Was the constitutional movement in Iran a massive tax revolt? If so, would this challenge its image as the harbinger of a new democratic era as judged by the appearance of globally familiar features like a representative assembly, written constitution, voting, political parties, and a modern public sphere with Enlightenment-inspired quest for freedom and rights entrenched in the law? An entirely new picture emerges when the constitutional movement is approached through the lens of petitions. Regardless of location, petitions of this period show astonishing uniformity about the public wants, reveal why the public was in a perpetual state of revolt throughout Iran, or why it had set its hopes on the Assembly in Tehran. The onerous local taxes (tafavut-i `amal) appear here as the main source of public dissatisfaction, as well as the administrators who enforced them, starting from the governor to the tax procurator (pishkar), the overseers (mubashir or mustufi), down to the collectors. Surprisingly though, if the public refused the local taxes, it considered the central ones as entirely legitimate and remitted them upon demand. Through petitioning the Assembly that functioned as a sympathetic intermediary, the public obliged the central and local governments to enter unprecedented negotiations that resulted in small and large victories like dismissal of high officials, and moderated taxes. Also transformed was the culture of politics that now began to speak in the language of rights. The associations (anjuman) played key roles in mobilizing the public. With the monarchy’s defeat and ascendance of the Assembly in the second constitutional period, petitions changed again. Provinces with powerful associations like Azerbaijan, Gilan, Khorasan, and perhaps others, now laid claim to the central taxes and demanded expenditure of the entire tax receipts in the locality. Their new demand, beyond creating a rift with the Assembly and the central government, prepared the ground for the emergence of the later decentralist movements such as Jangal, Khiyabani, and others, which showed tremendous continuity with the rhetoric and membership of the local associations of this period. By shifting the focus to actors from the ground up, this study suggests that bargaining over taxes was the dominant democratizing thrust of this movement. With collective petitioning and information flow through the associations and their independent presses, this period also witnessed the emergence of an alternative public sphere.

In this presentation, I attempt to narrate the history of the Iranian oil industry in the roughly twenty-year period between the 1954 Consortium Agreement and the 1973 oil-price shocks in terms of the juridical contradictions of capital. In doing so, I expand the traditional dialectic of capital and labor to theorize how extractive capitalism both operated and obscured itself along the legal frontiers of nature-exporting societies. After a three-year embargo of Iranian oil, the 1954 Consortium Agreement negotiated between the National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) and the “Seven Sisters” reintroduced Iranian oil to the international market, this time under a 50-50 profit-sharing principle already operating in Iraq, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia. The formal equality of profits enshrined in the Agreement extinguished accusations that the national owners and foreign managers of Iranian oil existed in unequal relation. Yet in reality, the Agreement isolated the Iranian state from operational matters and obscured the fact that profitability was contingent upon production limits, which foreign companies continued to determine. Discontent to collect rent that foreign companies set the ceiling on, the Iranian government worked throughout the 1960s to argue for increases in production capacities using the same juridical logic of the 1954 Agreement. While Iran conceived of oil, its finitude and potentials, in terms of national interest, the oil companies acted in terms of an international market crowded by new oil discoveries. Frustrated by his inability to harmonize dissonant interests, Mohammad Reza Shah, bolstered by the strength of oil-exporting countries under OPEC, nationalized the oil industry in 1973. Nationalization, however, exposed an even deeper contradiction in the oil industry: petrostates like Iran had helped lead the international struggle for sovereignty over natural resources, a key anti-colonial development strategy, but oil, exceeding the possibilities of its domestic consumption, could only be realized as value through foreign exchange, tethering nature-exporting countries to nature-consuming ones. Centering these contradictions in the history of Iran’s oil industry helps us account for the role of resource-rich but peripheral countries in the formation and reproduction of global capitalism. But more than that, it allows us to reconceptualize petrostates, distinguished by the emphasis on “productive” capital as passive rent seekers, as ciphers for understanding capital and the legal forms characteristic of it.

This paper examines the emergence of compulsory adult literacy in the Iranian Reza Shah period (1925-1941). Throughout the 1930s, the Ministry of Education (vizārat-i maʿārif) tapped into an existing school infrastructure to form adult literacy classes in the evenings. Under Iranian law, rank-and-file employees of the state, aged 18 to 50, were obligated to become literate or lose their jobs. Moreover, the state compelled local businesses, such as bakers, butchers, and barbers, to attend classes or risk their municipal permits. Adults needed a literacy certificate when receiving state services, with the exception of the courts of law. The state used a combination of coercion and encouragement to incentivize class attendance. Encouragement included state-organized sermons and lectures across the country on the benefits of functional literacy and knowledge more generally. Moreover, Iranian cinemas showed infomercials on the benefits of adult literacy during their movie screenings. Ministry of Education inspections and statistical reports reported favorably on state efforts. There were notable increases in the number of adult literates by the late 1930s. This historical narrative is based on previously unexamined Persian-language material from the Document Center (sāzmān-i asnād) of Iran’s National Archives. Moreover, the historical and descriptive material is grounded in a conceptual, cross-disciplinary discussion on the relationship between mass education and state formation. In drawing adults towards functional literacy, the paper posits, the Reza Shah state taught adults how to read and write at a functional level, while reminding them of its own authority to punish, reward, and rule the population. This paper is a chapter from a book monograph in preparation on relationship between statemaking, nationalism, and mass literacy in twentieth-century Iran in the context of modern world history.

During the 1910 cholera outbreak in Istanbul, fishing activities around Terkos Lake, situated in the northwest of the city, were prohibited as part of measures to curb the spread of the disease. In December 1910, a tax farmer named Mustafa Rıfat submitted a petition to the Contract Office of Istanbul Municipality, outlining how this decision was causing him financial losses. The petition revealed that he had paid 40 thousand gurus to the Ministry of Foundation for the right to fish in a specific region of the lake. Despite the substantial payment for this right, Mustafa Rıfat found himself barred from exercising it during that winter. His experience was not unique; there were comparable instances both preceding and following his case. For instance, during the cholera outbreak in 1893, tax farmer Mehmed Salim submitted a similar petition to the Office of the Grand Vizier. In his plea, he argued that the prohibition on the sale of various food items, such as eggplant, figs, and tomatoes, within the framework of the fight against cholera, was causing financial losses and violating the legal contract he had entered into with the Ottoman state. This presentation, focusing on the summarized petitions and other archival documents, aims to highlight the conflicts and cooperation that occurred at the everyday level among various social actors and the state during the implementation of food control mechanisms in the late Ottoman Empire. Concentrating on the case of tax farmers in the context of cholera-related food regulations, I establish that the cholera pandemic and other threats to public health presented significant "contingencies" during the late 19th century, impacting tax farmers with the uncertainties they brought. Essentially, the Ottoman state externalized the financial risks associated with epidemics and essential sanitation practices to merchants and tax farmers. I demonstrate that while the state embraced the discourse of sanitation and public health for arbitrating a tax-related conflict and used the tax-farming mechanism as a means to expropriate wealth, tax farmers attempted to mitigate the negative impact of these actions by invoking the "moral authority" of the sultan. Examining conflicts between tax farmers and the state through a sanitation lens provides valuable insights into the practical workings of food regulations at the everyday level. By intertwining food with its urban context and embedding it within power relations, this analysis also contributes to the literature on tax farming, urbanization, and critical food studies.

The British Mandate government in Iraq established new quarantine and medical procedures along Iraq’s borders. The creation of such border posts that carried a dual function of border protection and health inspection shows what the British perceived as external threats and from where. One responsibility of the medical officers at these border posts was the inspection of corpses entering Iraq by both land and sea for burial in Shi’i holy cities like Najaf and Karbala. With this medical-legal border, health posts inspecting arriving corpses became sites of taxation, permits, and arrests. The heightened bureaucratization of such sites also necessitated agents trained to inspect corpses, including Iraqi midwives responsible for female corpses. Using materials from the British India Office Archive and the Iraqi National Archives, I argue that corpse traffic to Iraq did not end during the British period, but rather the British created a new administrative apparatus to tax, record, and medicalize the incoming bodies. This work seeks to question how governments and subjects negotiate power within an imperial context using the dead as a vector of analysis. The paper also focuses on the training of these midwives to inspect the dead as opposed to maternity care.