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Modernizing Nature: The 1904 British Commercial Mission to Iran and its Covert Persian Counter-Narrative
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 October 2025
Abstract
This article analyzes the political ecology of modern Iran as envisioned in the report of Arthur Hills Gleadowe-Newcomen’s 1904–-05 Commercial Mission to South-Eastern Persia and a covert Persian counter-narrative penned by its military attaché, Mirza Riza Muhandis. The commercial ambitions of the British Empire in Qajar Iran involved a transformation of Iran’s environment. The critiques of these programs outlined in the travelogue of Mirza Riza Muhandis concern whom these interventions by science and engineering should serve. This case study highlights tensions over development and inequality at a critical moment in Iran’s history, just months before the beginnings of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution.
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- © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Association for Iranian Studies.
References
1 The Indian Tea Cess Committee was formed by an act of the Governor General of India in 1903 to “provide for the creation of a fund to be expended for the promotion of the interests of the tea industry in India.” “Act No. IX of 1903,” in A Collection of the Acts Passed by the Governor General of India in Council in the Year 1903 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India: 1904), 160–63.
2 A. H. Gleadowe-Newcomen, Report on the Commercial Mission to South-Eastern Persia During 1904–1905 (Calcutta: Office of the Superintendent of Government Printing, India, 1905), 1.
3 Minto to Brodrick, FO 368/38
4 John Foran, “The Concept of Dependent Development as a Key to the Political Economy of Qajar Iran (1800–1925),” Iranian Studies 22, no. 2/3 (1989): 5–56.
5 Gad Gilbar, “The Opening Up of Qajar Iran: Some Economic and Social Aspects,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 49, no. 1 (1986): 76–89.
6 Annette Destrée, “Belgian-Iranian Relations,” Encyclopaedia Iranica, online edition, 2019-, https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/belgian-iranian-relations.
7 Gleadowe-Newcomen, Commercial Mission, 154.
8 Ibid., 155.
9 J.G. Lorimer, Gazetteer of the Persian Gulf, vol 1, Historical, Part 1A & 1B, 1915, IOR/L/PS/20/C91/1.
10 Lorimer, Gazetteer, 388–89.
11 Lorimer, Gazetteer, 386.
12 For an accessible overview of the modernist press up to and during the constitutional period, see Abbas Amanat, “Constitutional Revolution i. Intellectual Background” Encyclopaedia Iranica (online edition, 2018-) https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/constitutional-revolution-i/
13 On Iran’s 1906 Revolution, see especially the collected articles in Iran’s Constitutional Revolution: Popular Politics, Cultural Transformations and Transnational Connections, ed. H.E. Chehabi and Vanessa Martin (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010). On the causes and consequences of the revolution, see Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911 Grassroots Democracy, Social Democracy, & the Origins of Feminism (New York, N.Y: Columbia University Press, 1996). Ervand Abrahamian, ‘The Causes of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 10, no. 3 (1979).
14 On developmentalism and nationalism in Iran’s modernist press, see James M. Gustafson, The Lion and the Sun: Environmental History and the Formation of Modern Iran (London: Bloomsbury, 2025), chapter 9.
15 For an accessible overview of the modernist press up to and during the constitutional period, see Abbas Amanat, “Constitutional Revolution i. Intellectual Background” Encyclopaedia Iranica (online edition, 2018-) https://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/constitutional-revolution-i/
16 John Foran, Fragile Resistance: Social Transformation in Iran from 1500 to the Revolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 116.
17 Foran, Fragile Resistance, 417.
18 Shahbaz Shahnavaz, Britain and the Opening up of South-West Persia 1880–1914: A Study in Imperialism and Economic Dependence (New York, NY: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 184.
19 Gilbar, “The Opening up of Qajar Iran.”
20 Camille Cole, “Controversial investments: trade and infrastructure in Ottoman–British relations in Iraq, 1861–1918,” Middle Eastern Studies 54 (2018): 1.
21 Newcomen to Government of India, FO 368/38, f.1.
22 Newcomen to Government of India, FO 368/38, ff.1-2.
23 Gleadowe-Newcomen, Commercial Mission, 2.
24 H. Lyman Stebbins, British Imperialism in Qajar Iran: Consuls, Agents, and Influence in the Middle East (New York, NY: I.B. Tauris, 2016).
25 Gleadowe-Newcomen, Commercial Mission, 1.
26 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1850), 13.
27 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” in The Frontier in American History (New York, NY: Henry Holt and Co., 1940), 4.
28 Gleadowe-Newcomen, Commercial Mission, 31.
29 Ibid., 32.
30 Ibid., 5.
31 Ibid., 31–32.
32 Ibid., 32.
33 Ibid., 32.
34 Ibid., 23.
35 Ibid., 24.
36 Ibid., 24.
37 Ibid., 46.
38 Ibid., 43.
39 Ibid., 44.
40 A copy of this speech was published as George Curzon, “The Karun River and the Commercial Geography of South-West Persia,” Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography 12, no. 9 (1890): 509–532.
41 JMS 9/211, Archives of the Royal Geographical Society, London.
42 Gleadowe-Newcomen, Commercial Mission, 5.
43 This was not the famous Mirza Riza Muhandis who traveled to Europe and served as the chief military engineer of the empire, designed the Dar al-Funun, and translated numerous European historical works into Persian. That Mirza Riza Muhandis died twenty years before this mission.
44 Mirza Riza Muhandis, “Safarnama-yi Mirza Riza Muhandis,” in Mallahan-i Khak va Sayyahan-i Aflak, eds. Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani-Parizi and Majid Nikpour (Kirman: Markaz-I Kirmanshinasi, 2007), 127.
45 Mirza Riza Muhandis, “Safarnama,” 131
46 Assef Ashraf, “The Politics of Gift Exchange in Early Qajar Iran, 1785–1834,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 58, no. 2 (2016): 552–54.
47 Mirza Riza Muhandis, “Safarnama,” 132.
48 Mirza Riza Muhandis, “Safarnama,” 141–42.
49 Ibid., 154.
50 Ibid., 154–55.
51 Mirza Riza Muhandis, “Safarnama,” 155.
52 Gleadowe-Newcomen, Commercial Mission, 12.
53 Ibid., 1.
54 On the cholera epidemic in Iran, see Amir Afkhami, A Modern Contagion: Imperialism and Public Health in Iran’s Age of Cholera (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2019).
55 Muhammad Tavakoli-Targhi, Refashioning Iran: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and Historiography (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2001).
56 Mirza Riza Muhandis, “Safarnama,” 154–55.
57 Ibid., 140.
58 Ibid., 141.
59 Gleadowe-Newcomen, Commercial Mission, 49.
60 See, for example, Newcomen’s recommendations to improve access to fresh water and sanitation in Bandar Abbas as part of a “port development” scheme. Gleadowe-Newcomen, Commercial Mission, 43.
61 James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 1.
62 Mirza Riza Muhandis, “Safarnama,” 158.
63 Leonard M. Helfgott, Ties that Bind: A Social History of the Iranian Carpet (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994).
64 Mirza Riza Muhandis, “Safarnama,” 154.
65 Ibid., 155.
66 Evelyn Mountstuart Grant Duff to Sir Edward Grey Bart, February 24, 1905, FO 368/38, f.263.
67 P.Z. Cox, “Remarks on Mr. Newcomen’s Trade Report,” FO 368/38 f.295.
68 P.Z. Cox, “Remarks on Mr. Newcomen’s Trade Report,” FO 368/38 f.301.
69 C. Spring Rice to E. Grand Duff Esq., FO 368/38 f.302.
70 C. Spring Rice to E. Grand Duff Esq., FO 368/38 f.303.