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Fordist Connections: The Automotive Integration of the United States and Iran

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 March 2016

Nile Green
Nile Green*
Affiliation:
Department of History, UCLA
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

This essay unravels the intertwined emergence of “Fordist” connections and conceptions of America in Iran during the 1920s. By focusing on the interplay of infrastructure and information, I use a Persian travelogue to chart the impact of motor transport that, in the wake of the First World War, connected a formerly isolated Iran to the Arab Mediterranean and thence to America. Compared to the extensive Levantine encounter with the Americas that from the 1870s generated an Arab diaspora and Arabic emigration literature from Buenos Aires to Detroit, the Iranian encounter with the United States was much later and more limited. This changed rapidly, however, with the opening of the “Nairn Way” and the importing of American automobiles, developments that tied Iran to the Levant at the very moment American strategists were coining the unitary spatial concept of a “Middle East.” In Iran, this conjunctural moment coincided with the rise of Riza Shah and the nationalist search for a third-power strategy to negate a century of Russian and British influence. Expanding the recent literature on Middle Eastern globalization, this essay uses ‘Abdullah Bahrami's 1926 travelogue Az Tihran ta Niyu Yurk (From Tehran to New York) to reconstruct what Iran's new nation-builders hoped to learn from the United States during the formative decade of U.S.-Iran relations. From behind the better-known story of petropolitics, Bahrami's travelogue captures the turning point when the United States first rose on the globalizing horizons of Iran's modernizing nationalists.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 58 , Issue 2 , April 2016 , pp. 290 - 321
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2016 

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References

1 E. Alexander Powell, By Camel and Car to the Peacock Throne (Garden City: Garden City Publishing Co., 1923), 261.

2 Though strictly speaking it is anachronous—“Iran” officially remained “Persia” in international usage until 1935—for the sake of a broader readership I have throughout this essay used “Iran” rather than “Persia” to label the country. “Persian” refers here to the language, except in direct quotations or period names for which I have necessarily maintained “Persia” and “Persian.”

3 Touraj Atabaki, ed., Iran and the First World War: Battleground of the Great Powers (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006).

4 Powell, By Camel and Car, 215, 350.

5 ‘Abdullāh Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān tā Niyū Yūrk (Tehran: Kitābkhāna-yi Barūkhīm, 1304s/1926). Barukhim, an Iranian Jewish company, was one of Tehran's earliest and most successful modern publisher-booksellers. In a continuation of Bahrami's literary depiction of the Anglosphere, in 1930 Barukhim published Sulayman Hayyim's groundbreaking Persian-English dictionary. See Marashi, Afshin, “Print Culture and Its Publics: A Social History of Bookstores in Tehran, 1900–1950,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47, 1 (2015): 89–108, 102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Mansour Bonakdarian, “U.S.-Iranian Relations, 1911–1951,” in Abbas Amanat, ed., The United States and the Middle East: Diplomatic and Economic Relations in Historical Perspective (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); and Abraham Yeselson, United States-Persian Diplomatic Relations, 1883–1921 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1956).

7 In view of the wider transnational context of Persian attitudes to America in the 1920s, I have adapted this term from Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1998), 368, where Rodgers writes of “the technological and economic transformations that Europeans were soon bundling together as ‘Fordism.’”

8 Dawn Chatty, From Camel to Truck: The Bedouin in the Modern World, rev. 2d ed. (Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2013), ch. 5; Clawson, Patrick, “Knitting Iran Together: The Land Transport Revolution, 1920–1940,” Iranian Studies 26, 3 (1993): 235–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Fletcher, Robert S. G., “Running the Corridor: Nomadic Societies and Imperial Rule in the Inter-War Syrian Desert,” Past and Present 220, 1 (2013): 185–215CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nile Green, “The Road to Kabul: Automobiles and Afghan Internationalism, 1900–1940,” in Magnus Marsden and Benjamin Hopkins, eds., Beyond Swat: History, Society and Economy along the Afghanistan-Pakistan Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012); Monroe, Kristin V., “Automobility and Citizenship in Interwar Lebanon,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, 3 (2014): 518–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ozkan, Fulya, “Gravediggers of the Modern State: Highway Robbers on the Trabzon-Bayezid Road, 1850s–1910s,” Journal of Persianate Studies 7, 2 (2014): 219–50CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Yaghoubian, David, “Shifting Gears in the Desert: Trucks, Guilds, and National Development, 1921–1941,” JUSUR: UCLA Journal of Middle East Studies 13 (1997): 1–36Google Scholar.

9 In this vein, see Valeska Huber's theorization of Middle Eastern globalization as characterized by the interplay between the acceleration and deceleration of movement; Channeling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

10 For a critique of the “Middle East” as a framework for understanding Iran, see Green, Nile, “Re-Thinking the ‘Middle East’ after the Oceanic Turn,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 34, 3 (2014): 556–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Arthur Millspaugh, The American Task in Iran (New York: Century Co., 1925), 266.

12 Among the vast secondary sources on the Arabic literature produced in the Americas at this time, see Hasan Jād Hasan, al-Adab al-ʻArabī fī al-Mahjar (Cairo: al-Tabʻah al-Ūlá, 1962). On emigration to the Americas more generally, see María José Cano, Raanan Rein, and Beatriz Molina Rueda, eds., Más allá del Medio Oriente: las diásporas judía y árabe en América Latina (Granada: Universidad de Granada, 2012); Albert Hourani and Nadim Shehadi, eds., The Lebanese in the World: A Century of Emigration (London: Centre for Lebanese Studies, 1992); and Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

13 I am not counting here the British-built Trans-Baluchistan Railway between Quetta and Duzdap (today's Zahidan), since it only operated between 1922 and 1931.

14 Powell, By Camel and Car, 226.

15 Ahman Mansoori, “American Missionaries in Iran, 1834–1934,” PhD diss., Ball State University, 1986. More generally, see David W. Lesch and Mark L. Haas, eds., The Middle East and the United States: History, Politics, and Ideologies (Boulder: Westview Press, 2012).

16 See the articles in the special issue about Alborz College of Iranian Studies 44, 5 (2011)Google Scholar.

17 Zirinsky, Michael, “Inculcate Tehran: Opening a Dialogue of Civilizations in the Shadow of God and the Alborz,” Iranian Studies 44, 5 (2011): 657–69, 666CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In terms of the growing awareness of the American rather than more generally Christian affiliation of the schools, it is notable that the Tehran school was only renamed the American College in 1925, during the years of growing knowledge about the United States.

18 Arthur C. Boyce, “Alborz College of Tehran and Dr. Samuel Martin Jordan,” in Ali Pasha Saleh, ed., Cultural Ties between Iran and the United States (Tehran: Shirkat-i Chapkhana Bistupanj-i Shahriva, 1976).

19 Oliver Bast, “La mission persane à la Conférence de Paix et l'accord anglo-persan de 1919: Une nouvelle interprétation,” in Oliver Bast, ed., La Perse et la Grande Guerre (Louvain: Peeters, 2002).

20 Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 131.

21 On the Millspaugh mission, see James Arthur Thorpe, “The Mission of Arthur C. Millspaugh to Iran, 1943–45,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1973.

22 Morgan Shuster, The Strangling of Iran (New York: Century Co., 1912); and Millspaugh, American Task.

23 On Sahhafbashi's American travels, see Mohammad R. Ghanoonparvar, “Nineteenth-Century Iranians in America,” in Elton Daniel, ed., Society and Culture in Qajar Iran: Studies in Honor of Hafez Farmayan (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 2002); also Hossein Kamaly, “Hāji Vāšangton,” Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. XI, fasc. 5, 553–54.

24 Ghanoonparvar, Nineteenth-Century Iranians, 243–48.

25 Muhammad Hasan Khān Badi‘, Tārīkh-i Inkishāf-i Yankī-Dunyā (Tehran: n.p., 1871).

26 On Persian translations of another sixteenth-century Ottoman account of the New World, see Tezcan, Baki, “The Many Lives of the First Non-Western History of the Americas: From the New Report to the History of the West Indies,” Journal of Ottoman Studies 40 (2012): 1–38Google Scholar. Note, however, that Tezcan clarifies that the 1871 Persian text is distinct from the 1583 Ottoman Tārīkh-i Hind-i Gharbī (13 n33).

27 Mihdī Qulī Hidāyat, Safarnāma-yi Tasharruf bih Makka-yi Mu‘azzama (Tehran: Chāpkhāna-yi Majlis, n.d.), 140–49.

28 Afshin Marashi, Nationalizing Iran: Culture, Power, and the State, 1870–1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 49–52.

29 Bahrami described his appointment and its aims in Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān, 4–5, 139–41.

30 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 372.

31 Ibid.

32 For statistical tables, see Karpat, Kemal H., “The Ottoman Emigration to America, 1860–1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 17, 2 (1985): 195–209Google Scholar. Karpat documents 178,712 emigrants to the United States from Anatolia alone between 1869 and 1892. More generally, see Samir Khalaf, “The Background and Causes of Lebanese/Syrian Immigration to the United States before World War I,” in Eric C. Hooglund, ed., Crossing the Waters: Arabic-Speaking Immigrants to the United States before 1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987).

33 Monroe, “Automobility,” 522–26.

34 On this formulation of Muslim globalization, see James L. Gelvin and Nile Green, “Introduction,” in idem, eds., Global Muslims in the Age of Steam and Print (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014).

35 Hidāyat, Safarnāma-yi Tasharruf, 17–18.

36 Muhammad Rizā Tabātabā’ī Tabrīzī, Hidāyat al-Hujjāj: Safarnāma-yi Makka (Qum: Nashr-i Mawrikh, 1386/2007), 104–5, 108–10, 116–17, 120–21, 125–30; and ‘Abd al-Husayn Khān Afshār Urūmī, Safarnāma-yi Makka-yi Mu‘azzama (Tehran: Nashr-i ‘Ilm, 1386/2007), 124–27, 223–24.

37 His education is described in ‘Abdullāh Bahrāmī, Khātirāt-i ʻAbd Allāh Bahrāmī az Ākhir-i Saltanat-i Nāsir al-Dīn Shāh tā Avval-i Kūditā (Tehran: Intishārāt-i ʻIlmī, 1363/1984), 13–18, 24–40. A brief summary of Bahrami's career also appears in Malcolm Yapp, Paul Preston, and Michael Partridge, eds., British Documents on Foreign Affairs: Reports and Papers from the Foreign Office Confidential Print, from 1940 through 1945, vol. 3, Iran and Afghanistan (Frederick: University Publications of America, 1997), 34.

38 The trip to France is described in Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān, 79–92. While Bahrami was clearly a patriotic proponent of progress, he was not an irreligious man: on his way back to Iran he visited the ‘Umayyad mosque in Damascus and made a pilgrimage to the Shi‘i ‘Atabat shrines of Iraq. See ibid., 137, 139.

39 Bahrāmī, Khātirāt-i ʻAbd Allāh Bahrāmī, 103. On the crucial Swedish role in establishing Iran's police force, see Markus Ineichen, Die schwedischen Offiziere in Persien (1911–1916): Friedensengel, Weltgendarmen, oder Handelsagenten einer Kleinmacht im ausgehenden Zeitalter des Imperialismus? (Bern: Peter Lang, 2002).

40 The journey is described in Bahrāmī, Khātirāt-i ʻAbd Allāh Bahrāmīd, 448–67.

41 On these early lines, see Millspaugh, American Task, 277–78.

42 For the penetration of Russian trade into northwestern Iran directly prior to the railroad's construction, see Issawi, Charles, “The Tabriz-Trabzon Trade, 1830–1900: Rise and Decline of a Route,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 1, 1 (1970): 18–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Millspaugh, American Task, 268, 274.

44 Bahrāmī, Khātirāt-i ʻAbd Allāh Bahrāmī, 83.

45 Ibid., 85–90.

46 Nile Green, “The Rail Hajjis: The Trans-Siberian Railway and the Long Way to Mecca”; in Venetia Porter, ed., Hajj: Collected Essays (London: British Museum, 2013).

47 Millspaugh, American Task, 273. On Russian transport policies in Persia's neighboring regions to the east, see Lantz, François, “Mouvement et voies de communication en Asie centrale: L'avenement d'une colonie,” Cahiers d'Asie Centrale 17–18 (2009): 289–317Google Scholar.

48 The fullest overview of the state of Persia's roads in the wake of these war efforts is given in Antoine Poidebard, Au Carrefour des Routes de Perse (Paris: G. Crès, 1923). See also Millspaugh, American Task, 268–69. On the British-built “Bakhtiari Road” connected to early oil production, see Arash Khazeni, Tribes and Empire on the Margins of Nineteenth-Century Iran (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 75–111.

49 Poidebard, Antoine, “The Junction of the Highways in Persia,” Journal of the Central Asian Society 11, 3 (1924): 204–28, 219CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50 Millspaugh, American Task, 271–72.

51 Cf. Karpat 1985.

52 Bahrāmī, Khātirāt-i ʻAbd Allāh Bahrāmī, 87. For a fuller study, see Hakimian, Hassan, “Wage Labor and Migration: Persian Workers in Southern Russia, 1880–1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 17, 4 (1985): 443–62CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the Persian merchant diaspora that developed through steamship connections with Bombay, see Nile Green, Bombay Islam: The Religious Economy of the West Indian Ocean, 1840–1915 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), ch. 4.

53 For parallel motor-transport developments in Afghanistan at this time, see Green, “Road to Kabul.”

54 On Amin al-Zarb, see Shireen Mahdavi, For God, Mammon, and Country: A Nineteenth-Century Persian Merchant (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000).

55 Claude Anet [Jean Schopfer], La Perse en automobile à travers la Russie et le Caucase (Paris: F. Juven, 1906).

56 Anet, La Perse en automobile, 319.

57 American Task, 272; and Shuster, Strangling of Iran, 225–26. Two photographs of Shuster and his wife packing the car to leave Tehran appear opposite page 229.

58 Ibid., xxxiv.

59 Powell, By Camel and Car, 225.

60 On the history of the Nairn Transport Company, see McCallum, Major D.. “The Discovery and Development of the New Land Route to the East,” Royal Central Asian Journal 12, 1 (1925): 47–61Google Scholar; and, retrospectively, John M. Munro, The Nairn Way: Desert Bus to Baghdad (Delmar: Caravan Books, 1980).

61 McCallum, “Discovery and Development,” 44–45.

62 “New York to Baghdad in Fifteen Days, His Plan,” New York Times, 14 July 1923.

63 McCallum, “Discovery and Development,” 54.

64 Millspaugh, American Task, 24.

65 McCallum, “Discovery and Development,” 49.

66 Ibid.

67 Munro, Nairn Way, 53–58, 63–65.

68 Ibid., 59.

69 This extends the points about “crossing borders” made by Gijs Mom, Atlantic Automobilism: Emergence and Persistence of the Car, 1895–1940 (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 636–42.

70 McCallum, “Discovery and Development,” 60. On the various American cars used by the Nairn Transport Company, see ibid., 45–48, 60–61, 65–66.

71 The Desert Mail: Across Syria from Beirut to Baghdad (New York: General Motors Export Company, 1925); “The Conquest of the Syrian Desert,” The Commercial Motor (7 Sept. 1926): 76–80.

72 Powell, By Camel and Car, 215, 350.

73 Bailward, A. C., “The Baghdad-Aleppo Motor Route,” Journal of the Central Asian Society 10, 3 (1923): 243–51, 245CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Fords are also mentioned on pages 244 and 249.

74 James S. Tullett, Nairn Bus to Baghdad: The Story of Gerald Nairn (Wellington: Reed, 1968), 44, 86–87.

75 Munro, Nairn Way, 73–75.

76 Bailward, “Baghdad-Aleppo Motor Route,” 249.

77 Harry A. Franck, The Fringe of the Moslem World (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1928), 83.

78 Fletcher, “Running the Corridor,” 195–207.

79 Ittila‘at, 3 June 1930, 4; and http://www.kettaneh.com/kettaneh/group.php (accessed 25 July 2013). I am most grateful to an anonymous CSSH reader for the reference to Ittila‘at.

80 “The Motor Invasion of Africa,” Motor Age 7, 17 (1905): 1–3Google Scholar.

81 “African Endurance Test,” Motor Age 7, 25 (1905): 19Google Scholar.

82 “Ford Taxi since 1915,” Ford News 8, 3L (1927): 7. On the mixed reactions to this new “age of speed” in the Egyptian Arabic press of the period, see On Barak, On Time: Technology and Temporality in Modern Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), ch. 5.

83 On Alexandria, Cairo, and Ismailiyya, see Ford Archives, documents 3.2.F.3.3; 9.9.104.1; and 8.21.198.2. For Istanbul and Alexandria, see Mira Wilkins and Frank E. Hill, American Business Abroad: Ford on Six Continents, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 435.

84 Ford News (1928) (Ford Archives, document 8.27.267.2–3). An “Egyptian banker” was also reported to own a Ford in 1928 (Ford Archives, document 8.27.272.1–2).

85 Ford News 4, 20L (1924): 3.

86 Ford News 6, 16F (1926): 8. While I have been unable to trace further details of their time at the school, they were part of a wider influx of mechanics from India, China, and elsewhere. See Ford News 2, 22F (1922): 3, 8f; (1923): 5, 4, 2l; (1924): 5.

87 Jonathan Schwartz, “Henry Ford's Melting Pot,” in David Hartman, ed., Immigrants and Migrants: The Detroit Ethnic Experience (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1974), 256.

88 Ford News 9, 2 (1929): 20. Lincoln had been a Ford subsidiary since 1922.

89 The factory was closed in 1934 due to state protectionism.

90 Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān, 4–20, 133–39.

91 Ibid., 5.

92 Ibid. Here Bahrami was clearly referring to the Eastern Company's vehicles, since the Nairn Transport Company used Buicks and then Cadillacs.

93 Ibid., 7–12.

94 Samir Kassir, Beirut (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 274.

95 Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān, 13–14.

96 Ibid., 5, 13, 16. Aside from naming the company, Bahrami also described the Eastern Company Ltd.'s distinct route via Palmyra and the new hotel it built there.

97 Ibid., 133–37; and Munro, Nairn Way, 67–71.

98 McCallum, “Discovery and Development,” 65; and Munro, Nairn Way, 77–78.

99 Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān, 133. Millspaugh himself referred to the new automotive route he shared with Bahrami, observing in 1925, “To-day, there are regular departures of seven-passenger limousines from Teheran via Baghdad to Beirut, making the trip in about six days.” See American Task, 268.

100 Munro, Nairn Way, 59–60.

101 Clawson, “Knitting Iran Together.”

102 Phillip K. Hitti, The Syrians in America (New York: G. H. Doran Co., 1924).

103 Phillip K. Hitti, Amrīkā fī Nazar Sharqī aw Thamanī Sanawāt fī al-Wilāyat al-Muttahida al-Amrīkiya (Cairo: Dār al-Hilāl, 1924).

104 Ahmed I. Abu Shouk, John O. Hunwick, and R. Sean O'Fahey, “A Sudanese Missionary to the United States: Mājid, Sāttī, ‘Shaykh al-Islām in North America, and His Encounter with Noble Drew Ali of the Moorish Science Movement,” Sudanic Africa 8 (1997): 137–91Google Scholar. On migrant Arab religious scholars in the United States at this time, see Muhammad al-ʻArabī al-Masārī, Islāmīyāt Udabāʾ al-Mahjar: Bahth fī al-Masʾalah al-Dīnīyah ʻInd Udabāʾ al-Mahjar al-Amrīkī ([Morocco]: Matbaʻat al-Risālah, 1990).

105 Bahrāmīm, Az Tihrān, 16, 25, 98.

106 “Crossed Desert in Auto,” New York Times, 10 May 1925: 19.

107 Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān, 32, 89–90.

108 Ibid., 7.

109 Ibid., 19, 21–22.

110 Ibid., 84.

111 Ibid., 85.

112 Barak, On Time, 145, and ch. 5 generally.

113 Ibid., 174.

114 Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān, 59.

115 Ibid., 60.

116 Ibid., 61.

117 Ibid., 62.

118 Ibid., 64–66.

119 Millspaugh, American Task, 266–80.

120 Ibid., 278.

121 Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān, 102.

122 Ibid., 134–37.

123 Ibid., 134.

124 Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, 146. On the stifling of earlier plans for a railroad, see Spring, D. W., “The Trans-Persian Railway Project and Anglo-Russian Relations, 1909–14,” Slavonic and East European Review 54, 1 (1976): 60–82Google Scholar.

125 Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, 146.

126 Clawson, “Knitting Iran Together”; and Yaghoubian, “Shifting Gears.”

127 Clawson, “Knitting Iran Together.”

128 For a contemporary overview of the state of Persian industry in the year of Bahrami's departure, see Millspaugh, American Task, 247–66.

129 Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān, 28–29.

130 Ibid., 61.

131 Ibid., 85–86.

132 Ibid., 74.

133 Amin Banani, The Modernization of Iran, 1921–1941 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1961), 139.

134 Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān, 74–76.

135 With caution, see Mohammad Gholi Majd, The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia, 1917–1919 (Lanham: University Press of America, 2003).

136 Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān, 78.

137 Ibid., 77.

138 Green, Nile, “Paper Modernity? Notes on an Iranian Industrial Tour, 1818,” Iran: Journal of Persian Studies 46 (2008): 277–84Google Scholar.

139 Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān, 78.

140 On the adaption of new educational practices in Iran during the 1920s and 1930s, see Matthee, Rudi, “Transforming Dangerous Nomads into Useful Artisans, Technicians, Agriculturists: Education in the Reza Shah Period,” Iranian Studies 26, 3–4 (1993): 313–36CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

141 Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān, 80.

142 Cosroe Chaqueri, The Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran, 1920–21 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994).

143 Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān, 81.

144 Ibid., 81.

145 Ibid., 82–83.

146 Sayyid Qutb, “The America I Have Seen in the Scale of Human Values,” in Kamal Abdel-Malek, ed., America in an Arab Mirror: Images of America in Arabic Travel Literature (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000). The original Arabic version was serialized in the journal al-Risāla in 1951.

147 Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, 146.

148 Ibid., 147.

149 I am basing this cautious claim of primacy on the bibliographical listing of travelogues provided in Rūhangīz Karāchī, Dīdārhā-yi Dūr: Pazhūhishī dar Adabīyāt-i Safarnāma’ī hamrāh bā Kitābshināsī-i Safarnāma-hā-yi Fārsī (Tehran: Nashr-i Chāpār, 1381/2002), which lists Bahrami's book on page 101. There were a few earlier accounts of America written in Persian, but these were not to my knowledge published at the time.

150 Millspaugh gives the names of the eleven other American advisors who worked with him in Tehran in American Task, 21.

151 Powell, By Camel and Car, 261–62.

152 On earlier missionary-based networks to the wider world, see Nile Green, “The Trans-Colonial Opportunities of Bible Translation: Iranian Language-Workers between the Russian and British Empires,” in Michael Dodson and Brian Hatcher, eds., Trans-Colonial Modernities in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2012).

153 Bahrāmī, Az Tihrān, 1, 4–5, 140–41. Cf. Zirinsky, Michael P., “Imperial Power and Dictatorship: Britain and the Rise of Reza Shah, 1921–1926,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 24, 4 (1992): 639–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

154 The dissertation was subsequently published as Issa Khan Sadiq, Modern Iran and Her Educational System (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1931). Sadiq's memoirs of New York are recorded in ‘Īsā Sadīq, Yādgār-i ʻUmr: Khātirāt-i az Sar-Guzasht-i ʻĪsā Sadīq kih az Lihāz-i Tarbiyat Sūdmand Tavānad Būd, 4 vols. (Tehran: Amīr Kabīr, 1345/1966), vol. 2, 1–30, and vol. 3, 304–33.

155 Abrahamian, Iran between Two Revolutions, 140.

156 Ibid.

157 Mehrdad Amanat, “Bahrāmī, Faraj-Allāh,” Encyclopædia Iranica, vol. III, fasc. 5, 525–26.