Reza Shah

Reza Shah rose from the ranks of a Cossack cavalry brigade to seize power in a coup in 1921 and, in 1925, to replace the Qajar dynasty as Shah of Iran. Over sixteen years he built a centralised state, a national army, railways and modern schools, while ruling as an autocrat who silenced opponents and clashed with the clergy. Britain and the Soviet Union forced him to abdicate in 1941, and he died in exile. Admirers regard him as the founder of modern Iran; critics, including the Islamic Republic, see a despot.

Reza Khan was born at Alasht on 15 March 1878, in Mazandaran, near the Caspian Sea. His father, an army officer, died when he was a few months old, and he was raised by relatives and a family friend who was an officer in the Persian Cossack Brigade. He enlisted as a teenager, served under the Qajar prince Abdol-Hossein Farman Farma and rose through the ranks to become a brigadier general. In 1919 he took the surname Pahlavi.

After the First World War and the Russian Revolution, Iran was close to collapse, with British and Soviet forces controlling much of the country and a Soviet-backed republic in the north. In January 1921 the British commander in Iran, General Edmund Ironside, put Reza Khan in charge of the Cossack Brigade, and in February he marched on Tehran with a few thousand men and took the capital with British encouragement. He became commander of the army and minister of war, then in October 1923 prime minister. A campaign in 1924 to make Iran a republic came to nothing, but on 31 October 1925, under pressure from his supporters, parliament voted to end the rule of Ahmad Shah Qajar and his dynasty. A constituent assembly then made Reza Shah the new monarch.

Reza Shah built an army of about 100,000 and a civil service of 90,000, and forcibly settled nomadic tribes such as the Bakhtiari and Qashqai, at heavy human cost. The Trans-Iranian Railway linked the Persian Gulf with the Caspian Sea, roads multiplied, state factories were founded and the University of Tehran was founded in the mid-1930s. He abolished the legal privileges of foreigners in 1928, moved currency issue to a national bank, cancelled the British-owned oil company's concession in 1932 before agreeing improved terms, and in 1935 asked foreign governments to call the country Iran rather than Persia.

He curbed the power of the Shia clergy, banning clerical dress in favour of Western clothing and later banning the chador for women. In 1935 troops stormed the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad to end a protest against his policies, killing dozens. Elections were managed by the police and parliament became a formality; powerful ministers such as Abdolhossein Teymourtash died in prison, the press was silenced, and the shah accumulated vast landed estates.

Wary of both Britain and the Soviet Union, Reza Shah turned to other partners, especially Germany, which by 1939 was Iran's largest trading partner. When Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Britain and the Soviets wanted Iran's railway to supply the Red Army and demanded the expulsion of German nationals. In August 1941 they invaded, and Iran's army quickly collapsed. As Soviet troops approached Tehran, Reza Shah abdicated in September 1941 in favour of his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The British took him first to Mauritius and later to South Africa, where he died in Johannesburg on 26 July 1944 of a long-standing heart condition. His body was kept in Cairo until 1950, when it was buried in a mausoleum near Tehran. The dynasty he founded fell in the Iranian Revolution of 1979.

Our 1920 map shows Qajar Iran on the eve of his coup, and the 1930 and 1938 maps show the country at the height of his reign.