The Persian Famine of 1917–1919

The Persian famine of 1917–1919 was a catastrophe of hunger and disease that struck Iran in the last years of the First World War, when poor harvests coincided with occupation by foreign armies, a collapsed government and the 1918 influenza pandemic. How many people died is one of the most disputed questions in modern Iranian history: most historians give a figure of up to about two million, while one widely read book argues for eight to ten million and calls the famine a genocide.

A country already at breaking point

Iran had suffered famine before; the famine of 1870–1872 was still within living memory. Grain production depended on rainfall and on a transport system of caravans and animals that could not move large quantities quickly. In normal times a bad harvest in one province could be eased by grain from another. By 1917 that system had broken down.

Three years of war had passed over the western and northern provinces (see Iran in the First World War). Russian, Ottoman and British armies had bought or seized grain, fodder and animals, and taken men as labourers. Fields had been abandoned where armies fought. Roads were unsafe, tribes and bandits raided villages, and the central government had neither money nor authority in the provinces. Then the harvest of 1917 failed across much of the north after a drought, and the rains of the following winter were poor.

What happened

Prices of wheat and bread rose many times over in 1917 and 1918. Contemporary reports from Tehran, Hamadan and Mashhad describe crowds outside bakeries, people eating grass and carrion, bodies in the streets in the morning and orphaned children wandering the roads. Bread riots broke out in Tehran and other cities. Large landowners and grain merchants, including some officials and members of the court, held back stocks while prices rose, a charge made at the time in the Tehran press and repeated by many historians.

Hunger was followed by disease. Typhus spread among the weakened population and refugees, cholera returned in some regions, and in the autumn of 1918 the influenza pandemic reached Iran, carried along trade and military routes. Many who survived hunger died of disease, and in the records it is often impossible to say which killed whom.

What foreign witnesses saw

Much of the surviving evidence comes from foreigners: British officers and consuls, American Presbyterian missionaries in Tabriz, Hamadan and Urmia, and relief workers. General Dunsterville, whose force crossed western Iran in 1918, wrote of starvation in Hamadan and organised relief work to pay labourers in food. American missionaries ran soup kitchens and orphanages. Iranian sources include newspapers, the reports of provincial officials and the memoirs of the period. All of these describe the suffering vividly; none provides a reliable count.

The death toll debate

No census of Iran existed before 1956, so every estimate of famine deaths rests on an estimate of the population before the famine, scattered local reports and assumptions about how far local conditions applied elsewhere. Most demographic estimates put Iran’s population around the First World War at roughly ten to twelve million. The main positions are:

• Up to about two million. This is the figure in most general histories. Ervand Abrahamian (A History of Modern Iran, 2008) writes that as many as two million may have died from famine and epidemics; Homa Katouzian gives a similar figure for famine and influenza together. Nikki Keddie suggests that a quarter of the population of northern Iran may have died.
• The influenza share. The medical historian Amir Afkhami, studying the 1918 pandemic, estimated that influenza alone killed between about 900,000 and 2.4 million people, or 8 to 22 per cent of the population. Other researchers, including Willem Floor, consider these figures too high, and local studies of Tehran and Kermanshah have found much lower urban mortality.
• Eight to ten million. Mohammad Gholi Majd, in The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia, 1917–1919 (2003), argued from American diplomatic records that eight to ten million died, and that Britain caused the famine by buying up grain for its troops and blocking imports. His figure assumes a pre-war population of about 19 million, far higher than other estimates. Some later writers have repeated his figures, and in 2015 they were cited on the official website of Iran’s Supreme Leader.

Most specialists reject the higher numbers. They point out that Majd’s population base is much larger than other estimates, that a loss of up to half the population would have left clear traces in later demographic data, and that the sources he uses do not support a deliberate plan. Several scholars, including the famine historian Cormac Ó Gráda, caution that claims of genocide and very high tolls are not a reliable guide to actual mortality. Amir Afkhami, in a 2020 article in Iranian Studies, argues that the lack of data is itself the main reason the argument continues.

The question of responsibility is also debated. Historians generally agree that the occupying armies, including the British in the west and north-west in 1918, worsened the crisis by buying and requisitioning food, and that British relief came late and was limited. Whether that amounts to a deliberate policy, as Majd argues, or the indifference and blunders of armies at war in a drought, as most historians conclude, is where they divide.

Consequences

The famine left villages depopulated and a generation of orphans. It deepened the anger at foreign occupation that greeted the Anglo-Persian Agreement of 1919, and fed the conviction among many Iranians that only a strong central state could protect the country, an idea that helped Reza Khan after the coup of 1921. Unlike some other wartime famines, it was little studied for decades, and research on it is still developing, much of it in Persian.