Newcomen in Iran

Newcomen and his small entourage arrived in the Qajar port town of Jask on the Sea of Oman on October 21, 1904. He was accompanied by two fellow officers: B.E. Luffman, who served as the mission’s vice president, and P.F. Ryan, who dealt with note-taking and general logistics as the secretary. They traveled with a small Indian guard and brought with them their own horses, food, supplies, personal effects, and samples of Indian manufactures to show to potential trade partners and offer as gifts to government officials. The mission was well-prepared but by no means self-sufficient, as it arrived relying on promises of favorable treatment and support from a network of British consular offices scattered throughout major towns, including Kirman, Yazd, and Shiraz, in the southern provinces of Qajar Iran. From the beginning, though, the mission ran headlong into a web of obstruction. The first instance came not from the Qajar government itself, but from Belgian customs officials at the port city of Jask on a small peninsula along the Gulf of Oman. The Belgian government had been in control of customs in Iran since 1898 as part of a reformist venture in which Belgium promised to make the customs process more systematic, orderly, and lucrative. The immediate success in boosting receipts led the Belgian government to expand its authority to operate with nearly total autonomy, along with similar schemes to reorganize the treasury, postal service, and eventually even various public health measures.Footnote ⁶ The Belgian authorities at Jask exercised their authority to simply confiscate the mission’s goods at the port and disarm their Indian guard.

The mission had the added misfortune of arriving during a terrible outbreak of epidemic cholera. A system of quarantine was in place, particularly for travelers by sea from India, where the cholera epidemic originated. The mission’s members were therefore held in quarantine for more than two weeks. Repeated telegraphic correspondence from India indicating the nature of their work made little difference. The Belgian customs agents held them up for weeks until they were finally given permission to enter the country. The mission did not meet up with their local military attaché until November 25, 1904, more than a month after their arrival, to begin their procession towards Kirman. It was an inauspicious beginning to a trip that was plagued with disasters and frustrations for the commission.

Newcomen, Luffman, and Ryan had laid out a plan on paper to travel through the major cotton producing areas of the southern provinces of Iran, across deserts and mountain ranges, but were totally unprepared for the reality of the physical geography of the country on the ground. Newcomen complained endlessly about the inhospitable landscape and decided that without an engineer, it would be no use to travel through rugged lands populated by “wild and poverty-stricken nomads.” Instead, the mission changed course, went through Bam and Narmashir to Kirman city, and traveled from there to Yazd in March. While in Yazd, Luffman and Ryan became extremely ill and were unable to travel for some time. Newcomen was then laid up for a time when he broke his left leg above the ankle. Even more serious, their forward guard was fired on shortly after departing Yazd and one of their Iranian cavalrymen received a severe flesh wound to his leg. The mission regrouped and made its way west from Yazd to Shiraz along roads more suitable for wheeled transportation and with greater available water and forage. The mission’s members had no further incidents with local tribal groups.Footnote ⁷ After spending some time in Shiraz, which had ample supplies, fresh water, and firewood, they made the final push to the Persian Gulf across less favorable trails (one described as “more of an avalanche track than a road”), commenting frequently in their itinerary about the lack of clean water and supplies along the route.Footnote ⁸ The mission concluded its journey at the port city of Bushire and departed for India in May 1905, having spent more than five months traveling through the southern Qajar provinces.

None of the mission’s accidents or misfortunes made it into the report. The gory details of broken limbs, prolonged illnesses, and gunshot wounds appear as a side note ten years later in J.G. Lorimer’s Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf. Footnote ⁹ In addition to filling in some detail on the mission’s undocumented challenges, Lorimer also gives some background on the mission itself in the context of the development of British commercial interests in the Persian Gulf. Lorimer notes that the introduction of new transportation and communication technologies in the closing decades of the 19th century had prompted changes in British policy. Steamships and telegraph lines cut the time involved in transporting goods and getting information on market conditions. This improved prospects for increased trade, which the British government was eager to control to advance its political influence in the region and hold off the advance of European competitors. Throughout all of this, the Russian consul in Tehran spread suspicion that the commercial mission was really a British military reconnaissance mission, a rumor the British legation had to continually quash.Footnote ¹⁰ This mission was wrapped up in a colonial project to absorb regions outside of formal imperial networks into their global commercial networks. To advance their trade interests, the British government first had to transform the simplify the complex processes of production, consumption, and exchange in Iran into a set of statistics and data points so they could see and intervene into them. In 1903, in order to engage in “the study of trade questions on the spot,” the British government had sent a small Advisory Committee on Commercial Intelligence under H.W. MacLean, formerly the manager of the Imperial Bank of Persia.Footnote ¹¹ The MacLean mission prepared three reports detailing the ins and outs of the customs system, the commercial situation of Iran, and a report on trade with Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait. Although full of valuable information on local manufacturing and trade, Percy Sykes complained to Lord Curzon in the India Office that MacLean’s itinerary through Iran’s major commercial centers in the north neglected the strategically important southern provinces near the Persian Gulf. The Newcomen mission was born out of this desire to advance British trade and fill an important gap in the commercial knowledge available to British Indian merchants after the MacLean report.

Newcomen arrived at a moment of intense political turmoil around Iran and Eurasia. Concerns over the state of the country framed around concessions, the next two years would see revolutionary movements triumph in both the Russian and Qajar empires with the aid of workers and reform-minded elites. In fact, a very broad coalition of opponents to the Qajars, which included such diverse elements as conservative religious scholars and modernist intellectuals, united around a shared discontent over how the government was handling the empire’s wealth. The modernist press in the first decade of the twentieth century engaged in a debate using the language of nationalism to advance political and cultural reforms. A significant but often underappreciated aspect of this literature is the related question of who ought to control the wealth produced by Iranian labor and Iranian land.Footnote ¹² In papers such as Bahar (Spring), Ihtiyaj (Needs), and Musavat (Equality), writers decried the government’s inability to manage inflation and blamed growing poverty and inequality in Iran on the granting of concessions and trade agreements that, in their view, siphoned off the nation’s wealth and handed it over to foreign capitalists. The remedy suggested in the modernist press was the creation of a representative parliament to share power and check the absolute authority of the shah, ensuring that the management of trade and development would serve the nation’s interests rather than those of the court alone.Footnote ¹³ Reformists drew together current discussions of nationalism, development (abadi), and political economy into a powerful critique of Qajar absolutism centered around the nature of wealth, and how Iran’s external trade relationships worked towards, or against, the national interests.Footnote ¹⁴ The modernist press in the first decade of the twentieth century engaged in a debate using the language of nationalism to advance political and cultural reforms.Footnote ¹⁵

In many ways, Iran’s southern provinces along the Persian Gulf were the focal point in debates over developing and protecting national wealth in the face of global commercial entanglements. Economic historians have argued that the expansion of British trade created a pattern of production and trade in the south of Iran that favored the interests of British capitalists over those of local producers. Promoting the export of raw materials and import of manufactured goods narrowed the range of viable economic activities to those that fed inputs to industrial production overseas. This perspective suggests that what is good for individual producers creates a structural imbalance over time that produces development in the industrializing West while simultaneously producing underdevelopment in the global south through “peripheralization and dependence.”Footnote ¹⁶ Foran argues that this process was “key to understanding why social movements since about 1890 took the anti-foreign, anti-state forms that they did,” including the Constitutional Revolution of 1906.Footnote ¹⁷ Shahbaz Shahnavaz, writing within the same dependency paradigm, wrote a detailed study of the Karun River concession, which granted Great Britain the right to transform the southwestern provinces into a conduit for British trade goods. “As a natural outcome of this process the economy of the south, particularly that of Khuzestan, gradually became an appendage of the international capitalist system.”Footnote ¹⁸ The “opening” of Iran to global, especially British, trade was wrapped up in projects to supplement or replace overland routes with maritime trade through the Persian Gulf.Footnote ¹⁹

Camille Cole has written extensively on a series of British-led development projects in Ottoman Iraq which align neatly with their ambitions in the neighboring Qajar lands. In her exploration of the Lynch Brothers’ efforts to create a steamship service on the Tigris and Euphrates in the late 19^th century and the Hindiyyah Barrage project (1911-13) to dam the Euphrates River, Cole has shown how engineering projects brought together funding and expertise from the Ottoman state and private firms, with British imperial support, to help facilitate an expansion of British merchant capital from private firms. Newcomen’s mission was part of this larger goal in the Near East to link what Cole has called zones of “informal empire” to global British networks. Clearing the way for the flow of British capital required remaking the landscape itself using British scientific and engineering expertise. This first required on-the-ground information and local connections.Footnote ²⁰

As the Newcomen mission moved through the country, its members engaged with local officials, elites, and merchants, but met with a great deal of skepticism. Despite the formal declaration of the mission’s roaring success in the pages of the Newcomen report and Lorimer’s Gazetteer, Newcomen privately said otherwise. In a brief note he authored as an informal commentary on the mission, now tucked into the report in the UK National Archives, he complained bitterly: “I have experienced no little difficulty in extracting information from the Persian traders, who, in this part of the country, seem strangely disinclined to give any, though they are ready enough to talk.”Footnote ²¹ More generally, though, the collection of the types of data the mission wished to compile to represent and intervene in the Iranian market was difficult to produce. As Newcomen phrased the situation,

The Qajar court arranged for a military attaché to accompany and keep tabs on the mission. Newcomen credited these Qajar officials with helping deal with logistical challenges along the way.Footnote ²³ Newcomen credited the consular assistant Khan Bahadur Asghar Ali for helping to make introductions with local elites and arranging transportation and supplies. The types of information Newcomen was interested in were valuable assets to the local elites the mission encountered. Local elites were valuable to the court for their prestige and social connections. They owed their positions to holding control over religious institutions, administrative offices, tax collection, and the maintenance of order. They essentially traded in local knowledge to maintain their social power, acquire offices and stipends, and negotiate power with the court. This was partially an environmental problem for the Qajars, who were unable to muster the resources to entrench themselves in lightly populated provincial communities scattered across more than a million square kilometers and relied instead on local elites as intermediaries, who in turn carried out most functions of local governance.Footnote ²⁴ This was particularly true in southern Iran, where it took weeks to travel between the capital and places such as Yazd, Kirman, or Shiraz. The mission was attempting to tap directly into those information networks to gather statistics and try to make the place legible to potential investors, but that would equally undermine their monopoly on local knowledge. Despite the challenges the mission entailed, Newcomen prepared a fascinating report full of suggestions on how to improve the productivity of the lands, peoples, and burgeoning industries of Iran as a useful trade partner to British India.

“The future prospect of Persia is in the hands of the engineer”

In addition to the difficulty gathering information, the Newcomen mission also encountered a natural environment they quickly came to see as the chief obstacle to Iran’s development. By “development,” of course, Newcomen meant simply increasing the sheer volume of production. This required improving land, labor, and infrastructure, drawn together into a system that produced a steady export trade for British India, while also creating a market for British Indian produce in Iran. Newcomen saw the vast, arid landscapes of southern Iran, spotted with small farming villages and expansive plains inhabited by mobile animal herders, linked together by little more than unpaved roadways, as a major restraint on its economic potential and ability to produce a modern work force. Ultimately, though, he viewed nature’s impediments as something that could be overcome by modern British science and engineering. Perhaps the most interesting pieces of the Report of the Commercial Mission are the recommendations it put forward for how to engineer a modern form of nature in Iran to transform it into a useful space to produce raw exports and receive British Indian manufactures. In the opening to his report, Newcomen expressed in no uncertain terms that the development of commerce required intervening and reshaping the nature and geography of the region, a task he was not wholly prepared to accomplish or advise on.

Newcomen’s words on progress, or “advancement,” are worth reflecting on. In the early political economy literature current at the turn of the 20th century, thinkers tended to view wealth as the ability to develop “value” or “capital,” produced through the intermixture of natural resources and human labor. In Adam Smith’s labor theory of value, for instance, he viewed labor as “the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities.”Footnote ²⁶ Liberal critiques of Smith, such as Sismonde de Sismondi’s Nouveaux Principes d’Économie Politique and Marx’s Das Kapital, built from the same premise even while offering strong normative critiques. In the 19th-century literature on Manifest Destiny in the American West, Frederick Jackson Turner used a version of the labor theory of value in “The Frontier in American History,” arguing that the immense natural wealth of the American West allowed for people (always White and always men, of course) willing to battle the elements of nature to make their own way and employ their labor in building civilization on the frontier.Footnote ²⁷ Boosters touted that the fertile Great Plains, the vast northern old growth forests, and the mines of California were awash in natural wealth to such an extent that only a relatively small input of labor was required to gather up nature’s bounty and make one’s fortune. Iran presented the opposite scenario to Newcomen, where the balance of labor to natural wealth was reversed. It would take more than hard work and grit to produce a modern society here; it was a battle against nature itself in the name of progress and development. This would mean fundamentally reshaping the landscape to make the arable lands, forests, pastures, and mines yield value in the face of labor.

Making a useful space out of Iran required three main elements in Newcomen’s view: improvements in irrigation, a reliable system of roadways, and a modern labor force. The first issue, that of water, was the fundamental one in his view. “Irrigation is, as I have said, Persia’s greatest need. Without it she becomes a desert.”Footnote ²⁹ Newcomen argued that the desert was slowly encroaching on arable lands, as “each year sees an extension of the arid zone and an addition to the dreary number of ruined and abandoned villages and Kanats [qanats].” He was concerned that the lack of water and poor agricultural practices stunted a potentially lucrative annual harvest. “The agriculturalist,” he said, “has a constant fight against nature for his scanty crop.”Footnote ³⁰ The problem was, again, one for which Newcomen saw a remedy in science and engineering.

He was especially critical of the system of subterranean wells (qanats) that tapped into the water table in the highlands and delivered a stream of water through underground channels to villages below, sometimes over dozens of kilometers. Qanats were carefully engineered by teams of excavators called muqannis to a fraction of a degree––just enough of a gradient to convey water using the force of gravity, but not so steep as to degrade the channels. The system of qanats on the Iranian Plateau was an ingenious solution to the problem of surface water scarcity and provided insurance against drought and, as subterranean wells, against evaporation in the summer heat. Without qanats, most agriculture in Iran would simply have been impossible. Newcomen saw in them little more than a traditional method to be improved or replaced by modern science, as he was convinced that “the desert encroaches now because the Kanat irrigation is so primitive.” He suggested instead that the focus should be on damming up surface water.Footnote ³²

While the availability of water would address the issue of productivity, Newcomen was equally concerned about the ability of Iran’s transportation infrastructure to get goods to market. “After irrigation and reorganization, roads are the prime necessity.”Footnote ³⁴ What good is there in producing more goods if there is no efficient way to get them to market? At the turn of the 20th century, most goods were transported on the backs of animals along dirt roadways or across open tracts of plains or deserts. Many of these routes were seasonal, as they became impassable when it rained. Pack animals also rely on the availability of forage, which was irregular and sometimes caused lengthy delays. These existing roads were a start, Newcomen said, adding: “there are places on these caravan routes however, where Nature has failed to make a passable roadway, and where it would be well if Science stepped in.”Footnote ³⁵ Like many political economists of the day, he assumed that trade would flow freely and wealth would increase if blockages in the system were cleared. In this case, it meant improving roadways to overcome Iran’s physical geography and climate to reduce the time and expense involved in moving goods from their point of production to market. “The construction of such roads would cheapen traffic, would decrease the time occupied and damage at present incurred in carriage of goods, and would, in the not distant future cause an appreciable increase in trade.”Footnote ³⁶ Newcomen further advised for improvements to the telegraphic network and to enhance road security to combat the uncertainty stunting trade.Footnote ³⁷

At the Persian Gulf port city of Bandar ʿAbbas, Newcomen opined that “the modernizing and development of the Port, together with the development of the immense region of which it is the mouth, will spell great things for Persia, bringing, as they will, wealth to the Shah and his subjects.” This speaks directly to his views of the goals of the physical transformation of Iran’s geography, namely to facilitate the production and then export of raw goods to British India for the benefit not just of the British Empire, but also, in his calculation, Iranian producers. He suggested that the Qajar government “see their own true interests” and develop their irrigation works, transportation and communication infrastructure, and security to that end.Footnote ³⁸ All impediments were “capable of easy alteration.”Footnote ³⁹

This conception of a nature directing a flow of trade goods, impeded by natural obstacles such as topography and climate, has a long history in both the field of political economy and British colonial thinking. Fourteen years earlier, in 1890, Lord Curzon had given a lecture to the Royal Geographical Society on what he called the “commercial geography” of southwest Persia, which shared a similar program. In that paper, Curzon’s goal was to incorporate what he called the “new science” developing within geography, which included “political reference” alongside “physical configuration.” Specifically, he suggested that British interests in Iran could be steadily advanced by strategic interventions into the environment that produced desired social effects. According to Curzon, this process would go through stages: reviving irrigation and pasture lands would allow for an increase in population, which would in turn create a market for British and Indian goods, and then infrastructure and technologies—such as steamships and railways—would be built to link the two more closely. His closing remarks are striking, as he said:

Here, Curzon was referring to the Karun road project that had been taken up by the new head of the British legation, Henry Drummond Wolf. The goal of this project was to unleash the productive potential of central Iran by opening the valve of the Karun River and then connecting it by road to Isfahan, all of this with an eye towards entrenching British interests deep into the interior of Iran.

This speech by Curzon is tucked away in the archives of the Royal Geographical Society in London and was derided at the time as not really being “geography.” There is a note from an elderly Henry Rawlinson tucked into the file that sums up its reception well. “This paper like everything written by Mr. Curzon is interesting and instructive but it contains little Geography and no announcement of discoveries or the exploration of new countries.”Footnote ⁴¹ In the years after 1890, however, Lord Curzon steadily climbed the foreign service ladder and was serving as Viceroy of India (1899–1905) at the time of the Newcomen mission, with his eye on brining Iran closer into the fold of British interests. Discussions over transforming the environment, building irrigation works, and constructing roads were truly normative discussions over the future of Iranian society. Development schemes, in this case, very literally meant a material remaking of the country’s environmental conditions, which had come to pervade British thinking by 1904.

As an added layer, it must be said that Newcomen did not have the highest opinion of Iranians. Using science and engineering to craft a modern environment in Iran would do little good, in his view, without a modern labor force to carry out the work. Newcomen described the peasants as industrious but directed by hopelessly backward elites. He was blunt in his assessment that the upper classes were made up of lazy, feckless, and apathetic people, working in collusion with a corrupt system of government. Of the landowners and administrators, he said “their brains and manhood were sapped centuries ago, and opium use and vice have finished them off.” Maybe sensing how his words sounded, he added, “I trust I may be forgiven for going into this subject briefly, as it bears greatly on the question of Trade Development in Persia.”Footnote ⁴² Given this attitude about Iranian elites, it is perhaps not surprising that the mission was met with guarded silence by many of their local interlocutors.

The counternarrative

Among the group traveling with the Newcomen mission was a military officer assigned by the Qajar court by the name of Mirza Riza Sarbaz Muhandis. As his name suggests, Mirza Riza was an engineer (muhandis) and an army officer (sarbaz). Otherwise, he is a strangely anonymous figure.Footnote ⁴³ Mirza Riza does not say much of anything about himself in the text except to relate his order to serve as a liaison to assist the mission by providing security, helping with logistics, and making introductions to prominent people. He was clearly a man of some distinction and trust in high-level circles at the Qajar court. He was appointed directly by some of Muzaffar al-Din Shah’s closest advisors, including Prime Minister ʿAyn al-Dawla, the reformist advisor Mirza Nasir Allah Khan Mushir al-Dawla, and Minister of War Amir Khan Sardar Sipah Salar.Footnote ⁴⁴ The Qajar government was understandably wary of the activities of a group of British commercial agents roaming about in the remote corners of its southern provinces, discussing trade arrangements with people of influence. The mission already had plenty of logistical help from the Qajars, though, including an Iranian servant from the Yazd consulate to manage logistics, a physician employed by the Kirman consulate to attend to medical needs, and local guides and problem solvers picked up along the way. It seems that Mirza Riza’s purpose there was primarily to serve as the Qajar court’s eyes and ears while serving as a military escort. Mirza Riza prepared a detailed counternarrative to the mission as it traveled through southern Iran in which he reported back on the activities of Newcomen, Luff, and Ryan, along with a significant amount of commentary often openly critical of the goals and recommendations of the commercial mission. The travelogue Mirza Riza produced is especially thought-provoking when read as a comparative piece to the Newcomen report, highlighting tensions between Great Britain’s global commercial ambitions and the interests of the Qajars as a tributary state.

Mirza Riza met up with the Newcomen mission shortly after it left Jask, joining the group just outside of Saʿidabad in Kirman on November 25, 1904. His first impression of the group was that they were a little out of their depth, and totally dependent on local guides provided by local consulates and a handful of servants brought along from India. Among the three British leaders of the mission, he singled out P.F. Ryan, the secretary, as being especially smart and perceptive, claiming that he did most of the actual work of managing logistical issues and keeping a record of information on the mission during its six-month adventure through Kirman, Yazd, Fars, and back to the Persian Gulf at Bushire.Footnote ⁴⁵ Unlike the mission report, which was organized thematically along with dubious statistical data compiled from local sources, Mirza Riza’s travelogue is a chronological account following the progress of the mission. He made his own survey of the towns and villages they passed, noting population levels, what sorts of things were being produced there, and evaluated obstacles and prospects for trade.

Of particular note, Mirza Riza encouraged landowners and merchants to be on guard with members, not to overshare with the eyes and ears of a foreign imperial power who may not have Iranians’ best interests in mind, gently undermining the mission’s access to information, as Newcomen complained bitterly about in his report. Mirza Riza noted, for example, that the mission’s gift-giving policy carried with it an opening, or even an implied agreement, that invited in further British influence. The Qajars also used gift-giving (pishkish) to create and maintain relationships with elites. As Assef Ashraf put it, “gifts, tributes, and honors were the backbone of the Qajar state and society,” connecting the court to elites and helping maintain the networks of power they relied on throughout the empire. In his study of gift-giving in the opening decades of the Qajar period, Ashraf estimates that gift-giving alone may have accounted for half of the empire’s revenue.Footnote ⁴⁶ It was well-understood that gifts were never free but carried expectations of future service. Mirza Riza noted that, as the goal of the mission was to make British Indian manufactures look appealing to potential buyers, the mission’s members brought with them a variety of sample goods, everything from pictures, to canes, to gold watches, but warned that “accepting gifts carriers with it either an explicit or implicit agreement to engage in commerce.” He argued that merchants were wary of entering into such arrangements with an industrial power “because commercial exchange means sapping the power from a country that does not have industries and factories, or at least not to such a degree.” The extent to which Mirza Riza was encouraging such views is unclear, but he did add in the next line: “patriotic Iranians through zealous love of their monarch were also conscious of putting up good appearances and kept their eyes wide open knowing that their actions were always being observed from all sides.” As the liaison from the court to accompany the mission, the implication here is he was the observer.Footnote ⁴⁷ As Mirza Riza rightly noted, the commercial mission was hardly a dialogue between buyers and sellers on equal footing. He observed that commerce carried the political power of the British Empire and threatened to drive existing inequalities deeper. The most potent symbol of that disparity was the factory–the site of the industrial manufacturing that differentiated wealthy countries from poor countries.

The discussion over industrialization came to the forefront when the mission arrived in Kirman city. Here, Mirza Riza observed that the town was somewhat depressed, with costs for land and food no longer as cheap as they used to be. However, he saw great potential for what modernists called “progress” (taraqqi), suggesting that the city could host factories and establish an industrial manufacturing sector with a little support from the court. While this support could certainly take the form of direct investment, the bulk of the conversation centered around infrastructural development and roadways. Members of the mission shared many of the same goals for improving transportation and communication systems in southern Iran. However, Mirza Riza was critical of the mission’s recommendations for building roads through remote areas, as such desert trade routes might only be good for an extractive system carrying goods efficiently out to the Persian Gulf. He suggested that such routes were likely not to be of much use, and instead advocated that investment be directed towards projects with a greater likelihood of improving local conditions and increasing the wealth of the country.Footnote ⁴⁸ Mirza Riza instead prioritized the creation of a system of roads that linked major towns to local points of production to carry an internal flow of grain and raw materials.

Discussions over how to support the growth of the textile industry at Yazd offer a clear example of the normative differences between the goals of the mission supporting the British Empire and those of Mirza Riza Muhandis as the representative of a tributary land empire. While Newcomen sought to expand the export of raw materials for textile production abroad, Mirza Riza encouraged scaling up the local textile industry. Mirza Riza argued that Yazd was already a bourgeoning industrial center: “people bring goods from all over Iran to Yazd, and from Yazd to all its corners. The holders of wealth are inclined towards commerce and industry if the government’s agents would simply entrust to them the introduction of factories.” He expressed this as an urgent issue of national autonomy, noting that domestic industries would ensure that the country would never have to rely on shabby Russian or Indian imports.Footnote ⁴⁹ He advocated for promoting investment into making Yazd the Bombay of Iran, rather than exporting Iran’s raw materials to enhance the commercial power of British India.Footnote ⁵⁰ Patterns of investment should therefore be considered in terms of their potential for supporting a circulation of goods internally to promote domestic industry rather than extracting the raw goods to the Persian Gulf, draining off the country’s wealth and power in the process. Mirza Riza argued that there was already a thriving textile industry, but members of the mission refused to really see it and instead suggested diverting all thread to Bombay. Here, he accused the mission of having ill intentions, stating that supporting local industrial development is “both good for the merchants and good for the government.” Mirza Riza was basically proposing a protectionist policy, not so much through tariff rates or other such strategies bound up in international agreements, but by resisting suggestions to develop a certain physical transformation of the country’s geography through roads and infrastructure that would facilitate production and trade in an unfavorable way.Footnote ⁵¹

The distinctions between the two models of modernizing nature are especially apparent when it comes to the issue of labor. Members of the commercial mission complained endlessly about the lack of a modern work force in Iran, in much of the same language as oil executives would say in later decades about the available stock of Persian labor. “It is hopeless,” Newcomen writes, “for any Indian or English manufacturer to think of establishing works in Persia at present.” He blamed this on the inability of foreign nationals to own land, the poor state of infrastructure for transporting machinery, and, most serious of all, what he saw as the lack of an adequate local workforce. Labor, “while fairly cheap (though dearer than Indian) is inefficient and undisciplined to a degree hard to conceive.”Footnote ⁵² To Newcomen, the challenge of transforming Iran into a useful space for British imperialism involved not just transforming the land, but also in modernizing labor. He ultimately saw the environmental and cultural transformations of the country as intertwined, with properly oriented engineering projects creating both “commercial and, indeed, moral advancement.”Footnote ⁵³

Newcomen’s views on the populace and their government were no doubt influenced by the state of crisis the mission encountered in 1904. Newcomen arrived in midst of one of seven deadly waves of epidemic cholera that rampaged violently across the Qajar Empire.Footnote ⁵⁴ Disease served as an easy metaphor for the Qajars’ inability to overcome the challenges of nature and become its master.Footnote ⁵⁵ The effects were staggering. In addition to the death toll, easily in the hundreds of thousands, massive shocks to the labor market left large numbers of people unemployed, hungry, and on the move.Footnote ⁵⁶ Mirza Riza estimated that there were upwards of 20,000 displaced people in Kirman province, many of whom were seen begging for money and bread on the roadways.Footnote ⁵⁷ More than a few had succumbed to opium use.

The differing attitudes towards poverty and displacement get us to the heart of the distinctions between the two authors’ approaches to political ecology. Newcomen, for his part, was appalled by the beggars and the mullahs; one an unproductive lower class of lazy drug addicts and the other a group of unproductive elites. This “prevents surprise at the Kerman of today not being more prosperous than it is.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Mirza Riza, for his part, saw this as a consequence of poverty, famine, and disease. Rather than an immutable fact, the difficult conditions experienced by local people (and by extension their labor) had specific causes and could therefore conceivably be improved. Supporting local manufacturing was a priority for both Newcomen and Mirza Riza, but for the latter it was not simply about creating a modern labor force and boosting production, but for the good of the people themselves. That would flow upwards, in his view, to boosting productivity and state revenues. Similarly, the two men’s shared interests in improving access to fresh water and sanitation rested at the intersection of creating stable trade conditions and healthy communities.Footnote ⁶⁰

In a surprising number of cases like this, the two men found themselves similarly in agreement over the specific interventions they recommended, but in the pursuit of very different ideals. One prejudice the men shared was a view of the mobile pastoral communities as an obstacle to a modern society. As James Scott famously put it, “people who move around” tended to be targeted as enemies of settled states.Footnote ⁶¹ The mobility of these pastoral communities made them difficult to see, control, extract from, and intervene into, compounded by the fact that they had acquired significant arsenals of firearms. As representatives of Great Britain’s global commercial ambitions and the Qajars’ tributary land empire respectively, Newcomen and Mirza Riza framed these communities as a holdover of pre-modern times, now little more than “thieves and brigands” who disrupted transportation routes and stood in the way of progress.Footnote ⁶² Newcomen suggested paying them off by hiring them to patrol, rather than attack, roads. Mirza Riza was of the mind that disarming these communities and subordinating them to the will of the state would be a painful necessity. Creating a modern society meant supporting a certain type of subject that was useful to the systems of production and trade.

Developmentalism

Mirza Riza repeatedly pushed back against recommendations from the Newcomen mission that, in his view, would have simply directed an outflow of Iranian wealth to more powerful foreign actors. Like with the issue of tribalism, the interests of the British trade commission overlapped significantly with those of the Qajars’ tributary empire, but there were also clear points of tension. The Qajars had an interest in promoting taxable activities, such as trade, but saw the ultimate underlying goals differently. Above all, what is interesting about Mirza Riza’s narrative is how he highlights a contrasting vision for the future of his country along the lines of what would later be called “developmentalism.” That is, he sought to improve conditions for production and trade but in a way that would promote and protect the interests of local producers and merchants, rather than seeking an increase in trade in absolute terms as an end in itself.

One way of promoting local industries was to invest in strengthening the web of relationships between urban, rural, and pastoral communities, and prioritizing these internal networks over those flowing outward towards the Persian Gulf. Mirza Riza showed a particular interest in supporting the carpet manufacturing sector. Since the 1870s, investors had scaled up the cottage industry of carpet weaving to meet the growing demand for “Oriental rugs” among Europe’s middle and upper classes. The workshops financed by wealthy urban investors brought in fine goat’s wool from mobile pastoral communities, dye crops from rural farms, the expertise of master weavers, and the labor of the urban poor––often children working in horrific conditions.Footnote ⁶³ After exploring the carpet weaving operations in Yazd, Mirza Riza questioned Newcomen’s intentions of flooding the market with textiles from foreign producers. “Goods come to Yazd from all over Iran, and from Yazd to every corner of the country,” Mirza Riza observed. “If the grandees of the country supported this community in building factories, inclined as they are towards commerce and industry, there would be no Iranians in need of accepting the shabby textiles of Russia and India.”Footnote ⁶⁴ In this case, he saw greater benefit in strengthening local ties, all the way down to the points of production of basic inputs. “Why buy thread from Bombay when it’s available locally? The merchants themselves and the government alike make every effort towards general progress and development.”Footnote ⁶⁵

As a military engineer engaged with the commercial mission, Mirza Riza suggested various ways that science and engineering could be applied to overcome the obstacles presented by nature to augment local production and international trade. In contrast to Newcomen, though, Mirza Riza prioritized protecting local industries and serving the interests of Iranian laborers, merchants, and investors first and foremost. He even suggested many of the same basic interventions, such as roadways and irrigation works, but not with the end goal of supporting export trade; instead, Mirza Riza sought to support local production alongside military and administrative centralization. Where Newcomen saw potential industrial-agricultural outfits and an underdeveloped work force, Mirza Riza saw small farming communities beset by poverty and in need of greater support from the government. One of Newcomen’s main recommendations in his report was the need to support massive road construction efforts to connect centers of production in southern Iran—such as Bahramabad, Sirjan, and Yazd—more directly to port cities on the Persian Gulf. Mirza Riza noted in Sirjan that the town lay in the midst of a lush valley surrounded by pasture lands and was manned by only a handful of soldiers from the provincial army. He suggested that while a commercial road would be useful to improving transport, it would be even more valuable in allowing the Qajars to project their power more directly into pastoral lands, even allowing for the creation of a patronage system with the local tribes by hiring them to protect the roadways. Mirza Riza also argued that roads running in long, straight lines should be reconsidered in favor of routes linking up producers in the many settlements along the way and connecting them back to major towns and trade hubs.

Mirza Riza was also generally supportive of schemes to dam up scarce surface water near Rafsanjan. This was suggested by Newcomen as a way to boost productivity by delivering irrigation water directly to farmers. Mirza Riza highlighted the importance of projects like this to supporting the security of farmers suffering from recurring drought rather than the more abstract goal of boosting overall agricultural productivity—a small, but important, distinction.

The concept of an “economy” as something that government intervenes in or manages was not in currency in the first decade of the 20th century. Yet, we see in Mirza Riza’s text a vision for something just like that: careful interventions that can be made to promote productivity and trade, improve the labor force, reduce poverty and unemployment, increase the degree of administrative access and control, and raise revenues for the state. All of this required a very material, concrete process of deploying science and technology to transform nature and produce the desired effect. Mirza Riza detracts from Newcomen’s vision of an Iran producing raw materials for the global market, which required commercial and transportation infrastructure directed to the seas. Muhandis prioritized developing resource markets internally in a way that would benefit Iranian producers. It is hard not to see the foreshadowing of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution, in which questions over who should benefit from the wealth created by Iranian labor on Iranian land were pushed to the forefront of political discussions in the modernist press and activist circles.

The Constitutional Revolution (1906–11), which began shortly after the commercial mission’s departure, has been interpreted from a wide range of perspectives, from modernization theory to grassroots democratization, to its entanglement with transnational forces. However, all these interpretations return to a central issue: the struggle over who has the right to benefit from the wealth produced by Iran’s land and labor. In this case, we have two contrasting visions of what that would look like, both expressed around using science and engineering to intervene and remake nature to do so—either by tying the country more tightly together and promoting the welfare of the people, or by reorienting its roadways and irrigation systems to promote the production and flow of resources into the Persian Gulf. There is an element of economic nationalism in the Muhandis text that is unmistakable. He warned Iranians to be wary of the interests of British trade boosters, and that not all trade would be beneficial to Iranian communities, if such trade was structured in a way that served to siphon off resources rather than promote local industry. A telling anecdote in the text is that the commercial mission was trying to give out sample goods and souvenirs along the way, such as gold and silver watches, canes, photographs, and samples of tea, but that many people refused such gifts—no doubt an attitude Mirza Riza did not try to combat. The entire mission was dependent on the logistics of and communication with Indian and local guides who could speak Persian. He relates that many elites were concerned about the mission’s intent and hesitant to accept these gifts, as accepting might imply some form of agreement with the British. He adds: “the conduct of trade intends to carry with it power into a country without industry and factories—or rather one that has them but to a very limited degree.” Instead, Mirza Riza suggests that Iranians should pursue things that will be good for their country and avoid those that do harm.

Engineering a modern Iran

In the Foreign Office archives, Newcomen’s report is accompanied by a critical note from Evelyn Mountstuart Grant Duff, Secretary of the Legation at Tehran and the chief British diplomat in Iran. Duff is best known as the man who opened the British consular grounds to asylum seekers during Iran’s 1906 Constitutional Revolution a few months later. Duff read the report carefully and expressed serious doubts that a meaningful transformation of the country could take place with the Qajars in power.

Duff compiled replies from consular officials stationed throughout the southern Qajar provinces to transmit back to the India Office. Most consuls took some offense at Newcomen’s criticism that they were not properly acquainted with business practices and not advocating vigorously enough for British commercial interests. These consuls argued that their roles were essentially political, and it was imperative to maintain positive relationships rather than push too aggressively or nakedly for British trade supremacy. That delicate diplomatic work was, in their view, directly supporting commercial matters over the long term. As consul Percy Cox put it, “under the conditions at present prevailing in Persia, matters commercial and political are, of necessity, inextricably interwoven.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Cox agreed with much of the rest of the report:

The consul at Bandar Abbas, Mr. Spring Rice, concurred that “in the absence of improved facilities, any considerable expansion of trade can perhaps scarcely be looked for.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Spring Rice specifically mentioned port improvements, roadways, and telegraph lines as key to British commercial dominance. This, he argued, would not just facilitate trade, but “Persia’s crude ideas of business methods would gradually disappear owing to his necessarily increased intercourse with business methods of the outer world.”Footnote ⁷⁰ A consensus had formed that remaking geography through infrastructural projects—including building roads, telegraph lines, and port facilities—would create the desired effect in both the land and habits of Iranians to advance British imperial ends.

The Qajar court was caught between British administrators’ expectations that the government reform Iran’s lands and peoples to support flourishing global trade, as a partner of global British commercial interests, and Iranian demands that transformations in productive relationships serve the interests of Iranians first and foremost. Newcomen’s recommendations essentially aimed to apply science and technology to overcome ecological constraints, reshape nature, and create a productive, modern work force out of the local population, but in a framework that favored British commercial and political interests. Newcomen frequently bemoaned not having an engineer on staff to advise on various recommendations he made along his circuit of southern Iran. The Qajar military liaison, Mirza Riza Muhandis, was indeed a trained military engineer and had intimate knowledge of land use, infrastructure, and commercial matters. He was actively translating, but also critiquing, the underlying conceptual framework of the commercial mission’s activities, with the crux of their disagreements existing in the realm of political ecology. Muhandis and the mission had mutual interests in improving conditions for production and trade, which involved reshaping nature in southern Iran, but the shape of those interventions and whose interests they should serve was the crux of their diversion. While Newcomen sought ways to increase the production and trade of raw materials through British commercial networks and create a fertile market for British imports, Mirza Riza Muhandis instead favored stitching together internal markets, supporting local industry, and attending to overcoming inequalities, both local and global. These issues were at the heart of the revolutionary struggle that began just months after the mission’s departure.