This paper discusses the development of the so called Lynch or Bakhtiary Road along the Karun river, a project which preoccupied various generations of Iranian, British, Russian, Dutch, and German imperialists, engineers, developers and bureaucrats, over a time spanning from the 1870s to the 1970s and the present. For over half a century Britain and Russia had systematically prevented any larger infrastructural developments in Iran. At the same time, this meant a continual, almost obsessive concern with transportation issues, haphazardly realized road construction, and in the Karun case also geo-strategic concerns and development projects such as irrigation works, dam construction and energy production, the exploitation of oil as well as the founding of a nuclear power industry. Although a stalemate of interests between Britain and the Iranian central government (as well as local interests) intermittently obstructed a pragmatic implementation of projects, the navigation of the Karun with a connecting road has captured the imagination as well as real importance of development in Iran. Over a century and a half, the Karun emerged into one of Iran’s strategically and economically most important regions with major impact on industrial, political, and regional social developments. A closer examination of the building of the Lynch/Bakhtiary Road, the construction of large-scale river dams since the 1950s as well as the later Pahlavi fantasy of a chain of nuclear power plants along the Karun provides an alternative view of the most central themes of Iranian history in the 19th and 20th centuries. Standard approaches to modern Iran have largely worked to explain change and modernization through political history. Researching the Lynch/Bakhtiary Road and development schemes along the Karun, this paper will use the deliberations and construction (or non-construction) of roads as an alternative model to trace modern Iranian history. The paper considers political implications, environmental ramifications as well as socio-economic consequences entailed by the road and industrialization schemes. Besides published materials including Persian and European newspapers, memoires and histories this paper draws from British Foreign Office documents, oral histories, and company papers involved in building of the Lynch/Bakhtiary Road.