Unemployment, Immigrant Workers and Revelations of Iran's Underdevelopment

The state’s relations with social groups also remained largely unchanged until the last decade of the nineteenth century and especially after the Tobacco Protest when the tacit state-ulama relationship went through a momentary crisis. The merchants and artisans also began to voice their discontent as their economic livelihood was further exposed to vacillations in world markets, foreign trade, and foreign concessions. More than ever before, people held the state responsible for its inability to shield the country against such vulnerabilities, for the lack of security in their everyday life, and for weak economic infrastructure. Greater contact with the neighboring world—Russian-annexed Caucasian and Central Asian provinces, the Ottoman capital and Ottoman provinces such as Iraq and Syria, Egypt under British occupation, and British India—made many émigré Iranians aware of their country’s relative underdevelopment, economic disadvantages, and the Iranian government’s failure to deal with mounting poverty, health, and social problems. By the last decade of the nineteenth century more than quarter of a million Iranians had emigrated in search of work and a better life to neighboring cities and regions, especially Baku, Tiflis, Ashkhabad, Istanbul, Cairo, Alexandria, Mumbai, and the pilgrimage cities of southern Iraq (Source: Iran a Modern History, Abbas Amanat).