The close of the First World War found Iran in a state of near anarchy. Despite its proclaimed neutrality, it had been invaded and fought over by the troops of the various belligerents, the eventual outcome being occupation by British and Russian forces. In some provinces the war had caused serious dislocation of economic life. Agricultural production had fallen, the presence of the occupying forces had created acute shortages of basic commodities, while bad harvests over extensive areas of the country, coupled with manipulation of the grain markets by speculators, had resulted in devastating famines. Such scanty prestige as the government of Ahmad Shāh had possessed in 1914 had been further eroded by 1918. Ahmād Shāh had succeeded his detested father, Muhammad ‘Al' Shāh, in 1909 at the age of twelve, but he was hardly more than a cipher. Over vast tracts of the country tribal chieftains or great landlords, such as the Shaukat al-Mulk of Bīrjand and Qā'in, exercised a seigneurial authority with little regard for the Tehran government. Since 1906, Iran had been a constitutional monarchy, with an elected Majlis, or parliament, and a cabinet appointed by the Shah but responsible to the country's chosen representatives, although the language of the original Constitutional Law relating to the subject was ambiguous. The deputies of the Majlis constituted, for the most part, fairly obvious “interest groups”: landowners, tribal leaders, the ‘ulamā, and in the case of the larger urban centres, the bāzār.