The subject of this paper is the medical service of the Anglo-Iranian (formerly Anglo-Persian) Oil Company (AIOC), which operated in southwest Iran from 1909 to 1953. Through an investigation of the AIOC’s network of hospitals and dispensaries, the political role of its doctors, and its sanitary efforts and public health campaigns, I argue that the AIOC’s introduction of modern medical practices and institutions to southern Iran constituted a case of colonial medicine; in other words, it served as an instrument of empire and a colonizing cultural force. Relying on AIOC medical reports, correspondences between company doctors, and other medical records available at the BP (British Petroleum) Archive, as well as British India Office and Foreign Office documents relating to health and sanitation in the Persian Gulf region, my paper addresses the theme of colonial medicine in three principal ways. First, challenging triumphalist narratives of medical development, it sheds light on the violence that accompanied the AIOC’s sanitary measures; the company’s efforts to combat disease often involved coercion and the dispossession and displacement of local peoples. Second, it highlights the role of the medical knowledge produced and relied upon by AIOC doctors in reinforcing notions of racial hierarchy and marking colonial difference. Third, it examines the disciplinary component of AIOC medical practices, framing them as part of a broader effort by the oil company to transform the local population into modern subjects who would facilitate rather than hinder the smooth operation of a major industrial enterprise. In addition, this paper elucidates the relationship between public health and sovereignty in Iran by arguing that the Iranian state’s 1928 repudiation of British and AIOC control over quarantine responsibilities in southern Iran was indicative of a growing sentiment within Iran that the ability to protect the country’s borders and bodies from disease was a source of political authority and legitimacy. Drawing on recent culturally grounded approaches to the study of empire, my paper contributes to the history of both modern Iran and the British empire by demonstrating that imperialism in Iran was not confined to economic exploitation or overt political domination. Rather, British imperial authority in Iran was also premised on the articulation of modern medical knowledge and the inculcation of new medical practices. By treating the AIOC as an imperial institution, this study reveals the key role that informal imperialism played in the unfolding of modernity in Iran.

The Scientific Meaning of the Cultural Revolution: Scientific Nationalism in Post-Revolutionary Iran By examining the development of the Iranian research institute for reproductive biomedicine and stem cell—the Royan Institute—this paper presents a revisionist account of the politically-laden portrayal of the Iranian Cultural Revolution of 1980s. Based on archival research and oral history interviews with Royan officials in Tehran, a content analysis of Royan’s newsletter and publications, and an examination of the literature on the Islamic bioethics and the Iranian Revolution, this study argues that the Cultural Revolution—which led to the closure of universities for three years, intellectual censorship, and a sharp exacerbation in brain drain—had a scientific arm, which has often escaped the attention of scholars of modern Iran. Scientific progress has always been part of the agenda of Iran’s post-revolutionary political leaders to battle against what they saw as cultural dependency, cultural assault, and colonial universities. It is, hence, problematic to reduce the Cultural Revolution to a religiopolitical narrative focusing on the Islamicization of academia and to describe the Cultural Revolution exclusively as a period of aggressive and discriminatory policies against secular-minded academics. The Cultural Revolution had two wings: cultural and scientific. Royan Institute, named after the Persian word for embryo, is a non-profit scientific organization located in the capital city of Tehran. Royan was initially established by Dr. Saeid Kazemi Ashtiani and his peers in the early 1990s as the first Iranian research institute for reproductive biomedicine and infertility treatments. However, since inception in the early post Iran-Iraq War, the research and therapeutic activities of Royan have expanded to include stem cell research as well as biotechnology. Royan Institute declares itself to be non-governmental because it does not operate under the auspices of the presidential administration. However, Royan is a state institution and is affiliated with the Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research (ACECR). ACECR is a post-revolutionary state agency, founded by the members of the Cultural Revolution Headquarters on 7 August 1980 to realize the goals of the Cultural Revolution after the Revolution of 1979. The Cultural Revolution Headquarters was later renamed to the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution (SCCR). SCCR is state body founded by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1984 to purify the cultural atmosphere of the country, especially the educational system in universities, from western influences. SCCR played a key role in the Iranian Cultural Revolution.

Existing histories of public health in Iran tend to focus on elite or urban narratives. Rural populations often appear in these narratives as national or provincial statistics, without the close look enjoyed by Tehranis or heads of state. This paper shifts the focus to Iran’s villages by examining the modern public health history of Khuzestan (southwest Iran), especially after rural services began to expand in 1958. Although plans for modern medical services in Iran date back to at least the early 19th century, no broad program for addressing rural public health in Khuzestan surfaced until the late 1950s. Even then, the primary goal of the health program was not to alleviate rural morbidity and raise the standard of living for the sake of villagers themselves. I argue that Khuzestani villagers desired modern medical services but the state health program’s roots in national economic goals (rather than social well-being) and detached, top-down decision-making led to the uneven distribution of services and the violation of personal agency. Khuzestan’s rural populations only gained access to health care after the Pahlavi government viewed them as potentially economically beneficial, and the public health program it instituted prioritized societal control over community wellness. As a result, health program results were uneven: village agents forced thousands of residents to undergo mass chemotherapy treatments to prevent water-borne parasites while other Khuzestanis were unable to access clinics built within their own communities. Born from a systemic imperative to control the masses and increase national prestige, government agents attempted to impose a vision of an orderly and hygienic society in Khuzestan divorced from residents’ actual needs and desires. This aspect of state intrusion into village life has been overlooked as historians of modern rural Iran often focused on the land tenure effects of the White Revolution initiatives begun in 1963. The Plan Organization of Iran partnered with the Development and Resources Corporation (United States) to institute these programs before Iranian ministries assumed primary responsibility for them in the mid-1960s. This paper uses DRC archival records and village studies conducted by Iran’s Ministry of Education and Tehran University to bring a richer picture of Iran’s villages into historical focus while also contributing to the small but growing literature on the environmental history of Iran.

Through investigation of Iranians’ collective expressions of happiness and sadness in the era of post-1979 Islamic Revolution, I argue that these feelings are extremely politicized in such a way that they have become the signifiers of individuals’ political and social identity and sites for collective political contestation and resistance. As the result of globalization and the spread of neoliberal ideologies and values, the concept of happiness has become bold in the Iranians social value system in the past few years. Happiness and its symbols “as a technique of living well” which is only imagined possible through the neoliberal Western way of living, have become the signifiers of liberal, progressive, and modern individuals in Iran. On the other hand, collective mourning ceremonies that have been inseparable components of the life of a Shi’i Iranians for centuries are perceived as purely Islamic and therefore looked upon as something backward and futile by the “modern” Iranians. In order to study the shifts in happiness and mourning discourses in Iran, I investigate and analyze three national events; the summer water pistol fights of 2011 that were organized through social media in a few major cities and which were all subject to a police crackdown, the arrest of six young men and women who created a tribute to Pharrell’s global "Happy" campaign in May 2014, and the Iran-South Korea soccer qualifier for the 2018 World Cup in October 2016. For each site of inquiry, I study the state media coverage of the events, the oppositional rhetoric against state violence, and participant and victims’ statements and interviews. I compare conversations around these major events to the state’s systematic attack on private social gatherings in the earlier years after 1979 Revolution. This comparison reveals the ways in which these events are framed and discussed differently by both the state and the people; once discussed and fought against through the lens of religion, now understood and argued on neoliberal grounds.

Historians are encouraged to look to the archive a foremost site for constructing events of the past. However, in examining 20th century Iran, this approach brings about an incomplete depiction of national landscape in transformation. Tracing documentation practices from the fall of the Qajar family to the rise of Khomeini, this research argues that oral histories - a stigmatized medium for historians - remain imperative to chronicling the political, social, and ideological developments absent from the written court histories and archives of Iran. In the case of Iran, cultural reproductions of memory are rich and legitimate sources for comprehending historical experience. The context of state-sponsored documentation practices, mass censorship, and suppression of testimony vaguely in opposition to the Shah affirm the tenets of archival theory contending the archive to be a site of constructed narrative. The epistemological foundations of new historicism affirm the field's urgent need to deconstruct the networks of power involved in narrative production. The Revolution triggered an exponential surge of oral history projects. The multiple initiatives offer thousands of pages of transcripts and hundreds of hours of recorded tape illustrating experience otherwise unchronicled. Retrospective oral interviews privilege the voices of activists, women, and racial and religious minorities whose accounts provide insight into events including the 1963 pro-Khomeini demonstrations, vast persecution of Baha'is, and omnipresent instances of disappearance, torture, and murder by SAVAK. Collected interviews are pivotal in reshaping historical discourse of not only the social landscape, but the political. During the nearly 40-year reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi there was one vision projected on the international stage: that of the Shah. Due to the nature of his authoritarian rule, dialogue with his foremost advisors and politicians provide insight to the Shah's monarchial strategies, concerns, and constraints otherwise not privy to documentation. Multi-lingual, open-access offerings enhance global understanding of the norms, concerns, and constraints which shaped and continue to shape Iran. This case illustrates oral histories as a vital medium for accessing historical knowledge which both contrasts and negates existing accounts. It is only through embracing narrative platforms outside sites of formal, written documentation that the scholar and inquisitive individual alike can best comprehend the Iranian domestic and transnational landscape past and present. Furthermore, lessons learned are applicable to other countries of the region and beyond where censorship and exclusionary documentation practices remain utilized as political forces.