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2 results

  • 2 - “We Have Done Nothing”

  • from Part I
  • Gregory Brew, Yale University, Connecticut
  • Book:
    Petroleum and Progress in Iran
    Published online:
    15 December 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022, pp 53-85

  • Summary

    In the wake of the Azerbaijan Crisis, the United States supported the Pahlavi development program, the Seven-Year Plan, masterminded by Abolhassan Ebtehaj, the country’s premier developmentalist. Assistance came from proxy groups, particularly the World Bank. The bank neglected to provide loans until Ebtehaj and the shah agreed to place the plan under foreign management. Primary financial support for the plan was to come from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. But negotiations failed to produce an agreement that would increase Iran’s revenues. The rise of an Iranian petro-nationalist movement, an economic crisis, and political paralysis within the Pahlavi government coalesced in 1950, and despite a late intervention the United States and its allied proxies failed to rescue the plan or the shah’s government from succumbing to the nationalization campaign of nationalist leader Mohammed Mosaddeq in early 1951.

Petroleum and Progress in Iran
  • Oil, Development, and the Cold War
  • Gregory Brew
  • Published online:
    15 December 2022
    Print publication:
    22 December 2022
  • From the 1940s to 1960s, Iran developed into the world's first 'petro-state', where oil represented the bulk of state revenue and supported an industrializing economy, expanding middle class, and powerful administrative and military apparatus. Drawing on both American and Iranian sources, Gregory Brew outlines how the Pahlavi petro-state emerged from a confluence of forces – some global, some local. He shows how the shah's particular form of oil-based authoritarianism evolved from interactions with American developmentalists, Pahlavi technocrats, and major oil companies, all against the looming backdrop of the United States' Cold War policy and the coup d'etat of August 1953. By placing oil at the centre of the Cold War narrative, Brew contextualises Iran's pro-Western alignment and slide into petrolic authoritarianism. Synthesising a wide range of sources and research methods, this book demonstrates that the Pahlavi petro-state was not born, but made, and not solely by the Pahlavi shah.