Abadan was not just a city.
It was an oil machine.[a]
At its center stood the vast refinery of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (then the largest refinery in the world), Its chimneys visible for miles across the flat land of Khuzestan.
From there, millions of tons of oil flowed outward each year.
From there, the British company drew the wealth that powered fleets and factories.
Abadan was where thousands of Iranian workers drew their wages.
By 1946, AIOC employed roughly 50,000 oil workers in southern Iran, many of them concentrated in and around Abadan.
The hierarchy was stark. Foreign staff lived in well-serviced compounds with gardens and clubs. Iranian labourers, who kept the furnaces burning, lived in crowded districts with poor sanitation and limited access to clean water.
In May 1946, after mounting labour unrest across the oil fields, Ahmad Qavam’s government passed its first comprehensive labour law. It promised an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, paid weekly rest on Fridays, and recognition of unions.
For workers who had endured long shifts and stagnant pay through wartime inflation, it sounded like a contract finally written in their favour.
But by early July, they were still waiting.
AIOC was refusing to implement the changes. 
They argued that parts of the law required clarification. Especially the question of Friday pay and the minimum wage.
Deadlines were issued by union representatives. Then extended. And when no satisfactory response came, a general strike was called.
On July 14, 1946 and before dawn, word spread through workers’ quarters and along the roads leading to the refinery gates: no one would clock in.[b]
By mid-morning, production had halted.
British officials later acknowledged that around 50,000 oil workers across the south were out.
In Abadan itself, crowds numbering in the tens of thousands filled the streets. The refinery, the industrial heart of the country, was in complete silent.
For much of the day,[c] the strike was organized and disciplined. Workers gathered in large assemblies, listening to speeches about wages, legal rights and dignity.
But Abadan was also a city filled with political tension: class divisions sharpened by foreign ownership, postwar uncertainty, and competing visions of Iran’s future.
As the afternoon wore on, the atmosphere tightened.
Groups moved through central districts. Confrontations erupted.
What[d] had begun as a mass work stoppage turned into street fighting: first scattered clashes, then hours of chaos.
The city that in the morning had been a platform for speeches became a full on battlefield.
The[e] army was eventually deployed in force.
Martial law was declared.
Soldiers moved to reassert control street by street.
When[f] the shooting stopped and the smoke cleared, the scale of the violence was undeniable.
17 to 50 dead.
Over 150 wounded.
Bodies lay in districts that only hours earlier had been filled with chanting workers.
Among the fallen were prominent local figures, and the shock rippled through the city.
The 1926 strike was not a minor disturbance.
It was one of the deadliest single days in the oil fields up to that day.
By[g] the next morning, union leaders were under arrest. With their organizers detained and the city under military control, the strike could not continue in the same form.
Work would soon resume …  but the spark struck that day would travel far beyond Abadan, until it set the whole question of oil ablaze.
Hi,
My name is Oriana and you’re listening to The Lion and the Sun: A Modern History of Iran.
The modern history of Iran is story thats closely tied with its oiled and the company that controlled the extraction and export of the resource.
​​Iran's oil story began in 1901 when William Knox D'Arcy secured drilling rights from the Qajar Shah for just £20,000 and a promise of 16% of future profits. After years of failed exploration, George Reynolds struck one of the world's largest oil reserves at Masjid-Soleiman in 1908, leading to the formation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC), which the British government bought a controlling stake in by 1914.
From the beginning, the arrangement was uneven.
APOC structured its accounting through subsidiaries, reducing the visible profits and shrinking Iran’s share. 
The wealth flowed outward. The imbalance stayed behind.
When Reza Shah rose to power, he attempted to renegotiate. In 1932, in a dramatic gesture, he canceled the original D’Arcy concession by burning the contract into the fire.
But the confrontation did not end in victory.
Under British pressure, a new agreement was signed in 1933.
On paper, it appeared revised. In reality, British control remained intact.
The company still controlled the books. It still controlled production. It still dictated the pace of reform.
Worse, the concession was extended to 1993, securing British dominance for another sixty years.
What looked like a correction from afar would later be seen by many Iranians as something else entirely: a longer leash, presented as compromise.
And nowhere was that imbalance clearer than in Abadan.
—
By the 1930s and 1940s, Abadan was one of the most important oil cities in the world.
Its refinery processed millions of tons each year. Tankers lined the waterways. Flames burned continuously above the stacks. Oil moved outward in immense quantities—fueling fleets, industries, and cities far beyond Iran’s borders.
But the wealth rarely stopped where it was produced.
An unskilled Iranian oil worker earned the equivalent of about fifty cents a day. There was no paid vacation. No sick leave. No disability compensation. If a man was injured, he was replaced. If illness kept him home, wages stopped. 
Most of these workers lived in districts like Kaghazabad or “Paper City.”[h]
The name came from the materials used to build it: flattened oil drums and scrap metal hammered into makeshift walls.
The settlement had no running water, no electricity, no meaningful infrastructure.
It expanded as the workforce expanded, without planning and without permanence.
In winter, heavy rains transformed the ground into mud so thick it swallowed shoes.
Water pooled in stagnant sheets. When it dried, swarms of insects rose from it, settling on food, in homes, in the air itself. Disease followed overcrowding and contamination.
Summer was worse.[i]
The[j] heat would come down suddenly and non-stop.
Desert winds carried sand as hot as air from a furnace. The refinery’s own boilers and flares pushed temperatures even higher. Inside the metal dwellings, heat accumulated until the rooms felt sealed and airless. The smell of burning oil lingered constantly …
There were no trees offering shade. No proper public square. No bathhouse. No cooling refuge. Alleyways remained unpaved. Vermin thrived. 
Across the refinery, upwind of the smoke, stood another Abadan.
In foreign districts, British managers and senior staff lived in spacious villas set among lawns and gardens. Roads were paved. Water and electricity were reliable. Clubs offered tennis courts, swimming pools, libraries, dining halls. Offices were cooled. Imported goods filled stores. The environment was designed to replicate a suburban corner of Britain in the middle of Khuzestan.
The refinery divided these two worlds.
To the west: greenery, order, insulation.
To the east: density, heat, improvisation.
Each morning, Iranian workers crossed physically through that hierarchy … leaving shantytowns behind to operate one of the most advanced industrial complexes in the region.
Each evening, they returned to neighbourhoods that reflected none of the wealth they generated.
Abadan was not simply unequal.
It was organized that way: spatially, economically, racially.
—
The strikes of 1946 were not spontaneous. They were the direct result of foreign control and domestic exclusion.
The promises of the 1933 agreement, training, welfare, advancement, had reached only a small circle. For most workers in Abadan, daily life remained the same: low wages, unsafe conditions, and a city divided by race and rank.
The workers believed the strike would finally force the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to change.
To improve wages.
To improve housing.
To treat them as partners in the industry built on their own land.
What they received instead was repression.
Violence.
And a return to enforced conformity.[k]
In the years that followed, AIOC offered only limited adjustments.
Minor improvements
And symbolic gestures.
The core structure remained untouched. The company still resisted any serious revision of the concession’s fiscal terms or managerial control.
At the center of that resistance stood Sir William Fraser.
A Scottish oil industry leader from Glasgow, Commander of the Order of the British Empire and knighted in 1939. He was the chairman of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
Fraser had little patience for compromise.
To him, the refinery workers of Abadan were labor units … nothing more.
Their anger did not alter the balance of power. They did not matter.
Despise Fraser’s push for return to normalcy; the unrest did not fade.
After the strikes, pressure began to grow inside the Majlis.
Deputies demanded that AIOC offer Iran a better deal.
Some went further, introducing proposals to cancel the concession altogether.
The tone was shifting.
…
Sensing the rising resistance, London urged Fraser to present a solution … something that could calm the unrest and stabilize the situation inside Iran before it moved beyond negotiation. 
Formal talks opened in Tehran in September 1948 between AIOC director Neville Gass and Iranian representatives, leading to a draft “Supplemental Agreement” presented to the government.
The agreement raised some of the financial stakes: the royalty rate per ton of oil climbed from four to six shillings, and the company agreed to pay Iran extra sums tied to its annual general reserves. These payments were backdated to 1948 and structured so that British income tax would not reduce what reached Tehran.
There were also one-off cash payments. Slightly higher commutation payments in lieu of Iranian taxes. Better domestic pricing on oil products. All of this meant more money would flow into Iran’s treasury.
And once again AIOC pledged to train more Iranians for administrative positions.
In Western accounts, these changes were presented as generous. 
Progressive.
But inside Iran, the reaction was far less enthusiastic.
The Supplemental Agreement left the foundation of the 1933 concession untouched.
AIOC still controlled operations.
It still controlled accounting.
It still controlled management.
Iran still had no real audit rights. And there was no movement toward the kind of transparent 50–50 profit-sharing agreements that were beginning to appear in places like Venezuela.
To many Iranian critics, this was not reform. It was adjustment.
Iran’s prime minister viewed the proposal as a starting point … something that could be negotiated further, refined, improved.
But when Sir William Fraser was invited back for continued discussions, he refused.
He declared the offer final. Then he boarded his private plane and left Iran.
The message was clear.
…
Abbas Goli Golsha'ian, Iran’s finance minister, was furious; both at the terms of the agreement and at the British attitude that accompanied it.
The Shah, however, saw the proposal differently.
Compared to 1933, he considered it an improvement.
Imperfect … but better. And he pushed the government toward acceptance.
So on July 17, 1949 and on the orders of the crown, the Supplemental Agreement was signed by AIOC’s representative Neville Gass, and Iran’s finance minister, Abbas Goli Golsha’ian.
…
Despite the efforts of AIOC and the Iranian government, the Supplemental Agreement still required Majlis approval to become law.
Inside parliament, the mood was far colder than in the palace. Many deputies argued that the agreement did not go far enough. It left the core structure untouched. It failed to secure meaningful oversight. And it did little to improve the position of Iranian workers in Abadan.
They knew rejecting the deal could provoke the Shah’s anger. But public opinion was strongly against it.
The deputies found themselves trapped between the palace and the streets.
So they chose delay.[l]
The term of the Majlis was only days from expiring. After prolonged debate and extended filibusters, the chamber avoided a final decision. The vote on the Supplemental Agreement was postponed to the next parliament.
But that transition was not neutral.
In 1949, after surviving an assassination attempt, the Shah had already strengthened his constitutional position through a Constituent Assembly.
His authority had expanded.
The palace had become more assertive.
The upcoming elections mattered enormously.
A cooperative Majlis could ratify the agreement and close the oil question … at least for the moment.
So the machinery of the state moved.
The Interior Ministry supervised elections that many viewed as carefully managed.
In constituency after constituency, conservative landowners and court-aligned candidates were favored. Administrative pressure shaped outcomes. 
The process felt less like competition … and more like choreography.
But Iranians who had tasted political openness in recent years were not willing to return quietly to silence.
Protests broke out in major cities.
In Tehran, the confrontation was sharp and visible. Crowds gathered and voices rose.
Among those who stepped forward to challenge the results, one figure stood apart.
He was not a general. Not a court insider. Not a man of sudden ambition.
He was thin, aristocratic in manner, prone to fainting spells and dramatic gestures in parliament.
A veteran of the Constitutional Revolution. A former finance minister. A governor. A parliamentarian who had spent decades arguing that national independence meant something more than formality.
Mohammad Mosaddegh was not backing down easily.
Not this time. [m]
—
Born on June 16, 1882, into a Qajar aristocratic family, Mohammad Mosaddegh grew up in a world of political authority and statecraft.
His mother was a Qajar princess and his father a senior finance official under Nasir al-Din Shah. From an early age, he was drawn into administration, serving as the chief tax auditor of Khorasan at sixteen. The experience exposed him to both the machinery of governance and the corruption embedded in the late Qajar order, shaping his lifelong commitment to legality and accountability.
During the Constitutional Revolution, he aligned himself with the movement for representative government, though he was too young to play a meaningful role.
After Mohammad Ali Shah bombarded the parliament in 1908, he gave up on the fight for Iran’s democracy and departed for Europe. There, he studied political science in Paris and later law in Switzerland.
In 1914, he became the first Iranian to earn a doctorate in law from a European university.
His years abroad deepened his belief in constitutionalism and national sovereignty, even as recurring illness marked his personal life.
He was often described as constitutionally weak, suffering from fatigue, nervousness and episodes of fainting that sometimes kept him away from sessions of the Majles, though these symptoms were never clearly diagnosed medically.
So he decided to come back to Iran.
To fight for the democracy he had given up on.
Returning to Iran during World War I, Mosaddegh taught law and entered government service, where he developed a reputation for incorruptibility.
As deputy finance minister and later finance minister, he pursued aggressive anticorruption measures.
In 1922,[n] he resigned rather than endorse Reza Khan’s escalating military expenditures, arguing that the army’s swelling budget threatened both fiscal stability and constitutional balance.
His resignation established him as a progressive voice unwilling to legitimize what he viewed as a reckless concentration of power.
When Reza Khan moved in 1924 to establish a republic, Mosaddegh opposed the plan, warning that in the hands of a man with a clear appetite for control, a republic would become a façade for military dictatorship.
The following year, on October 31, 1925, he was among the few deputies who spoke against abolishing the Qajar dynasty.
Holding up the constitution, he argued that a monarch must remain a ceremonial figure and cautioned that if Reza Khan assumed the throne, his autocratic tendencies would collapse the separation of powers.
Knowing he could not halt the outcome, he delivered his remarks as a final protest and walked out, abstaining from the vote that inaugurated the Pahlavi dynasty.
He was soon proven right as Reza Shah turned himself into a ruthless authoritarian monarch, sidelining the majlis and suppressing all those who were against him. 
Marginalized under Reza Shah and excluded from parliament in manipulated elections, Mosaddegh spent much of the next decade in enforced seclusion at his estate in Ahmadabad, and in 1940 he was arrested and confined before being placed under house arrest.
In the more open political climate of the 1940s after Reza Shah’s abdication, Mosaddegh emerged as a central parliamentary critic of foreign influence and authoritarian residue, sponsoring legislation in 1944 that barred the government from granting oil concessions without parliamentary approval.
Mosaddegh was not a newcomer.
He was a constitutionalist from the old era, a veteran of earlier parliaments.
A figure with credibility among urban middle classes and bazaar networks.
To him and his allies, the issue was larger than oil alone.
It was about whether the Majlis could function independently of the court.
—
When[o] objections to the 1949 election results were ignored, Mosaddegh and a group of nationalist deputies escalated.
They took sanctuary inside the royal palace grounds.
They demanded annulment of fraudulent results and fresh elections, at least in Tehran, where the manipulation was most visible.
At first, the Shah did not yield.
But the timing complicated matters.
Right as all of this was happening, Mohammad Reza Shah was preparing for his first official visit to the United States.
Iran was presenting itself as a stable, modern ally in a Cold War environment.
Images of parliamentary protest and accusations of rigging did not serve that narrative.
Public pressure built.
Reluctantly, the Shah compromised … but only partially.
He did not void the elections nationwide. Instead, he ordered a re-run in Tehran, the capital where scrutiny was greatest and opposition strongest.
In January 1950, Tehran voted again.
This time the results were decisive.
Mosaddegh and his allies won the highest number of votes in the capital, entering the Sixteenth Majlis with a visible mandate.
Nationally, conservative and court-aligned figures still dominated many rural constituencies.
But now they had to coexist with a small, disciplined, and vocal nationalist bloc centered in Tehran.
And perhaps more importantly, that bloc quickly moved from protest to organization.
Mosaddegh, alongside other liberal and progressive candidates founded the National Front (Jebhe-ye Melli) as an umbrella coalition of middle-class organizations. 
This coalition united liberal nationalists from the Iran Party, the Toilers Party, professional associations like lawyers' and teachers' guilds, segments of the bazaar, and religious figures.
The Front's platform emphasized constitutional limits on royal power, electoral reforms, and oil renegotiation, rapidly gaining traction in Tehran by channeling urban discontent into organized action.
After the suspension of Tudeh, National Party was becoming the biggest challenger to the status quoi and a powerful presence in IRan’s politics. [p]
The struggle over procedure, over elections, over ratification, over committee votes, had become something larger.
The Supplemental Agreement had been introduced as a technical correction … a financial adjustment to stabilize relations with the oil company.
Now it carried a different weight.
To its defenders, rejecting it meant instability and confrontation with Britain.
To its critics, approving it meant surrendering sovereignty for another generation.
The debate was no longer about percentages or royalties.
It was about who ruled Iran … and on whose terms.[q]
And as the newly sworn in Majlis prepared to take up the question, one reality became clear: whatever happened next would not end with an amendment.
It would begin with a reckoning.[r]
In the next episode of The Lion and the Sun, the Shah and the parliament face off in the battle over Iran’s oil and Mohammad Mossadegh moves toward nationalizing the industry.
—
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My name is Oriana and I will see you in two weeks!
Thanks for listening!