Western oil interests shaped Iran’s politics decades before the 1953 coup

Evidence

Keddie acknowledges the invidiousness of trying to trace revolutionary momentum to a single source but suggests that one crucial moment leading to the Iranian Revolution was the conspiracy between the CIA and MI6 to overthrow Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq in 1953. … In 1901, Britain was granted a concession to prospect in southern Iran, a move that led to oil’s discovery near Ahwaz in Khuzestan, southwestern Iran, in 1908, just as the British navy was moving from coal to oil as fuel for its ships. The strategic importance of Iran as a center for the West’s energy needs begins at this point and gathers pace with the establishment in 1914 of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later to become British Petroleum, or BP. But it was only after the Second World War, with the emergence of a popular nationalist movement in Iran, headed by Mossadeq and calling for the nationalization of Iranian oil—thereby providing the inspiration for Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser to do the same with the Suez Canal in 1956—that Western forces were prompted to intervene and stage a coup. Thereafter, the shah became increasingly dependent on Western and especially American support, much to the chagrin of many in the country, not least the Shia ulema. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 220

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: The Mossadeq coup is the historical hinge omitted by novels that render post-9/11 Iranians as archetypal monsters; parallel to how ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ traced West-East dress panics back to material politics rather than timeless Oriental character.
• XREF: Pairs with The Reluctant Fundamentalist’s Changez telling the American interviewer about his own ‘moment’ of reversal — both hinge on 1953-style historical interventions producing contemporary resentments.