Pahlavi dynasty | Iran, Coups, Revolution, & Founder | Britannica

Reza Shah’s need to expand trade, his fear of Soviet control over Iran’s overland routes to Europe, and his apprehension at renewed Soviet and continued British presence in Iran drove him to expand trade with Nazi Germany in the 1930s. His refusal to abandon what he considered to be obligations to numerous Germans in Iran served as a pretext for an Anglo-Soviet invasion of his country in 1941. Intent on ensuring the safe passage of U.S. war matériel to the Soviet Union through Iran, the Allies forced Reza Shah to abdicate, placing his young son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi on the throne.

when Mosaddegh became prime minister in 1951, he immediately nationalized the country’s oil industry. Britain, the main benefactor of Iranian oil concessions, imposed an economic embargo on Iran and pressed the International Court of Justice to consider the matter. The court, however, decided not to intervene, thereby tacitly lending its support to Iran.

In August 1953, following a round of political skirmishing, Mosaddegh’s quarrels with the shah came to a head, and the Iranian monarch fled the country. Almost immediately, despite still-strong public support, the Mosaddegh government buckled during a coup funded by the CIA. Within a week of his departure, Mohammad Reza Shah returned to Iran and appointed a new prime minister.

after 1954 a Western multinational consortium led by British Petroleum accelerated Iranian oil development. The National Iranian Oil Company (NIOC) embarked on a thorough expansion of its oil-production capacities. The NIOC also formed a petrochemical subsidiary and concluded agreements, mainly on the basis of equal shares, with several international companies for oil exploitation outside the area of the consortium’s operations.

Petroleum revenues were to fuel Iran’s economy for the next quarter of a century. There was no further talk of nationalization, as the shah firmly squelched subsequent political dissent within Iran.

In 1957, with the aid of U.S. and Israeli intelligence services, the shah’s government formed a special branch to monitor domestic dissidents. The shah’s secret police—the Organization of National Security and Information (Sāzmān-e Amniyyat va Ettelaʿāt-e Keshvār, known by the acronym SAVAK)—developed into an omnipresent force within Iranian society and became a symbol of the fear by which the Pahlavi regime was to dominate Iran.

In 1961 the shah dissolved the 20th Majles and cleared the way for the land reform law of 1962. Under this program, the landed minority was forced to give up ownership of vast tracts of land for redistribution to small-scale cultivators. The former landlords were compensated for their loss in the form of shares of state-owned Iranian industries. Cultivators and workers were also given a share in industrial and agricultural profits, and cooperatives began to replace the large landowners in rural areas as sources of capital for irrigation, agrarian maintenance, and development.

The land reforms were a mere prelude to the shah’s “White Revolution,” a far more ambitious program of social, political, and economic reform. Put to a plebiscite and ratified in 1963, these reforms eventually redistributed land to some 2.5 million families, established literacy and health corps to benefit Iran’s rural areas, further reduced the autonomy of tribal groups, and advanced social and legal reforms that furthered the emancipation and enfranchisement of women. In subsequent decades, per capita income for Iranians skyrocketed, and oil revenue fueled an enormous increase in state funding for industrial development projects.

The new policies of the shah did not go unopposed, however; many Shiʿi leaders criticized the White Revolution, holding that liberalization laws concerning women were against Islamic values. More important, the shah’s reforms chipped away at the traditional bases of clerical power. The development of secular courts had already reduced clerical power over law and jurisprudence, and the reforms’ emphasis on secular education further eroded the former monopoly of the ʿulamāʾ in that field.