The Environmental Context of the Tobacco Protest in Nineteenth-Century Iran

• In Event: The Middle East's Global Ecologies: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean World

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ecological context of a protest movement that challenged the British administration of the tobacco industry in Iran in 1890-92. In some ways comparable to the Boston Tea Party, the Tobacco Protest marks the beginning of a revolutionary movement that led eventually to the establishment of a parliamentary government in Qajar Iran in 1905. Drawing on several years of archival research in and outside of the Middle East, this presentation discusses some of the most neglected causes of popular mobilization in 1890-2.

The article engages with the literature on the ecological context of protest in revolutionary America, France, and China, and contends that the leading groups in the Tobacco Protest (i.e., the merchants, the landed elites, the religious groups, and the secular radicals) objected to the changing political economy of the region that gave a colonial power undue control over the natural resources of their country.

More important, the presentation demonstrates that the working and underclass population, which were by far the majority of people taking part in the protest, were motivated by a set of bread-and-butter grievances that had more to do with the changing ecology of Qajar Iran in this period. Rather than “selling their country to the British,” people expected their government to address the ongoing public health crisis, the terrible consequences of extreme weather conditions that disrupted the everyday life of average people, or the intermittent food shortage and famine that had as much to do with recurrent flood, droughts, and locust attacks as with price inflation, hoarding, price-gouging, and other forms of market manipulation.

In explicating the political ecology of the earliest national protest movement in Iran, this paper reviews the terrible effects of climatic stress, fatal epidemics, and a political economy that had long pauperized large segments of the population.

Author

• Ranin Kazemi, San Diego State University