against the Amir Abdur Rahman, he gave himself up to the British
consul-general at Meshed in the beginning of November, and was
sent under escort to the Turkish frontier and thence via Bagdad to
India. Yahya Khan, Mushir-ad-daulah, the Persian minister for
foreign affairs (died 1892), who was supposed to have connived at
Ayub Khan’s escape in order to please his Russian friends, was
dismissed from office.
In December 1887 Sir Henry Drummond Wolff was appointed minister to Persia. The appointment greatly pleased the Persian court, and the shah lent a willing ear to his advocacy for the development of trade and commerce, construction of roads, abolition of various restrictions hampering Persian merchants, &c. The shah soon afterwards (May 26, 1888) issued a proclamation assuring freedom of life and property to all his subjects, and (Oct. 30) declared the Karun river open to international navigation up to Ahvaz. At about the same time he appointed Amin-es-Sultan, who had been prime-minister since 1884, Grand Vizier (Sadr ʽazim). In the same year (June 25) the first railway in Persia, a small line of 512 miles from Teherān to Shah-abdul-Azim, was opened under the auspices of a Belgian company. A few months later (Jan. 30, 1889) Baron Julius de Reuter—in consideration of giving up the rights which he held by his concession obtained in 1873—became the owner of a concession for the formation of a Persian State Bank, with exclusive rights of issuing bank-notes and working the mines of iron, copper, lead, mercury, coal, petroleum, manganese, borax, and asbestos in Persia. Russia now insisted upon what she considered a corresponding advantage; and Prince Dolgoruki, the Russian minister obtained in February 1889 a document from the shah which gave to Russia the refusal of any railway concession in Persia for a period of five years. The Persian State Bank was established by British royal charter, dated the 2nd of September 1889, and started business in Persia (Oct 23) as the “Imperial Bank of Persia.” The railway agreement with Russia was changed in November 1890 into one interdicting all railways whatsoever in Persia.
In April 1889 the shah set out upon his third voyage to Europe. After a visit to the principal courts, including a stay of a month in England, where he was accompanied by Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, he returned to his capital (Oct. 20). Sir Henry returned to Persia soon afterwards, and in March of the following year the Persian government Shah’s Visit to Europe, 1889. granted another important concession, that of a tobacco monopoly, to British capitalists. In the autumn bad health obliged the British minister to leave Persia. It was during his stay in England that the shah, for two or three days without his grand vizier, who was mourning for the death of his brother, listened to bad advice and granted a concession for the monopoly of lotteries in Persia to a Persian subject. The latter ceded the concession to a British syndicate for £40,000. Very soon afterwards the shah was made aware of the evil results of this monopoly, and withdrew the concession, but the syndicate did not get the money paid for it returned. This unfortunate affair had the effect of greatly discrediting Persia on the London Stock Exchange for a long time. The concession for the tobacco monopoly was taken up by the Imperial Tobacco Corporation (1891). The corporation encountered opposition fostered by the clergy, and after a serious riot at Teherān (Jan. 4, 1892) the Persian government withdrew the concession and agreed to pay an indemnity of £500,000 (April 5, 1892). In order to pay this amount Persia contracted the 6% loan of £500,000 through the Imperial Bank of Persia, which was redeemed in 1900 out of the proceeds of the Russian 5% loan of that year. (For details of the tobacco concession and an account of the events which led to its withdrawal, see E. Lorini, La Persia economica, Rome, 1900, pp. 164-169; and Dr Feuvrier, Trois ans à la cour de Perse, Paris, 1899, ch. v., the latter ascribing the failure of the tobacco monopoly to Russian intrigue.)
In November 1889 Malcolm Khan, Nizam-ul-Mulk, who had been Persian representative to the court of Great Britain since October 1872, was recalled, and Mirza Mahommed ʽAli Khan, consul general at Tiflis, was appointed in his stead, arriving in London the following March. In 1890 the scheme of a carriageable road from Teherān to Ahvaz was taken up again; the Imperial Bank of Persia obtained a concession, and work of construction was begun in the same year, and continued until 1893. In this year, too, the mining rights of the Imperial Bank of Persia were ceded to the Persian Bank Mining Rights Corporation, and a number of engineers were sent out to Persia. The total absence of easy means of communication, the high rates of transport, and the scarcity of fuel and water in the mineral districts made profitable operations impossible, and the corporation liquidated in 1894, after having expended a large sum of money.
Great excitement was caused in the summer of 1891 by the report that an English girl, Kate Greenfield, had been forcibly carried away from her mother’s house at Tabriz by a Kurd The British authorities demanded the girl’s restitution from the Persian government. The Kurd, a Turkish subject, refused to give up the girl, and took Kate Greenfield Case. her to Saujbulagh. The Turkish authorities protected him, and serious complications were imminent; but finally an interview between the girl and the British agent was arranged, and the matter was promptly settled by her declaring that she had left her mother’s house of her own accord, and was the wife of the Kurd. It also became known that she was the daughter of a British-protected Hungarian named Grunfeld, who had died some years since, and an American lady of Tabriz.
Sir Frank Lascelles, who had been appointed minister to Persia in July, arrived at Teherān in the late autumn of 1891. In the following year Persia had a visitation of cholera. In Teherān and surrounding villages the number of fatal cases exceeded 28,000, or about 8% of the population. In 1893 the epidemic appeared again, but in a milder form. In June 1893 Persia ceded to Russia the small but very fertile and strategically important district of Firuza and the adjacent lands between Baba Durmaz and Lutfabad on the northern frontier of Khorasan, and received in exchange the important village of Hissar and a strip of desert ground near Abbasabad on the frontier of Azerbaijan, which had become Russian territory in 1828, according to the Treaty of Turkmanchai.
Sir Frank Lascelles left Persia in the early part of 1894, and was succeeded by Sir Mortimer Durand, who was appointed in July and arrived in Teherān in November. In the following year the shah, by a firman dated the 12th of May gave the exclusive right of exploring ancient sites in Persia to the French government, with the stipulation French Archaeological Concession. that one-half of the discovered antiquities, excepting those of gold and silver and precious stones, should belong to the French government, which also had the preferential right of acquiring by purchase the other half and any of the other antiquities which the Persian government might wish to dispose of. In 1897 M. J. de Morgan, who had been on a scientific mission in Persia some years before and later in Egypt, was appointed chief of a mission to Persia, and began work at Susa in December.
On the 1st of May 1896 Nasur ’d-Din Shah was assassinated while
paying his devotions at the holy shrine of Shah-abdul-Azim. Five
days later he would have entered the fiftieth (lunar)
year of his reign, and great preparations for duly
celebrating the jubilee had been made throughout the
country. The assassin was a small tradesman of
Assassination of
the Shah, 1896.
Kermān named Mirza Reza, who had resided a short time in Constantinople
and there acquired revolutionary and anarchist ideas
from Kemalu ’d-Din, the so-called Afghan sheikh, who, after being
very kindly treated by the shah, preached revolution and
anarchy at Teherān, fled to Europe, visited London, and finally
took up his residence in Constantinople. Kemalu ’d-Din was
a native of Hamadan and a Persian subject, and as the assassin
repeatedly stated that he was the sheikh’s emissary and had
acted by his orders, the Persian government demanded the extradition
of Kemal from the Porte; but during the protracted
negotiations which followed he died. Mirza Reza was hanged
on the 12th of August 1896. There were few troubles in the
country when the news of the shah’s death became known.
Serious rioting arose only in Shiraz and Fars, where some persons
lost their lives and a number of caravans were looted. European
firms who had lost goods during these troubles were afterwards
indemnified by the Persian government. The new shah, Muzaftarud-ud-Dīn
(born March 25, 1853), then governor-general of Azerbaijan,
residing at Tabriz, was enthroned there on the day of his father’s
death, and proceeded a few days later accompanied by the British
and Russian consuls, to Teherān, where he arrived on the 8th of
June.
An excessive copper coinage during the past three or four years had caused much distress among the poorer classes since the beginning of the year, and the small trade was almost paralysed. Immediately after his accession the shah decreed that the coining of copper money should cease and the excess of the copper coinage be withdrawn from Currency Difficulties. circulation. In order to reduce the price of meat, the meat tax, which had existed since ancient times was abolished. The Imperial Bank of Persia, which had already advanced a large sum of money, and thereby greatly facilitated the shah’s early departure from Tabriz and enabled the grand vizier at Teherān to carry on the government, started buying up the copper coinage at all its branches and agencies. The nominal value of the copper money was 20 shahis equal to 1 kran, but in some places the copper money circulated at the rate of 80 shahis to the kran, less than its intrinsic value; at other places the rates varied between 70 and 25 shahis, and the average circulating value in all Persia was over 40. If government had been able to buy up the excess at 40 and reissue it gradually after a time at its nominal value when the people required it, the loss would have been small. But although the transport of copper money from place to place had been strictly prohibited, dishonest officials found means to traffic in copper money on their own account, and by buying it where it was cheap and forwarding it to cities where it was dear, the bank bought it at high rates, thus rendering the arrangement for a speedy withdrawal of the excess at small cost to government futile. It was only in 1899 that the distress caused by the excessive copper coinage ceased, and then only at very great loss to government. The well-intentioned abolition of the tax on meat also had not the desired result, for by a system of “cornering” the price of meat rose to more than it was before.
