ABSTRACT
The Karun opening greatly affected the social and economic structure of Khuzestan. The changes which occurred there could be classified, broadly speaking, into social and economic ones. In this chapter the social and demographic developments will be analysed first and then the economic changes will be studied. With respect to the demography of Khuzestan major changes which followed the Karun concession were: an increase in the total population of the province due to immigration (between the 1880s and 1920s it rose from about 180,000 to 410,000); and urbanization, which in the context of nineteenthcentury Khuzestan cannot be used but in its broadest sense. The emergence of towns with relatively large populations in the southern parts of the province substantiates this view. A corollary to this was the tendency towards greater sedentarization. These points will be discussed in more detail below. In the sphere of economics, certain undertakings such as the construction of public works had a marked effect on the province. The projects, which were mostly connected with the exploitation of the Karun concession, injected new blood into the stagnant economy of Khuzestan. In this regard certain variables, such as the prices and wages, rents, etc., will be studied in order to ascertain the economic effects of the event. Here, the crucial point is that the process of opening-up the region, which had begun in earnest in the late 1880s with the Karun opening, culminated in the late 1900s in the oil discovery in South-West Persia. The take-over in January 1909 of the D’Arey concession (including all the assets and the liabilities of the Concession Syndicate Ltd) by the AngloPersian Oil Co. could be regarded as a turning point in the history of the region and Iran as a whole. Not surprisingly, the British too were fully aware of the great significance of this development. Hence their view that it was ‘undoubtedly the most important and far reaching event affecting British interests’ that had happened in Khuzestan ‘since the opening of the Karun’.1 The oil industry, as will be discussed below, somewhat complemented the Karun concession in the sense that it quickened the pace of these developments.
