Throughout the nineteenth century, Iran was caught up in the turmoil between Russia and Great Britain over the issue of hegemony in the Middle East. Indeed, Iran often became the battleground of this conflict, and frequently the two great powers imposed upon her swift and degrading military defeats and burdensome economic treaties. In 1857, for example, a series of British assaults launched from India forced a resistant Iranian government to concede special nation trading rights and exceptional legal status, more favorable than those available to Iranian nationals, to British companies. In 1869, the Suez Canal opened, significantly reducing the time and difficulty of travel between Western Europe and Iran. By the 1890s, increasing foreign control over the economy created alarm among provincial elites, merchants, religious leaders, nationalists, artisans, and peasants. By the end of the century, European businesses were paying the Shahs for concessions to various resources and commercial markets in Iran. The most controversial of these concessions was the establishment of a monopoly over the production, sale, and export of all Iranian tobacco, which was granted to a British firm in 1890.
A series of Islamic reform efforts, which began in the late nineteenth century and carried into the first decade of the twentieth century, clearly articulated Iran's weaknesses when compared to the West. The country's "growing interaction with the West hastened socioeconomic change producing both new problems and new possibilities of development." During this period, the primary consideration of most Iranian elites, particularly the Constitutionalists, came to be "catching up with the West."
In 1906, the Qajar Shah Muzaffar Ad-din, agreeing to demands by reformers, granted Iran a constitution that called for a national assembly (the majles) and a constitutional-monarchy system of government. Nonetheless, many Shi'ite clerics saw constitutionalism as a threat to Islamic law. As a result.......
