ABSTRACT
The loss of political independence through increasing indebtedness is a familiar phenomenon in modern Middle Eastern history. Although well known as an affliction of states and governments, indebtedness has also often wrought its debilitating effects on wider layers of society, in the case of the Bakhtiyari khans contributing substantially to their collapse as a cohesive body and their disappearance as a factor of national significance. The succumbing to indebtedness, whether by states, governments, social groups or individuals, is usually reckoned to be a consequence of mismanagement, various kinds of weakness, distorted priorities, even corruption, while those on the lending side of the equation are perceived as playing an essentially passive role, merely responding to ever-more importunate overtures from potential debtors. On the contrary, however, the case of the Bakhtiyari khans and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company reveals the extent to which a would-be lender, the company, pursued an active and deliberate policy aimed at securing the khans’ financial dependence, devising and employing aggressive tactics, ethically and even legally doubtful, to this end. Company officials, in persuading the khans to take successive loans which, as they were well aware, could never be repaid, inveigled the khans into a set of incredibly complicated financial arrangements, the implications of which were frequently lost on many of the khans themselves. The latter, for their part, often engaged in behaviour that was foolish, profligate, greedy and crooked; behaviour that suited the company very well and which they encouraged and at which they connived. In the game of blackmail and threat in which both company officials and khans engaged throughout the 1920s, the company was stronger and more skilled, and finally emerged victorious.
