Reza Shah Pahlavi
Reza Shah Pahlavi founded Iran's last dynasty and forced the country through rapid modernisation in sixteen years. Born in 1878 in Mazandaran to a military family, orphaned young and raised in poverty, he enlisted in the Persian Cossack Brigade as a teenager and rose through the ranks to command it — an ascent almost unheard of for a man of his origins. In February 1921, with the country fragmenting after the First World War and the Anglo-Persian Agreement, he marched on Tehran with about three thousand men and took power in a coup, becoming war minister and then prime minister. He deposed the last Qajar shah in 1925 and had himself crowned, having first considered founding a republic on the Turkish model and abandoned the idea under clerical pressure. He built a centralised state where none had existed: a conscript national army, a unified bureaucracy, a modern judiciary that displaced the sharia courts, secular schools, the University of Tehran in 1934, and the Trans-Iranian Railway, financed by domestic taxes rather than foreign loans. He suppressed tribal autonomy by force and disarmed the tribes. The cultural programme was coercive. Traditional dress was banned in 1928, men were required to wear European hats, and in 1936 the veil was outlawed outright, with police removing headscarves in the street — a measure many women experienced as confinement to their homes. He renamed the country Iran internationally in 1935. He renegotiated the Anglo-Persian Oil Company concession in 1933 on modestly better terms. Suspecting his German sympathies, Britain and the Soviet Union invaded in August 1941 and forced his abdication in favour of his son. He died in exile in Johannesburg in 1944.
- Lived: 1878 CE – 1944 CE
- Nationality: Iranian
- Roles: shah
