years, to centralise tax collection, found a modern technical college (the Dar ul-Funun, opened in 1851), modernise the army on European lines, and free the treasury from its dependence on royal favourites. He was dismissed in November 1851 on the orders of the queen mother, the harem, and the conservative clerics whose interests he had threatened; he was exiled to the bath-house of the royal palace at Fin, near Kashan, and a few weeks later his veins were opened on the shah's orders. He died on the 9th of January 1852 in the bath. He is, in Iranian historical memory, the great Qajar might-have-been.
Naser al-Din's own reign was marked by a series of foreign concessions that progressively mortgaged the country to outside interests. In 1872 he granted Baron Julius de Reuter — the British founder of the Reuters news agency — an extraordinarily comprehensive concession covering all railways, tramways, mines, canals, irrigation, and a national bank, in exchange for £40,000 and a share of profits. Lord Curzon would later describe the concession as "the most complete and extraordinary surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that has probably ever been dreamed of." It was cancelled the next year after Russian protests and clerical opposition at home, but the principle had been established. The 1890 grant of a national tobacco monopoly to a British company prompted a country-wide boycott of tobacco organised by the Shi'a clerical establishment under Mirza Hasan Shirazi — the so-called Tobacco Protest — which was the first time the modern Iranian clergy demonstrated the capacity to mobilise mass political resistance. The shah cancelled the concession in 1892.
Naser al-Din travelled three times to Europe (1873, 1878, 1889) and brought back, on each occasion, an interest in photography (he was an accomplished amateur photographer; his photographic archive, now at the Golestan Palace, is a major source for nineteenth-century Iranian visual history), an interest in modern furniture (the European-style salons of the Qajar palaces date from these visits), and very little serious institutional reform. He was assassinated on the 1st of May 1896 in the shrine of Shah Abdul-Azim south of Tehran, while paying respects to mark the fiftieth anniversary of his reign, by a follower of the pan-Islamic agitator Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. He was sixty-five.
The Constitutional Revolution
The Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911 was the first successful popular constitutional movement in any Muslim country. It began in December 1905 with a sit-in protest by Tehran merchants and clerics against the brutal punishment of two sugar merchants for refusing to lower their prices. The protest escalated, through 1906, into a national demand for an elected legislature and a written constitution. In August 1906, fourteen thousand protesters took sanctuary in the British legation gardens at Tehran — the only available extra-territorial space large enough to accommodate them — and refused to leave until the shah granted their demands. Mozaffar al-Din Shah, dying of kidney failure, signed the constitutional charter on the 5th of August 1906. He died nine months later. The first Iranian parliament (the Majles) opened on the 7th of October 1906.
The reaction was immediate. The new shah, Mohammad Ali, tried to revoke the constitution in June 1908; on the 23rd of June he ordered the Russian-officered Cossack Brigade to shell the Majles building, dispersing the deputies and arresting or executing the leaders of the constitutional movement. A counter-revolution from Tabriz, led by the constitutionalist commanders Sattar Khan and Baqer Khan, marched on Tehran in 1909 and deposed Mohammad Ali in favour of his eleven-year-old son Ahmad. The constitution was restored. But the brief period of constitutional government that followed was overwhelmed almost at once by the strategic crisis on the country's frontiers.
"Either we shall be a constitutional government, or we shall be no government at all." — Mirza Naser al-Mulk, regent during Ahmad Shah's minority, 1910
The Anglo-Russian partition
In August 1907, Britain and Russia — formerly the two competing imperial powers in Iran, now allies against Germany in the new European alignment — concluded a treaty partitioning Iran into spheres of influence: a Russian sphere in the north (Tehran, Azerbaijan, Khurasan), a British sphere in the south-east (Sistan and Baluchistan), and a notional neutral zone in between. The Iranian government was not consulted and was informed of the treaty by the foreign press. By the start of the First World War, Iran was, in effective terms, a joint Anglo-Russian protectorate, with Russian and British troops on its soil, Russian and British advisers attached to its ministries, and almost all of its modern infrastructure (telegraph, banks, oil) in foreign hands. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which had struck oil at Masjed Soleyman in 1908 in a concession granted to William Knox D'Arcy by the late Mozaffar al-Din Shah, was a British company in which the British government would become the controlling shareholder in 1914.
The First World War, in which Iran was officially neutral but in fact occupied by British, Russian, Ottoman, and (later) Soviet troops in various combinations, devastated the country. There was famine in the north in 1917-1919; the death toll has been estimated at two million, perhaps a quarter of the population, although the figure is contested. The Soviet revolution of 1917 had two effects: it removed the Russian troops, and it produced a brief separatist Soviet republic at Gilan on the Caspian coast (1920-1921) under Mirza Kuchak Khan. The British remained, but in reduced form.
The 1921 coup
On the 21st of February 1921, in pre-dawn darkness, a column of two thousand Iranian Cossacks under the command of a forty-three-year-old officer named Reza Khan entered Tehran without resistance. The political leadership of the coup was provided by the journalist Sayyed Ziaeddin Tabataba'i, who was made prime minister; the military leadership by Reza Khan, who was made commander-in-chief and then minister of war. Tabataba'i was dismissed within three months. Reza Khan accumulated power over the next four years, defeated the regional warlords of Gilan, Tabarestan, and Khuzestan, and in October 1925 persuaded the Majles to depose Ahmad Shah (who was conveniently in Europe) and the Qajar dynasty altogether. He was crowned Reza Shah Pahlavi on the 25th of April 1926. The Qajar dynasty was over. The Pahlavi dynasty, and the next great chapter of Iranian history, had begun.
End of Chapter VIII