Telegraphs, Roads and the Modern Iranian State: From an Imperialist to a Nationalist Infrastructure

Morad Roohi, Queen's University, PhD Student

Questions concerning the formation of the Iranian nation state over the first have the 20th century, have all too often been viewed from through the lens of ideas and elite groups. But the actual processes of building modern nation-states, particularly from the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 through the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925- 1941) requires and appreciation not only how central state institutions exerted control over people and politics through armies, police, revenue collection, but through a major effort to exert effective, systematic and permanent control over “peripheralized” territories and channel these resources to the center through the establishment of telegraph cable and carriageable road networks. This paper reconstructs these processes from the early 1860s, when the first telegraph line was laid across the fragmented territories of the fragmented but “well-protected” domains of the Qajar Kingdom. The Indo-European Telegraph Department connected Baghdad to Tehran running south to the Port of Bushire was largely to link London to India. However, the telegraph would also serve the shah’s expanding governmental agencies; by the end of the century, imperial powers, Russia in the north and the British in the south, added modern roads – the Russian road linked the Caspian to Tehran and the British highway linked the Gulf to Isfahan – which added to the infrastructure which would be bequeathed to the post-Qajar polity, along with a spate of military road buildings during the First World War in Iran. In this paper, by looking into these developments, I aim to shed light on the legacy of late Qajar-imperial infrastructure building shaped the directionality and emphases of nation-state infrastructure building under the post-War government of Reza Shah in the 1920s.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 22. Mapping Diversity from the Red Sea to the Gulf: Ethiopia, Turkey and Iran