Iran Under Allied Occupation In World War II
The Bridge to Victory & A Land of Famine
By (author) Mohammad Gholi Majd
Publication date:
22 March 2016Length of book:
748 pagesPublisher
UPAISBN-13: 9780761867388
Occupied Iran in World War II became the most important supply route to Russia and source of fuel to the Allies. Having pledged to meet Iran’s “minimum needs”, the Allies commandeered the means of transport, seized food and fuel, severely restricted imports, forced Iran to print money, brought Polish refugees from Russia, and initially did little to contain the chaos and insecurity. The resulting famine and typhus epidemic of 1942-43 had claimed 4 million lives amounting to a quarter of the population. This was in addition to the 8-10 million lost in the Great Famine of 1917-19. Iran’s 1944 population was the same as 1900, a perfect case of a Malthusian Catastrophe. Having previously described the World War I famine, and using US diplomatic, military, and intelligence records, as well as primary British sources, Majd completes the task by also telling the story of the World War II Iranian famine.
Mohammad Gholi Majd’s latest book, which deals with food shortages and famine in Iran during the Second World War, and his previous work looking at the famine conditions experienced in Iran during the First World War, are welcome for the attention threat they focus on the much-neglected subject of the suffering of ordinary Iranians during the cataclysmic and often very violent upheavals which accompanied the arrival of modernity in Iran and the county’s incorporation into the emerging global economic and political systems…. Majd’s book, therefore, contributes to recent efforts to look beyond the concerns of the political elite in Tehran, who were not only remarkably unmoved by the spectacle of mass starvation but were themselves avid hoarders and speculators, towards the profound struggle for survival which the population of Iran was obliged to wage unceasingly and often unsuccessfully…. The book is therefore useful for researchers…[and] for methodological exercises for History Students.