Mosaddegh nationalised Iran's oil, and output fell by almost 96 percent
In March 1951, Iran's new prime minister cancelled the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company's concession, decades before its 1993 expiry, and took over its assets. Britain responded with an embargo and warships. Iranian production collapsed from 664,000 barrels in 1950 to 27,000 in 1952, and Mohammad Mosaddegh's government lasted barely two more years.
Mosaddegh was born in 1882 near Tehran into the Qajar elite; his father served as finance minister and his mother descended from Fath-Ali Shah. After two years at Sciences Po in Paris he took a law doctorate at Neuchâtel in Switzerland in 1913, becoming the first Iranian to earn a European PhD in law. Elected to parliament from Isfahan at 24, he could not take his seat because the legal minimum age was 30. He later served as justice, finance and foreign minister and as a provincial governor.
In 1925 he opposed replacing the Qajar dynasty with Reza Khan, calling it a breach of the 1906 constitution, and withdrew from politics once the change went through. He returned to parliament in 1944 and led the National Front, founded in 1949 with nineteen others, which sought democracy and an end to foreign influence, above all through taking control of the oil industry. Iran had never been formally colonised, but foreign powers had held sway through concessions going back to the Qajar shahs.
Parliament chose him as prime minister by 79 votes to 12, and the Shah confirmed him on 28 April 1951. His government introduced unemployment pay, required factory owners to support sick and injured workers and freed peasants from forced labour on estates. A 1952 land reform imposed a 20 percent levy on landlords' revenue, split between tenants and a development fund that paid for rural housing and public baths. The oil dispute, known as the Abadan Crisis, starved these plans of money as other oil companies agreed not to fill the gap.
In 1953 a coup backed by British and American intelligence, with the CIA's Kermit Roosevelt Jr. in charge, removed him. Convicted of treason, he spent three years in prison and the rest of his life under house arrest, and he was buried at his home in 1967 to avoid public unrest. In 2013 the United States formally acknowledged its role.
Source: Mohammad Mosaddegh
