A Veritable Holocaust: The Decline in the Population of Iran

To estimate the famine’s toll, this chapter will compare Iran’s pre and post-famine population. Iran’s first population census was conducted in 1956, 35 years after the advent of Pahlavi regime. In the absence of census figures for the earlier years, one has to rely on estimates of contemporaries, foreign and Iranian, diplomatic reports, and on the very small number of scholarly articles that have attempted to estimate the population of the country during the first two decades of the twentieth century. This chapter will first review and critique these more recent studies and will point out that some of the key demographic developments described, namely, the increase in urbanization and increase in emigration to neighboring countries and beyond, are completely inconsistent with the hypothesis of a more or less stationary population, and that population of Iran in 1910 was much higher than implied by these studies. It is indeed remarkable that these results have gone unchallenged for so long. The chapter will then utilize population figures found in State Department records and American sources to estimate Iran’s loss due to famine and disease in World War I. The results indicate that conservatively 8-10 million Iranians, and possibly more, perished during the famine. The famine of 1917-1919 was probably the greatest calamity in the history of Iran and possibly the biggest holocaust of the twentieth century. That it has remained concealed for nearly a century leads one to suspect that there are other hidden calamities awaiting discovery.