Mohammad Gholi Majd's book covers the history of Iran from 1919, when the British tried to force the Iranians to sign the highly unpopular Anglo–Persian Agreement, through 1930, when Reza Shah Pahlavi consolidated his power and managed to establish an arbitrary dictatorship. It mostly consists of a long series of quotations from U.S. documents that very frequently overlap. The author's narrative is awkwardly divided into sections in such a way that there are ruptures between them and gaps in information. In sum, Majd tells an incomplete story.

The story details a number of important episodes such as the coup of February 1921, Reza Khan's struggle to consolidate power in the early 1920s, and the change in the Persian monarchy that culminated in the crowning of Reza (by himself) as the founder of a new dynasty in Iran.

In the introduction, the author promises to explain the entire vicissitudes of Iranian history in terms of imperialist policy. He argues that Reza Khan, later Reza Shah, was always a puppet of British imperialism, installed in power by the British just as his son was put in power in 1941. The argument is rather flimsy because the British did not confiscate Reza's fortune after he was ousted.

Majd relies exclusively on U.S. State Department documentation, and although he states that he has no sympathy for the crocodile tears of Britain's jealous imperial partner, his not including other kinds of sources suggests otherwise. Evidence that the 1921 coup was a British design is largely circumstantial. Of course, Reza was Britain's perfect man. He could resist the advances of Soviet Russia while remaining friendly to the old imperial power. Yet British records that Majd should have consulted show clearly that London had no idea who the leaders of the coup were. We can only deduce that encouragement of the coup by British agents in Iran was not Foreign Office policy and that the agents may have gone beyond their prescribed duties.

In any case, that Reza got rid of the last remnants of British political influence in Iran does not appear to matter to anyone. It must be admitted, he did so under Soviet pressure. However, his heavy-handed nationalism was received with dismay by the Iranians, who never abandoned their belief in the great rumour of a Pahlavi–British coup in 1921. (Rumors of impending coups had been rife since the days of World War I in Iran. Even the Ottomans and the French were said to have had such plans.)

Majd's story has an obvious purpose, and that is to justify the deep sense of vulnerability and the violent anti-Western paranoia of the Iranian regime. It is now some two decades since prominent intellectuals such as Fred Halliday and Ervand Abrahamian set in motion an intellectual movement exposing the erroneousness of these sentiments and demonstrating how they have served as the main reasons behind internal repression in Iran. Yet Majd is no longer very easy to dismiss. It was only some years ago that George Bush rendered the entire intellectual movement obsolete and exacerbated the hard-line approach of the Iranian regime through his aggressive rhetoric and promises of a U.S. invasion of Iran. It must be admitted, a certain amount of sobriety has come to the fore. At the time of this writing, news of intense repression and practice of torture are rife in the Western media and the Internet, and that has put an end to the wishful thinking of a section of the opposition that hoped for reform and meaningful change from within the Iranian regime.

As a project that aims to cover the history of Iran from 1919 to 1930, Majd's study is rather inadequate. It is still useful to those who wish to know the American view of British policy in Iran, although there was much that the British did not share with them. The study would have been much more complete and coherent if the author had consulted works that at least partially cover the period—such as the excellent studies by Houshang Sabahi and Cyrus Ghani. As one might suspect by this point in the review, the book is void of a bibliography.