The shah and Amin al-Soltan, who had earlier decided against a plan to impose a state monopoly on the production of tobacco, later entered into negotiations with a British concessionaire. By 1889, during the royal visit to Europe as a guest of the British government, the shah finalized the granting of a monopoly on Iranian tobacco to a certain Major G. F. Talbot. Then probably the largest grower and exporter of tobacco in the Middle East, Iran exported largely to the Ottoman Empire and supplied its own growing domestic market. The Regie monopoly, as the company came to be known, after an earlier tobacco monopoly granted to it by the Ottomans, was given a fifty-year concession for the purchase, distribution, sale, and export of all tobacco products throughout Iran. As a major income-earning commodity, tobacco was also a vital to Iranian daily life. By the 1890s as many as two and a half million people, a good 25 percent of the Iranian population, both men and women, were regular smokers, mostly in the form of water pipes (qaliyan, better known today in the West as hookah). Peasants and the poorer classes used long pipes (chopoq) and consumed inferior-quality tobacco. No other commodity, except perhaps tea, held such sway over the public. Since its introduction in the late sixteenth century, the production of Iranian tobacco increased all over the country, especially in the provinces of Azarbaijan, Khorasan, Isfahan, and Fars. It is remarkable to note how imprudently the shah had once again fallen victim to a foreign concession, and for a commodity vital to a large sector of Iranian producers and consumers. It was as though the memories of the ill-fated Reuter concession had all but faded. No doubt, the glamour of the English surroundings, the subtle hints of his British host, and the not-sosubtle persuasions of his chief minister convinced the shah to go ahead with the concession at the time the ruling elite was ever more oblivious to the public’s growing anti-Qajar sentiment. The shah’s hopes for short-term gain had no bounds, even at the expense of the growers and merchants whose sustenance was crucial to the national economy. If the merchants could pocket a substantial profit from the tobacco trade, the shah must have reasoned, why not him? The royal gain, of course, came at the expense of a large sector of Iranian exporters, wholesalers, distributors—perhaps as many as five thousand—and a much larger body of medium- and smallscale tobacco growers (Source: Iran, a Modern History, Abbas Amanat).
Background of Tobacco Movement: What Triggered the Protest?
