Introduction

On the afternoon of 9 November 1893 three British subjects were playing cricket in the Persian Gulf port of Bushihr.¹ About twenty Iranian spectators had gathered. The batsman, Mr. Daniels, a clerk employed by the mercantile firm of Messrs. Grey, Paul & Company, deflected a ball into the net behind him. A young boy named Muhammad Riza was standing directly behind the net. The ball hit him in the stomach, and he cried out in pain. Other spectators comforted him and walked him home, another boy holding his hand. The following day, however, Muhammad Riza died. His father, Mashhadi Haji Sabbagh, appealed to the local authorities and to the imām-i jumÊ¿ah, the state-appointed leader of the Friday prayers, who demanded monetary compensation (dīyah) from Daniels. As a British subject, Daniels, however, enjoyed extraterritoriality, or exemption from Persian jurisdiction and criminal prosecution. On 26 January 1894, the kārguzÌ ār,² the agent of the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bushihr, wrote the British resident and consul-general to reach a settlement (Figure 1).³ The matter was soon under discussion between the British legation and Qajar authorities in Tehran.

The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the creation of Iran’s modern “frontiers,” their “fictions,” and their “frictions.”⁴ These borders were not only territorial and ideological ones but also legal and jurisdictional. As commerce and empire bound Iran and British India together, merchants, migrants, and officials navigated these overlapping, porous boundaries. Extraterritoriality and nationality laws were efforts to disentangle and clarify these lines. Merchants in the Indian Ocean and Mediterranean had long enjoyed various kinds of legal autonomy.⁵ The Safavids extended extraterritoriality to English and Dutch merchants in the seventeenth century.⁶ Beginning in the 1820s, Russia and Britain consolidated such privileges into a system of “legal imperialism.”⁷ Imperialism played a pivotal role in the making of international law.⁸ European jurists and diplomats limited the scope of international law to what they deemed civilized societies and demanded extraterritoriality from allegedly uncivilized ones like Iran. The denial of liberal institutions to British colonies in Asia and Africa and American restrictions on Chinese immigration relied on the same distinction.⁹ Extraterritoriality spurred Iranian nationalism and Pahlavi legal centralization, secularization, and state building. Similar patterns emerged in the Ottoman Empire, Qing China, and Meiji Japan. Extraterritoriality was thus an avenue by which the “fluid, multijurisdictional legal orders” of the early-modern period were eclipsed by a “state-centered legal pluralism” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.¹⁰ Iran has not received much treatment in this broader literature, and its long-standing relationships with India, both before and during British rule there, make it an interesting case study. Iran’s journey into the modern international legal order was shaped by the collision of royal, Islamic, and foreign law—in the latter instance British and Anglo-Indian law. As the death of Muhammad Riza reveals, moreover, Qajar officials and the Ê¿ulamaʾ challenged British jurisdiction well before the abolition of extraterritoriality and the promulgation of the Iranian Civil Code (Qanun-i madani) in the first decade of Pahlavi rule.

Extraterritoriality in Iran impacted Britain’s Indian subjects along with its European ones. Indian communities in Iran and the Persian Gulf were diffuse and diverse.¹¹ Daniels himself was of mixed European and Indian descent. Indian merchants flourished in this region throughout the long nineteenth century, controlling key commodities and bazaar capital, before encountering severe difficulties in the 1930s.¹² They often moved within and across jurisdictions,¹³ shrewdly appealing to British, Qajar, and Islamic authorities as it suited their interests. Extraterritoriality, nonetheless, proved a way for the British to exercise imperial power over Indians beyond the Raj. British officials seized Indian property and deported Indian subjects from Iran, especially in cases when Indians embarrassed the British vis-à-vis the Persians or when Indians appealed to local authorities to escape British law.¹⁴ Britain’s legal imperialism in Persia was directed at not only Iranians but also Indians. Indeed, extraterritoriality, which in its liberal idiom was positioned as a bulwark against Asian despotism, also functioned as an instrument of the British Empire’s autocratic authority.

Extraterritoriality was inextricable from nationality. The importance of early Pahlavi legal reforms for the abolition of extraterritoriality in 1928 has long been clear,¹⁵ but the role of nationality law in this process has gone largely unexplored. Nor has it received much attention in recent and important scholarship on Iranian nationalism and state-building.¹⁶ Nationality here is distinct from citizenship and nationalism in that it refers not to an individual’s domestic political rights or to a sense of belonging to a national community but instead to an international legal status that allows one to claim and be claimed by a state.¹⁷ It is a relatively recent legal category. In Iran, one’s nationality determined access to extraterritoriality and other capitulations, the ability to own landed property, and by the 1920s, eligibility for military conscription. Nationality laws and documentation proved a way for modern states to “embrace” their societies.¹⁸ Both Qajar and Pahlavi governments were keen to limit the number of persons claiming to be foreign nationals and to expand Iranian nationality as broadly as possible to include the Iranian diaspora in India through legislation in 1894 (Figures 2-3),¹⁹ 1929, and 1935. These statutes blended Iranian and foreign templates and pushed Iran into the conflict of laws; to this day Iran does not recognize dual nationality. Significantly, the British had accepted Iranian definitions of nationality as applying to individuals inside Iran and declined to extend extraterritoriality in such cases even before its abolition in 1928. Individuals also “grasped” nationality as a tool to advance their own material interests, without necessarily identifying with the state in nationalist terms.²⁰ Such individual, transactional, and contingent claims to Iranian or British nationality undercut primordial notions of national identity. Nationality laws and their related documentation—passports, certificates of consular and census registration, and residency permits—were key sites where individuals encountered the state, both Iranian and British. Diplomatic correspondence and nationality legislation were in turn key sites where these states encountered one another and negotiated the contours of international law in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Modern extraterritoriality and nationality in Iran, finally, overlaid an older Persianate world.²¹ Recent scholarship has stressed the persistence of the Persianate into the twentieth century, as merchants, religious figures, and scholars circulated commercial and communication networks closely linking India and Iran by steam, print, and telegraph.²² The maritime circuits connecting Bushihr, Masqat, and Bombay also spliced together the Persianate and the Indian Ocean Arena.²³ Merchants and migrants navigated this “Persianate bazaar”²⁴ as well as the extraterritoriality and nationality regimes by which modern states sought to regulate it. In this context, Iranian nationality law proved both expansive and exclusive. Seeking to counter extraterritoriality, Iran’s nationality law encompassed various forms of non-territorial, pre-national belonging associated with the High Persianate.²⁵ Adopting a synthetic approach characteristic of what might be called the Late Persianate,²⁶ this legislation fused Persian and European political and legal concepts to recognize ties binding individuals and communities in Iran and India.²⁷ But, anxious about extraterritoriality, Qajar and Pahlavi officials also made it difficult to renounce Iranian nationality and took a dim view of dual nationality—one that was shared by a considerable body of international opinion, but less so by Britain. By 1940, these policies had restrained Persianate mobility and rejected a more fluid Persianate legal order in favor of a broad, but exclusive definition of Iranian nationality.²⁸

The two documents that frame this article highlight these dimensions of the Late Persianate. The first document, the Qajar kārguzÌ ār’s letter to the British representative in Bushihr in 1894 (Figure 1) contesting Daniels’s extraterritoriality, indicates the continued centrality of Persian-language correspondence and its conventions and forms for diplomatic relations between Iran and India, even as imperialism introduced significant legal distinctions and privileges among Iranians, Indians, and Europeans.²⁹ The second document, the first Iranian nationality law, enacted that same year (Figures 2-3), limited extraterritoriality and began a sustained Iranian engagement in the emerging field of international law that was subsuming the Persianate. That, moreover, the document here is a copy of the 1894 law published by a Persian newspaper, Habl al-matin, in Calcutta in 1901³⁰ demonstrates that the editors presumed that their small readership of merchants and reformists were interested in information about the new international legal order and their place in it.

1 Extraterritoriality

The legal order of late Qajar Iran remained a pluralistic one. In a jurisdictional division with major significance for modern Iranian history, the shah and his officials executed royal law (Ê¿urf), and the Ê¿ulamaʾ implemented religious law or shariÊ¿a. Europeans viewed both legal systems with suspicion, criticizing them as arbitrary, lacking in proper institutions and procedures, and uncivilized. Russia obtained extraterritoriality from Iran by the Treaty of Turkmanchay in 1828, and Britain followed in 1841. Parliament laid out Britain’s extraterritorial legal architecture in the Foreign Jurisdiction Act of 1843 and in subsequent Orders in Council for specific foreign states.³¹ The situation in Iran was further complicated by the fact that in 1889, Parliament issued two mutually exclusive Orders in Council, one applying British law to inland Persia and the other applying Anglo-Indian law to the “Persian Coasts and Islands.”³² Britain’s and India’s legal frontiers met in Iran, and an imperial legal order was superimposed on an older Persianate world. Crucially, a person’s legal standing, rights, and privileges in this world were now based upon his or her nationality. Consuls appointed by the British Foreign Office and residents appointed by the Government of India supervised this system; the British official at Bushihr held both offices. In response, the Persian foreign ministry sent kārguzÌ ārān to provincial cities to manage relations between Iranians and foreigners enjoying extraterritorial protection and their consuls. This quintessentially nineteenth-century arrangement produced considerable sub-ministerial diplomatic correspondence between kārguzÌ ārān and consuls, as the cricket incident revealed.

About a month after Muhammad Riza’s death in November 1893, Muhammad Hasan Khan Mafi SaÊ¿d al-Mulk, the Governor of Bushihr and a member of the influential Nizam Mafi family, complained to Tehran that his efforts to obtain compensation for the boy’s family had been opposed by the British consul-general and resident, J.A. Crawford, and he warned that the Ê¿ulamaʾ were not pleased.³³ On 12 December 1893 the kārguzÌ ār wrote Crawford, seeking an indemnity in accordance with religious law.³⁴ The following day, Vice-Consul J.C. Gaskin interviewed Daniels, the other two players, and the residency’s medical staff but did not collect statements from any Persian witnesses. Gaskin summarily concluded that there “was not sufficient evidence to justify the trial of Mr. Daniels for an offense under the Indian Penal Code.”³⁵ In forwarding this judgment to the kārguzÌ ār, Crawford reasserted British extraterritoriality: “As a British subject at Bushire Mr Daniels is liable to and must be dealt with according to, the laws of British India.”³⁶ Daniels had, nonetheless, testified that there was “no one more sorry than myself that such an accident occurred and I am willing to give any reasonable compensation to the father.”³⁷ Crawford informed the kārguzÌ ār that he believed Rs. 300 was an appropriate sum and that the father, Mashhadi Haji Sabbagh, could collect it at the British residency.

Undeterred, the kārguzÌ ār kept up the pressure, writing again to the British resident on 26 January 1894 (Figure 1).³⁸ The document here is a copy made by a residency secretary, Ahmad Munshi, which was forwarded, together with an English translation (Appendix), to the British minister in Tehran, Sir Frank Lascelles, the following month—the original likely being retained at Bushihr.³⁹ Duplicates were probably sent to India. The kārguzÌ ār’s letter took the form of a reply (jawāb)⁴⁰ to Crawford’s letter (murāsalah), no. 440, dated 9 Jumada II 1311/18 December 1893. He plainly laid out the facts as he understood them: Daniels and his colleagues had taken insufficient precautions while playing cricket, had accidentally killed Muhammad Riza, and “must, in accordance with shariÊ¿a and the law of this country (qānūn-i īn mamlakat), give satisfaction to the victim’s father” at the kārguzÌ ār’s office.⁴¹ In linking qānūn and mamlakat here, moreover, the kārguzÌ ār expressed a territorially expansive view of “country,” or domain, as defined by a kind of legal uniformity that was tied not only to the Qajar dynasty but also to the Iranian state.⁴² Islamic law too, he believed, was relevant to the case, especially as regards compensation (dīyah). He did not explicitly refer to British extraterritoriality and tacitly framed the incident as a civil matter rather than a criminal one to void Gaskin’s judgment and achieve a settlement in court. He doubted whether Mashhadi Haji Sabbagh would accept only Rs. 300, requested Daniels to appear on 28 January, and closed by expressing his hopes for a quick resolution of this tragic case.

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Kārguz̠ār to Wilson, 26 January 1894/18 Rajab 1311, FO 248/590

Citation: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 64, 5-6 (2021) ; 10.1163/15685209-12341552

with permission, UK National Archives

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Throughout his letter, the kārguzÌ ār addressed the British resident as a friend (dūst) and referred to himself similarly (dūstdār). This approach bespoke diplomatic equality and good relations and conveyed a sense of obligation characteristic of the “ethico-didactic” quality of Persianate literary form (adab) and correspondence (inshāʾ).⁴³ If the British resident could only understand the case clearly, he would certainly meet the kārguzÌ ār’s friendly request. A new consul-general, F.A. Wilson, who had replaced Crawford, received this letter but rejected the kārguzÌ ār’s proposal as a recognition of Iranian jurisdiction and would not permit Daniels to come before the Persian authorities.⁴⁴ In the residency’s English translation of the kārguzÌ ār’s letter, dūst and dūstdār were rendered “you” and “I”—pronouns that did not convey fully the kārguzÌ ār’s meaning. On 2 February, the kārguzÌ ār forwarded Wilson a copy of a letter from the imām-i jumÊ¿ah to SaÊ¿d al-Mulk, warning the governor that failure to resolve the case might provoke popular unrest in Bushihr.⁴⁵ Wilson took exception to what he perceived as a threat and referred the matter to Tehran.⁴⁶ An overture of Persianate friendship had foundered on British notions of diplomatic civility. The prime minister (sÌ£adr-i aÊ¿zÌ£am), Mirza Ê¿Ali Asghar Khan Amin al-Sultan, quickly agreed with the legation, and instructions were sent to Wilson and SaÊ¿d al-Mulk to reach a private settlement along British lines, which presumably occurred as the correspondence ends there.⁴⁷

At first glance this case was a clear example of extraterritoriality. The British government shielded Daniels from Persian prosecution. For Wilson, the imām-i jumÊ¿ah’s letter was evidence of the deficiencies of Islamic law.⁴⁸ That said, it is significant that the governor, kārguzÌ ār, and imām-i jumÊ¿ah all challenged British jurisdiction.⁴⁹ The extraterritoriality regime, which had been established in Iran for over half a century, met with considerable Iranian resistance. Interestingly, both sides acknowledged the desirability of compensation, but they disagreed pointedly as to under which authority such compensation was to be made. Local opposition then obliged the consul-general to forward this unfortunate but relatively minor matter to Tehran.

The controversy surrounding Muhammad Riza’s death also illustrates ways in which extraterritoriality impacted relations between the Qajar state and the ShiÊ¿i Ê¿ulamaʾ. Although the Ê¿ulamaʾ could withhold legitimacy from the Qajars and did frequently oppose them, most notably during the Tobacco Protests and the Constitutional Revolution, they also depended on the state for the protection of Islam and the maintenance of the social order.⁵⁰ Both dynamics were at work in this case. On the one hand, the imām-i jumÊ¿ah, although appointed by the state, demanded that the governor not allow foreigners to kill Iranian Muslims with impunity. On the other, his appeal to SaÊ¿d al-Mulk was a recognition that relations with foreign governments were the prerogative of the state, not the Ê¿ulamaʾ. And yet, SaÊ¿d al-Mulk and the kārguzÌ ār enlisted the Ê¿ulamaʾ against the British while also seeking to enhance the legitimacy of state institutions by compelling Daniels to reach a settlement at the kārguzÌ ār’s court, not the British consulate, or for that matter the shariÊ¿a court. True, they failed but not before involving Amin al-Sultan.

And then there is Daniels himself. In the end, his willingness to pay Mashhadi Haji Sabbagh was essential to concluding the affair. He was saddened by Muhammad Riza’s death and eager to make amends in whatever way he could. He also certainly realized that failure to pay would render his personal position in Bushihr untenable. His government could defend him from Persian prosecution, but it could not protect him from social ostracism, or perhaps, as the imām-i jumÊ¿ah had implied, worse. While his status as a foreign subject placed him in a different legal domain, he remained a member of a community and was subject to its social and cultural expectations. Not paying was not really an option. Daniels, furthermore, could not expect much more support from British officials. As Crawford explained to the kārguzÌ ār, Daniels was “only an Eurasian clerk drawing Rs 250 per mensum.”⁵¹ Crawford’s casual contempt for Daniels’s Indian parentage and occupation demonstrates that British exterritoriality in Iran was inseparable from its colonial context.

Indians living in Qajar Iran regularly sought British intervention with Persian officials—as had some Iranians going back to the Safavid period. Although they were British subjects, Indians often straddled jurisdictional lines between British, Indian, and Iranian law. On 8 April 1894, the “Hindu community resident in Kirman (jamāʿat-i HindÅ«-yi sākin-i Kirmān)” petitioned Surgeon Major G.W. Brazier Creagh, who was touring the area with Percy Sykes, for recovery of debts from local Iranians.⁵² These Indians were members of an expansive Shikarpuri commercial network stretching from Sind to Iran, Afghanistan, Russian Central Asia, and Sinkiang.⁵³ They enjoyed a leading position in Kirman’s international trade and played an important role in integrating the region into the growing global economy.⁵⁴ Their petition made an interesting journey. Composed in Persian, it was addressed to the consul-general in Bushihr. Upon reaching Karachi, Brazier Creagh duly mailed it to Wilson in Bushihr, who sent a copy and an English translation to the legation in Tehran.⁵⁵

The Shikarpuris in Kirman were Persianate foreigners and imperial subjects. When Edward Stack of the Bengal Civil Service visited Kirman in April 1881, he reported that this community numbered forty people headed by two bankers. They occupied a caravanserai owned by the qazi, dressed in a Persian style, and were permitted to perform Hindu rituals. It is unclear whether a Shikarpuri drafted the 1894 petition himself or engaged an Iranian secretary to do so, but the choice of Persian suggests the petitioners were more comfortable in this language than in English. As Claude Markovits has observed, “Shikarpuri Hindus lived in a cultural world which was Persianized, even if few of them knew High Persian. Their commercial terminology was Persian and may have been originally imported from that country.”⁵⁶ Some of them evidently had facility in colloquial Persian. Stack described an incident in which the Shikarpuris insulted a local official “fearlessly in choice Persian slang” after he charged an extortionate fee for accompanying a Hindu funeral procession.⁵⁷ Stack, nonetheless, considered these Indians to be racially inferior not only to the British but also to the Persians: “In their Persian dress and tall felt hats they presented a miserable contrast to the genuine Persian. I never was more forcibly reminded of the physical inferiority of the Hindoo race. They looked like withered black apes.”⁵⁸ Two decades later, Sykes took exception to Stack’s language, affirming that this community were enterprising merchants, but he still felt obliged to observe that “as to their appearance, it is not prepossessing.”⁵⁹ Although all British subjects could claim extraterritoriality in Iran, all British subjects were not equal in the eyes of British officers.

In April 1894, the Shikarpuris requested British assistance with debts in Kirman and Bahramabad, complaining that their debtors bribed local authorities to evade repayment.⁶⁰ As was typical of bankruptcy cases in Qajar Iran, efforts to reach speedy settlements had failed.⁶¹ Petitioning was the main way for Iranians to seek redress of grievances. It was integral to the ideology of the Qajar monarchy and the shah’s critical role in ensuring the circle of justice.⁶² It was also common political practice in Britain and South Asia as well.⁶³ The Shikarpuris’ petition, however, did not receive a favorable reception from the British legation’s second Oriental Secretary, Mirza Hasan Ê¿Ali Khan Nawwab, in Tehran. The Nawwabs were themselves a Perso-Indian family, several of whom held British diplomatic posts in Qajar Iran. Hasan Ê¿Ali Khan had been educated in Bombay and served in Shiraz, Afghanistan, and Mashhad before taking up this appointment in Tehran.⁶⁴ Dismissing the petitioners, he explained that “certain individuals of the Hindoos are usurers and they lend out money on nearly 50 to 100 per cent.”⁶⁵ British authorities stereotyped the Shikarpuris as parasitic moneylenders in Sind too.⁶⁶ Hasan Ê¿Ali Khan had investigated similar cases in Hashtadan, near Kirman. He alleged that the claims were sometimes nearly twenty years old and that the loans, often carrying 50% compound interest, were frequently sold from one lender to another. When these creditors, furthermore, learned that the legation would only seek to collect 12% interest, they dropped their cases with British officials, electing instead to negotiate privately with their Persian debtors.

Hasan Ê¿Ali Khan noted that Shikarpuri merchants at Khwaf in Khurasan had also recently “pestered” the legation on this account. Colonel C.E. Yate alleged their lending practices caused considerable economic dislocation and popular discontent. He observed that these Indians declined British extraterritoriality in favor of Persian mediation. They “know that by appealing to the Consulate for the settlement of their cases this exorbitant rate of interest would not be allowed, and although by Consular rules, if they wish British protection, they are bound to register themselves as British subjects every year on a fee of half a crown; they steadily refrain from doing this, preferring to trust to the support of the Persian authorities.”⁶⁷ Shikarpuri merchants at Hashtadan and Khwaf alertly exploited the legal pluralism of the Late Persianate world. As such, they straddled the legal line that extraterritoriality was meant to clarify. Such “forum shopping”⁶⁸ was clever, but it did not endear its practitioners to the British or the Iranians.

Indian merchants could also get themselves into significant debt in Iran, as the case of one Goverdhandas Valji reveals. Goverdhandas (as he is most commonly referred to in British sources) was a British subject, a Hindu, and a merchant who served as the Iranian customs master in Bandar-i Lingah on the Persian Gulf for much of the 1880s and 1890s. Customs houses were central nodes connecting trade, information, finance, and the state in this maritime world.⁶⁹ Goverdhandas farmed customs, advancing money to the local authorities and profiting from the customs dues he collected.⁷⁰ After Tehran hired Belgian officers to establish a centralized customs administration in 1900, Goverdhandas was relegated to the status of a customs cashier—a financial blow. By 1905 he was in trouble. Owing some Rs. 70,000 to Persian merchants, he wrote them checks on a Bombay bank and left Bandar-i Lingah. The checks bounced. At Iran’s request, the British resident at Bushihr, Major Percy Cox, secured Goverdhandas’s arrest in Masqat, returned him to Bandar-i Lingah, and detained him at the house of the British agent, Aqa Badr. A group of Lari creditors surrounded Aqa Badr’s house, claiming to take sanctuary (bast) under the British flag there, and demanded the surrender of the debtor and his assets.⁷¹ The British prevailed on the Governor of the Gulf Ports, Mirza Ahmad Khan Darya Baygi, to sail from Bushihr and disperse the demonstrators. The British consul at Bandar-i Ê¿Abbas then held long sessions reviewing Goverdhandas’ accounts with his creditors. He speculated that Goverdhandas had attempted “in collusion with the two native banking firms in Bombay” to perpetrate “a fraudulent bankruptcy.”⁷² British authorities in the Persian Gulf could dispose of Goverdhandas’ property in Bandar-i Lingah, but the Indian courts would have to pursue the matter of the Bombay banks.

Goverdhandas, meanwhile, attempted to collect debts owed him. He had claims against the Iranian government dating back to 1898-99, when Shaykh Muhammad ibn Khalifa crossed from the Arab coast and briefly seized control of Bandar-i Lingah.⁷³ Goverdhandas had already purchased the customs farm for Rs. 20,000 that year, but Shaykh Muhammad obliged him to pay an additional Rs. 10,000. In March 1899, Darya Baygi ejected Shaykh Muhammad, and on 18 March, he prevented an Indian steamer from landing its cargo, alleging that the quarantine sheds had been damaged during the assault on the port. The cargo was only landed on 21 March. This date, Nowruz, was significant because Goverdhandas’ customs contract had expired the previous day, allowing Darya Baygi to pocket Rs. 3,500 in duties on the cargo. Goverdhandas alleged that Darya Baygi had caused the delay to deprive him of these monies. Interestingly, one report of this affair was provided to Cox in 1906 by an employee of Messrs. Grey, Paul & Co., named James W. Daniels, who had been in Bandar-i Lingah in 1899.⁷⁴ This man was very probably the same who had accidentally killed Muhammad Riza in 1893. Evidently Daniels had been able to make a life in the Persian Gulf. Goverdhandas’s tenure there, however, was coming to a close. In March 1906, Cox declared that Goverdhandas had proved himself a “thorough rascal” who could not possibly repay his sizeable debts.⁷⁵ In August, Cox deported him from Iran to Karachi.⁷⁶ For Goverdhandas, extraterritoriality was a sword that cut two ways. He had enjoyed some of the benefits of British protection, but at the end of the day he found himself in India, cut off from the networks and livelihood he had cultivated for thirty years in Iran.

British extraterritoriality in Iran could lead to a fate worse than deportation. In March 1907, the British consul in Sistan, Major R.L. Kennion, convicted an Indian named Amir Shah of robbery and sentenced him to a year’s hard labor in India and a £15 fine.⁷⁷ Kennion also alleged that one of the witnesses in the case, Munshi Ê¿Umar Din, a consulate clerk from Peshawar, had perjured himself.⁷⁸ Fearing British prosecution, Ê¿Umar Din and his wife took bast at the house of a prominent mujtahid, Mullah Mahdi. Kennion claimed that the Ê¿ulamaʾ were much interested in the case: “the successful protection of a British subject through the principle of ‘bast’—would of course add enormously to their prestige.”⁷⁹ Iranian authorities, nevertheless, surrendered Ê¿Umar Din to the British. He explained that he fled to Mullah Mahdi’s protection because he objected to the ways in which British officers had questioned his wife and searched his property. Kennion had indeed disparaged this woman as a “prostitute” in his official consulate diary.⁸⁰ Consequently, Ê¿Umar Din argued that the consular court was biased against him. Kennion rejected this defense as “absolutely baseless and frivolous” and sentenced Ê¿Umar Din to three months’ incarceration in Bombay and a £15 fine.⁸¹ He acknowledged that this maximal punishment was necessary because the “mode adopted by the accused of avoiding lawful apprehension by what amounts to an appeal to racial and religious feeling is in the highest degree objectionable and even dangerous to public order.” That an Indian consular employee in Iran would seek Islamic protection from British justice was unacceptable to Kennion; it is no wonder then, Ê¿Umar Din received such a stiff sentence.

2 Nationality

Extraterritoriality raised legally significant questions about nationality, questions that were complicated by the longstanding Persianate connections between Iran and India and by the impact of nineteenth-century trade, travel, and communications. Status as a British subject had clear advantages under the extraterritoriality regime, and both the Qajars and the Pahlavis were keen to limit the number of persons claiming these privileges by defining Persian nationality as widely as possible. Iranian officials, moreover, understood population to be a key indicator of modern power and were anxious that emigration was weakening a state that had already seen its territories diminish throughout the century. With roughly 10 million inhabitants, Iran was sparsely populated. Persians petitioning Qajar authorities understood these insecurities when they threatened emigration should their grievances go unheard.⁸² Iranian governments of various stripes asserted Persian nationality to combat extraterritoriality and to claim subjects living in India and elsewhere.

Iran did not recognize British nationality for persons born in India of Persian descent. In the common law tradition, British subjecthood applied to all persons born in the “dominions and allegiance” of the British crown.⁸³ The Iranian foreign ministry rejected this principle in January 1876 in the case of a merchant named Aqa Mahdi, who had been born in India to Persian parents. Mirza Husayn Khan Mushir al-Dawlah, the foreign minister, agreed to allow Aqa Mahdi to continue to pay the preferential 5% customs duty as a courtesy to the British minister but insisted that such persons were Persian subjects and that he would not accept British diplomatic protection on their behalf.⁸⁴ The foreign ministry thus maintained that Persian nationality was a function of descent, or in European terms, jus sanguinis, as distinct from birthplace, jus soli, which was maintained by Britain. In modern history, “countries of emigration” have tended to embrace jus sanguinis and “countries of immigration,” jus soli.⁸⁵ Many nationality laws mix both principles to varying degrees. Iran would adopt both strategies because of its historical ties with India and the imperial strains of extraterritoriality. British officials accepted Iran’s assertion of jus sanguinis. In response to a query from the Persian consul-general in 1884, the Government of Bombay acknowledged that it issued certificates of naturalization to Persians “domiciled” in India and recognized persons born in India of Persian parents as British subjects.⁸⁶ It confirmed, however, that in accordance with Tehran’s views, British officials treated both classes of persons as Persian subjects while they were in Iran.

In August 1894, Nasir al-Din Shah’s government issued Iran’s first modern nationality law. Translations were published in French in 1896 and 1897 and in English in 1899.⁸⁷ Habl al-matin followed with a Persian copy in 1901 (Figures 2-3) under the title “Qanun-namah-yi tabaÊ¿iyat-i dawlat-i Ê¿aliyah-yi Iran.”⁸⁸ It included key elements of this international, legal genre: enumerated articles, inclusionary and exclusionary language based on jus soli and jus sanguinis, and provisions regarding naturalization, nationality renunciation, marriage, property, and military service.⁸⁹ Article 1 claimed as Persian subjects all persons born in Iran—i.e. jus soli—except those born to foreign parents. Individuals in the latter category could become Persian nationals on reaching adulthood. This law has been cited as evidence of the growing significance of territorial nationalism and “citizenship” in Iran and as an effort to link the individual’s allegiance not only to the sovereign but also to the “land.”⁹⁰ This argument needs some qualification. The word, tābiÊ¿īyat, used in this law can today refer to citizenship, but it is better translated in this historical context as nationality,⁹¹ especially given its meanings of “dependence, subjection, following.”⁹² The Iranians likely borrowed this usage of tābiÊ¿īyat and several other provisions from the Ottoman nationality law of 1869 (TabiÊ¿iyet-i Osmaniye kanunnamesi).⁹³ Following the Napoleonic Code of 1804 and the French law of 1851,⁹⁴ the Ottomans prioritized jus sanguinis in 1869, whereas the Iranians in 1894 privileged jus soli, perhaps following the new French nationality law of 1889.⁹⁵ The latter legislation “created the republican use of jus soli” by linking “socialization and nationality.”⁹⁶ But Iran’s nationality law harkened back to an Old-Regime conception of jus soli that linked birth, soil, and allegiance to the king—precisely also the principle undergirding British nationality law. Critically, Article 9 stipulated that expatriate Persians adopting a foreign nationality first needed the shah’s permission, failing which they would be denied entry into Iran and obliged to sell their property (milk) there. Royal sovereignty remained central to defining Persian nationality. Even as it entered an international legal order, qānūn remained firmly tied to its dynastic origins.

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Iranian Nationality Law, 1894, Article 1, Habl al-matin, no. 28, 22 April 1901/2 Muharram 1319: 3

Citation: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 64, 5-6 (2021) ; 10.1163/15685209-12341552

Princeton University Library

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Iranian Nationality Law, 1894, Article 9, Habl al-matin, no. 28, 22 April 1901/2 Muharram 1319: 3

Citation: Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 64, 5-6 (2021) ; 10.1163/15685209-12341552

Princeton University Library

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Although the shah’s government invoked jus soli in 1894, it continued, as it had since the 1870s, to apply jus sanguinis to people born abroad to Iranian fathers, arguing such persons had not obtained royal permission to renounce Iranian nationality. This situation provoked Harold Nicolson, a legation counsellor, to remark playfully as late as 1926 that the Iranian position “if pushed back to its logical conclusion, would lead to the view that a considerable portion of the world’s inhabitants, perhaps the whole of the Aryan stock, are at present Persian subjects.”⁹⁷ Race would of course help fracture the Persianate, but at the turn of the twentieth century, the Qajar combination of jus soli, jus sanguinis, and involuntary subjection to royal authority made Iranian nationality a broadly expansive category. But in punishing the failure to obtain royal authorization to adopt a foreign nationality, Article 9 of the 1894 law also laid the groundwork for a definition of Iranian nationality that discouraged Iranians from holding dual (or multiple) nationalities. The new Iranian embrace was a wide but jealous one.

Persian consuls pursued these nationality policies in India. In January 1900, the consul-general in Bombay, Hajj Muhammad Mirza Kashif al-Saltanah, who became famous for bringing tea cultivation from India to Iran,⁹⁸ lamented that the many Persians emigrating to India would shortly leave “Iran destitute of inhabitants and subjects (Īrān khālī az sakanah wa raÊ¿īyat).”⁹⁹ He connected this issue to the abuse of extraterritoriality, claiming hyperbolically that a third of Iran’s population who had never even left their own towns enjoyed Russian or British protection. His solution was new legislation barring Iranians from abandoning their “original nationality (tābiÊ¿īyat-i asÌ£lī).” It is entirely possible that Iranian consuls in India provided Habl al-matin with a copy of the 1894 nationality law for publication in April 1901.¹⁰⁰ This information was clearly significant to individuals seeking to establish their nationality for purposes of travel, residency, and protection. That August, Mirza Ê¿Ali Muhammad Khan Muwaqqar al-Dawlah, consul-general at Bombay, requested an identity document/passport (tazÌ kirah) for Nawwab Ê¿Imad Nawaz Jang.¹⁰¹ Iran had begun issuing and requiring this tazÌ kirah the year before.¹⁰² Interestingly, tazÌ kirah had hitherto referred to (auto)-biography and memoir, a genre which has recently been cited as evidence for the multiplicity of linkages between individuals and communities across the High Persianate.¹⁰³ In applying for his tazÌ kirah, Nawwab Ê¿Imad Nawaz Jang relayed his history. His ancestors were Iranians, and he had served as a financial administrator for the Nizam of Hyderabad. He married the daughter of an English consular officer stationed at Baghdad, and she in turn converted to Islam. Nawwab Ê¿Imad Nawaz Jang now desired to settle in Iran on his Hyderabadi pension. In applying for a tazÌ kirah, he stressed that he had never surrendered his Iranian nationality, a claim that demonstrated an awareness of the 1894 law. In January 1903, Mirza Mahmud Khan Mufakhkham al-Sultan, the newly appointed consul-general at Calcutta, received a very warm welcome from the city’s Armenian community, whose ancestors, he explained, hailed from (New) Julfa.¹⁰⁴ This community had in fact been settled in Bengal since the first decades of the seventeenth century.¹⁰⁵ Mufakhkham al-Sultan relayed the shah’s affection for them and promised his own careful attention to their affairs. He noted that the Armenians maintained a school in Calcutta with a hundred students, including some from southern Iran. So struck was he by this Persian diaspora that he proposed to undertake a census of “all Iranians, Muslim and Armenian” living in India and to issue each of them identity papers—a daunting task that he acknowledged would require not only money but also, tellingly, knowledge of the “languages of India (zabān-i Hindī).”¹⁰⁶ The Iranian foreign ministry approved, but it is unclear how far this project developed.¹⁰⁷

The early Pahlavi government more strenuously enforced Iran’s nationality law, but it too was not always successful. In 1924, the Iranian government protested the unilateral deportation of Akali Sikhs by the British consul from Duzdab to India.¹⁰⁸ In 1925, the chief Iranian representative in India, Taqi Nabawi, directed consuls to refuse to visa the British passports of “Persians who either through their long stay or birth in India have changed their nationality.”¹⁰⁹ There was some Qajar precedent here; in 1901, Muwaqqar al-Dawlah had declined to grant visas in similar circumstances.¹¹⁰ In 1925, such persons were to surrender their British passports and accept Persian ones if they wanted to travel to Iran. The following year, Lord Lamington, President of the Persian Society, relayed a letter from an unnamed correspondent in Bombay who explained in astonishment that the Iranian consul there had declined a visa to Colonel Merwan Irani, who had served with the Indian Medical Service for twenty-three years. Irani ignored the Bombay consul, somehow obtained a visa at a Persian port, and then “represented the Parsi community at the Coronation of Reza Shah,” in April 1926.¹¹¹ Bombay Persians, Lamington’s correspondent observed, “proceed to Persia under a very irregular arrangement. Very many go as British subjects, some go with two passports while others deal with each port of entry according to the circumstances of the day.”

For the British, the most high-profile nationality case turned out to be that of Haji Muhammad Hasan Namazi. Namazi was born in Shiraz in 1859 to a mercantile family with business in Hong Kong.¹¹² He too became a successful merchant and ship-owner and led the maritime trade of Chinese green tea to Russia via the Black Sea. He lived in Bombay for twelve years before settling for the next thirty in Hong Kong, where he owned considerable commercial real estate and named his racehorses after Iranian mountains. In 1916, he became a naturalized British subject in Hong Kong and was appointed Justice of the Peace in 1921 as a gesture toward the colony’s Indian inhabitants. The governor, R.E. Stubbs, explained: “Mr. Nemazee, though of Persian birth, is so closely associated with the Indian community that I think that most people in the Colony would be surprised to learn that he is not an Indian.”¹¹³ Stubbs also praised Namazi’s philanthropic work, especially his gift of HK$100,000 to the University of Hong Kong. In 1923, when Namazi and his son, Ahmad, who was born a British subject in Hong Kong in 1901, entered Iran from Iraq near Khanaqin, Persian authorities confiscated their British passports, asserting both men to be Iranians.¹¹⁴

British officials would have let the matter drop had it not been for the fact that they alleged Namazi to be the principal opium smuggler between the Persian Gulf and China. They were determined to destroy his operations, but this task would prove easier said than done. British opium laws varied from colony to colony, and the Namazis navigated them artfully. Hoping to close these loopholes, the British government made it illegal for Hong Kong residents to trade opium without a license in 1924.¹¹⁵ In April 1925, Sir Percy Loraine, the minister to Iran, met with Namazi in Shiraz, where he had recently opened a maternity hospital. His most famous son, Hajj Muhammad, who was born in Hong Kong in 1896, would carry on this charitable tradition, founding the Namazi Hospital in Shiraz after World War II.¹¹⁶ Loraine warned Namazi senior that Britain was seeking to prosecute him but knew that his status as a Persian national would protect him in Iran, remarking that “my threat was a ‘brutum fulmen’ which Nemazi may be sharp-witted enough to detect.”¹¹⁷ The following year, an interdepartmental committee in London drafted the “The Dangerous Drugs Regulations” (1926), prohibiting British subjects from dealing in Iranian opium without a license within the extraterritorial jurisdiction of the consular courts in the Persian Gulf.¹¹⁸ Namazi was careful not to break the new opium laws. His eldest son, Aqa Ê¿Ali, had reportedly shifted the family’s narcotics business to Bombay, which enjoyed laxer opium laws than did Hong Kong or Bushihr. In the spring of 1926, Namazi left Bushihr on his Persian passport for Hong Kong via Bombay, and the British consul-general was obliged to visa this document as he could not deny a British subject entry into British territories.¹¹⁹ Namazi returned again to Shiraz several years later, where he died in 1935.

Iran’s desire to end extraterritoriality, meanwhile, led to the great legal reforms of the early Pahlavi years and the country’s greater participation in the arena of international law. In a speech on 26 April 1927 establishing a new national court system, Riza Shah announced the imminent abolition of extraterritoriality and other capitulations.¹²⁰ Tehran withdrew the kārguzÌ ārān from the provinces in June.¹²¹ The very capable minister of justice, Ê¿Ali Akbar Davar, drafted new criminal, civil, and commercial codes and began organizing the new courts, which prepared Iran to revoke extraterritoriality a year later on 10 May 1928.¹²² Persian officials quickly passed a new nationality law in September 1929.¹²³ An English translation was included in a monumental Collection of Nationality Laws of Various Countries prepared for the Conference for the Codification of International Law, which was convened by the League of Nations in 1930 at The Hague.¹²⁴ Iran’s delegation was headed by Anushirwan Sipahbudi. The Conference hoped to eliminate “all cases both of statelessness and double nationality.”¹²⁵ These goals proved impossible but clearly enjoyed considerable international support including from Pahlavi Iran.

Iran’s 1929 legislation clarified the 1894 law by explicitly embracing both jus soli and jus sanguinis.¹²⁶ Persian nationality was extended to “all residents of Iran,”¹²⁷ except persons possessing documentary proof of a foreign nationality; to everyone “born in Iran or abroad” to a Persian father; and to everyone born in Iran to a foreigner who was also born in Iran—i.e. double jus soli.¹²⁸ The law thus confirmed the Iranian government’s claims over persons of Persian ancestry living abroad, especially in India. It also made many Indians living in Iran Persian nationals. Someone born in Iran to a foreigner could renounce his Persian nationality in favor of his father’s foreign nationality within a year of his eighteenth birthday, now with ministerial rather than royal permission, but had to sell or give his real property to an Iranian. Tehran later established procedures for the registration of foreign residents, the compulsory sale of their agricultural properties, and their deportation at the discretion of Iranian officials.¹²⁹ Seeking, furthermore, to balance imports and exports by means of a Trade Monopoly Law in 1931, Iran greatly impaired commerce with India.¹³⁰

Indian communities in Iran were uneasy. As the British consul-general in Mashhad remarked in July 1929,

it is becoming increasingly difficult to remain an undistinguished unit in the flotsam and jetsam of Meshed; either you are a Persian subject and must wear a Pehlavi hat or you should give very good reasons why you should not. At the same time the Census Department is functioning energetically and gathering into its net large numbers of people who have no wish to be enrolled as likely subjects for recruitment into the Persian Army.¹³¹

One group feeling the pressure were some two hundred Kurramis, whose ancestors hailed from the Indo-Afghan border region and settled in Tehran, Gilan, Mazandaran, and Khurasan.¹³² Their situation was further complicated by the fact that Kurram was an Agency territory, not a formal part of British India; Kurramis were thus British protected persons rather than British subjects. One condition of the new Iranian nationality law was that the foreign state claimed by an individual renouncing Persian nationality had to certify him as a national of that state. The problem was that Kurram did not have a nationality law, and neither for that matter did the Indian princely states of Kashmir and Hyderabad, whose subjects in Iran were also British protected persons. Consequently, in 1931-2 the Government of India directed Kurram, Kashmir, and Hyderabad to issue similar notifications, which, following British law, extended their respective nationalities to the “descendants of … emigrants born abroad … for two generations.”¹³³ This situation not only revealed the “lumpy”¹³⁴ legal terrain of the British Empire but also was a case in which legal modernity flowed not from Europe to Iran but instead from Iran to British protectorates in the subcontinent. Ultimately such efforts proved futile. The Iranian government decided in 1933 that anyone renouncing Iranian nationality must leave the country. British officials in Iran communicated this information in a circular letter drafted in both English and Persian.¹³⁵ They quietly urged the Kurramis and others to accept Iranian census/identification documents (sijill-i ahÌ£wāl) and the loss of British diplomatic assistance within Iran. In 1935, Iran again revised the nationality law and incorporated it into the Civil Code.¹³⁶ A person could now renounce Iranian nationality only at age twenty-five, not eighteen, having first completed military service, and must then depart the country.

Hazaras resident in Khurasan soon attracted Iranian attention. Fleeing Afghanistan following rebellions against Ê¿Abd al-Rahman Khan in 1888-1893, some Hazaras settled near Mashhad and others near Quetta.¹³⁷ During World War I the British recruited men from both communities for the “Hazara Pioneers” in eastern Iran. Some of the Quetta Hazaras, who were British subjects, remained in Khurasan after the war.¹³⁸ In 1935, the Iranian government threatened the expulsion of these so-called “British Barbaris” for their alleged, but later disproved, involvement in the demonstrations against the nationalist Pahlavi dress code at the shrine of Imam Riza that had been bloodily suppressed that summer.¹³⁹ In 1938, Mashhad authorities again ordered the deportation of the British Hazaras, citing their refusal to abandon their customary dress and suspecting them of espionage, especially as some of them received military pensions from the British consul. By August, ninety-eight British Hazaras and thirty-nine other Hazaras had quitted the country.¹⁴⁰ The British consul in Mashhad, G.F. Squire, urged retaliation by deporting Iranian merchants from India or a negative press campaign.¹⁴¹ Britain, however, feared escalation, one Foreign Office official observing two weeks after the Munich Agreement with Hitler that “at the present juncture in world affairs we can hardly embark on a campaign of publicity against the Persians, however much their manners may call for such action.”¹⁴² Squire and the British Hazaras got their revenge, however unexpectedly, when the Government of Punjab deported sixty-nine Iranian “gypsies” to Mashhad following a riot in Multan that occurred in June 1938.¹⁴³ Punjab authorities took this action purely for local reasons without reference to the ongoing Hazara dispute, much to the surprise of Delhi and London. Squire cheerfully reported that the Governor-General of Khurasan, Fath Allah Pakravan, had traded “harmless Berberis” for “thieves” whom he was now ejecting from Mashhad.¹⁴⁴

While the Hazara case undoubtedly demonstrated the hardening of national boundaries during the interwar period, a final episode demonstrates that there was still some fleeting room for maneuver within the Persianate, especially for a merchant of means, connections, and tact. In 1932 Haji Ê¿Abd al-Husayn Hyderabadi and other Indian merchants in Chabahar applied to renounce Iranian nationality. A British official sent to investigate in 1934 described Haji Ê¿Abd al-Husayn as “the Raise Tujar, also one of the wealthiest merchants and largest property owner, the expert on Charbar affairs, the ‘brains’ of all the different communities, and as he proudly describes himself, the ‘right hand of Customs and authorities.’”¹⁴⁵ Haji Ê¿Abd al-Husayn was optimistic about a compromise, especially as he and his father had made powerful allies in Tehran. Later that year, however, many of the petitioners found themselves obliged to accept Iranian nationality documents, including Haji Ê¿Abd al-Husayn, who had been imprisoned until he did.¹⁴⁶ He lobbied British authorities for assistance, and they pressed his case with the Iranian government when it appeared he might be put on trial in Kirman for his leadership in the Chabahar dispute.¹⁴⁷

In the end, however, Haji Ê¿Abd al-Husayn Hyderabadi managed his own affairs very effectively. The Iranian government accepted his nationality renunciation in 1936, whereupon he successfully petitioned Riza Shah to allow him and his family to remain in Chabahar on a residency permit (jawāz-i iqāmat). Others were not so lucky; over two hundred British subjects left the port in January 1937.¹⁴⁸ Haji Ê¿Abd al-Husayn was soon touring the new road between Zahidan and Chabahar with the new governor-general and selling supplies to Iranian troops in the port.¹⁴⁹ He remained mindful of the value of British assistance and, explaining his new situation to the British, remarked that he “brought all the facts to your kind notice and advice so that you may extend your kind help to me in case any trouble comes.”¹⁵⁰ Evidently there was still some room in Riza Shah’s Iran for a well-connected and useful Indian merchant, even one who rejected Iranian nationality and repeatedly appealed to British diplomats in a manner more appropriate to the Qajar era than to the Pahlavi one.

Conclusion

Much had changed between Muhammad Riza’s death in 1893 and Haji ʿAbd al-Husayn’s reprieve in 1937. Extraterritoriality had been abolished and Iranian nationality stringently defined. Opposition to extraterritoriality and the evolution of Iranian nationality law, nonetheless, forms an important continuity bridging the Qajar and Pahlavi periods. The imperial context is essential for understanding not only Iranian legal reforms in the 1920s but also Iran’s entry into the international legal order. Extraterritoriality, moreover, had an enormous impact on Indian communities living in Iran and the Persian Gulf, no doubt offering them legal options and protection but also subjecting them to British rule beyond the Raj. Iran’s expansive 1894 nationality law circumscribed extraterritoriality even before the latter’s abolition in 1928. Blending Persian and European traditions and extending to populations not only in Iran but also India (and even Hong Kong), Iranian nationality law was a prominent feature of a Late Persianate legal terrain, but its increasingly exclusive boundaries also helped to bring the Persianate to a close.

By the 1930s, Indian merchants and migrants enjoyed far less flexibility, and many were returning home. British protection had often proved useful to them, but the imposition of Indian law overseas also underscored the imperial inequalities that raised an anti-colonial, Indian consciousness among “expatriate patriots.”¹⁵¹ British frustrations with Pahlavi intransigence, meanwhile, would soon find an outlet in summer 1941 with the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, which resulted in Riza Shah’s abdication and rendered him an exile on the Indian Ocean, first in Mauritius and then in South Africa, where he died three years later. Iranian sensitivity about extraterritoriality resurfaced in 1964 when Ayatollah Khomeini denounced the extension of diplomatic immunity to American military personnel in Iran.¹⁵² Key sections of the 1935 Nationality Law remain in the Civil Code of the Islamic Republic,¹⁵³ posing considerable difficulties for the Iranian diaspora today. Imperialism’s long shadows in Iran include legal ones.