Britain and the Abadan Crisis, 1950-51

CHAPTER I THE BACKGROUND OF BRITISH ENTERPRISE IN PERSIA, 1901-47 By the middle of the 20th century Great Britain had forged a special link with Persia.

The most modern oil refinery in the world, the outstanding achievement of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company upon the sweltering mud-flats of Abadan, nourished by the oilfields of South Persia, had become the greatest single British investment overseas. Yet the summer and autumn of 1951 brought a British decision, under Persian pressure, to relinquish Abadan by closing down the huge enterprise and withdrawing every Englishman. This was one of the heaviest decisions taken by any British Government since the close of the Second World War. Nor has its political importance diminished in the perspective of after-years. This decision was embedded in an especially close complex of considerations, political, economic, juridical and military. The grave task of relating and resolving these considerations for the United Kingdom fell primarily, subject to the authority of Cabinet and Parliament, upon the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and his advisers in the Foreign Office. In order to understand how this task was undertaken and accomplished it is first necessary to gauge the many operative, and often conflicting, forces and factors for decision.

1. The Persian Setting and the D’Arcy Concession In 1950 Persia comprised about 15 million inhabitants and 630,000 square miles, approximately the area of Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy put together. The Iranian plateau between the valleys of the Indus and the Tigris, the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf of the Arabian Sea, has retained its strategic importance since the days of the Median and Achaemenid empires. Persia largely commands the approaches to the Middle Eastern land bridge, across the Straits of the Bosphorus into Europe, and across the Gulf of Suez into Africa. Already in the first half of the 18th century Persia focused the attention of the two emergent empires of Great Britain and of Russia.

The entry of Russia upon the European scene under Peter the Great significantly coincided with her advance against Persia. Russian forces captured Baku and Russian engineers in disguise operated at times in the armies of the conquering Nadir Shah who rose to power in Persia shortly after the death of the Czar Peter. At that period British interest in Persia was primarily commercial. The East India Company maintained factories there and Persian commandeering of the company’s ships for service in the new navy of Nadir Shah was only one of the exactions and dangers which often compelled the East India Company, there as elsewhere in Asia, to pursue a flexible and diplomatic policy in order to preserve its position before the advent of the more massive imperialism of the 19th century.

Persia became strategically important to Great Britain in the interests of covering her Indian Empire against Russian expansionism. In the Persian Gulf British influence often became, in the 19th century, a more immediate reality than that of the weak and impecunious Persian governments of the Qajar dynasty. In 1906 His Majesty’s Government won much popularity in Persia by supporting, against Russian interests, a movement of constitutional reform which instituted a Parliament, the Majlis, as an important new factor for good and ill in Persian affairs.

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