Labor & Industry in Iran: 1850-1941

In the nineteenth century, Iranian reformers wanted to create an independent, modern state that could stand on its own feet. However, constrained by foreign influence, ignorance, and inexperience, their efforts at industrialisation were an expensive failure. When a modernising regime took over the country in 1925, it began the most interesting example of a state-directed effort at economic organisation in the Middle East. Iran was able to lift itself up by its bootstraps by financing its own very capital intensive industrialisation program without borrowing from abroad. But the people of Iran paid for their nation’s modernisation through heavy taxation, bad living conditions and dictatorial rule. And although unionisation of labour failed, and bad working conditions, low wages and lack of labour laws remained, the much reviled Reza Shah had ironically been able to realise the dreams of the nineteenth and early-twentieth-century reformers.