Word: shahs
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Furanghi is a prominent Iranian. Prime Minister once before, thrice Foreign Minister, onetime Ambassador to Turkey and onetime President of the Council of the League of Nations, he is a historian and economist of considerable local note. But he does not give the orders in Iran. The Shah does...
Minus Times Minus Equals Plus. If ever a man had reason to be bewitched, bothered and bewildered by recent history's queer swerves, it was His Majesty Reza Shah Pahlavi. For 20 long years he had played with London, played with Moscow and never lost a trick. Actually he never played both ends against the middle, for he never needed to. During most of the 20 years, London and Moscow felt towards each other much as Georgia's Governor Eugene Talmadge feels towards Negro Ph.D.s and vice versa. But now, somehow, crazily, incredibly, these two irreconcilables stood shoulder...
Flashback. Scion of an Army-officer family, the Shah was born in 1876 in the Firuzkuh district east of Teheran. Iran was Persia then; and in the '80s Russia, which had steadily picked off Persia's northern provinces, conspicuously strengthened her position at Teheran by organizing under Tsarist officers the Persian Cossack Brigade, most effective military force in the country. This rough & tough outfit Reza, a youngster of 24, joined as a trooper...
While the Russians staked out their bailiwick in the north, the British did beautifully for themselves in the south. Oil had been smelled, and in 1901 for $20,000 bleak-brained Shah Muzaffar-ed-Din gave an English financial adventurer named William Knox D'Arcy a 60-year monopoly to explore and exploit all Persia for petroleum except the five northern provinces in the Russian stakeout...
...extending British control from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea, thereby adding a magnificent frontier province to British India. The Mesopotamian campaign had slopped over into always neutral Persia, but in 1918 the British drove the Turks out and garrisoned Persia's strong places. The next year Shah Ahmad, even bleaker-brained than Shah Muzaffar, had no alternative but to submit to an agreement by which his country came under Britain's political and military control...