Political Economy of Railway and Railway policy-making in Iran from the Perspective of Creative destruction theory

Among the communication and transportation technologies, the railway has the most connection with politics to the extent that it has changed according to the fluctuation in the policy of creating, expanding, building, and concluding railway contracts. Since at the end of the nineteenth century, railways were seen as the locomotive of countries' development, the elites of countries, including Iran, made great efforts to expand this industry in their country. So that dealing with the road was theorized as a symbol of progress in the Qajar and Pahlavi periods. In this research, an attempt is made to answer the question of what effect politics has had on the introduction of railways as an important world technology to Iran by using the explanatory and analytical approach. In response to this question, it can be argued that the railway in Iran has been a complicated political issue rather than a technical and engineering phenomenon. This hypothesis is examined in the framework of "creative (innovative) destruction theory". The findings of the research show that the establishment of the railway in Iran is intertwined with politics, and an important range of statesmen, intellectuals and other social strata have taken a position on it according to their interests. Therefore, the foreigners had a difference of opinion about it and turned it into a place of competition between them. The method of collecting information in the current research is library-based and using documentary sources and oral history.