The Great Famine & Genocide in Iran

The Great Famine & Genocide in Iran PDF Author: Mohammad Gholi Majd
Publisher: University Press of America
ISBN: 0761861688
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
At least 8–10 million Iranians out of a population of 18–20 million died of starvation and disease during the famine of 1917–1919. The Iranian holocaust was the biggest calamity of World War I and one of the worst genocides of the 20th century, yet it remained concealed for nearly a century. The 2003 edition of this book relied primarily on US diplomatic records and memoirs of British officers who served in Iran in World War I, but in this edition these documents have been supplemented with US military records, British official sources, memoirs, diaries of notable Iranians, and a wide array of Iranian newspaper reports. In addition, the demographic data has been expanded to include newly discovered US State Department documents on Iran’s pre-1914 population. This book also includes a new chapter with a detailed military and political history of Iran in World War I. A work of enduring value, Majd provides a comprehensive account of Iran’s greatest calamity.

The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia, 1917-1919

The Great Famine and Genocide in Persia, 1917-1919 PDF Author: Mohammad Gholi Majd
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 166

Book Description
In this book, Mohammad Gholi Majd argues that Persia was the greatest victim of World War One and also the victim of possibly the worst genocide of the twentieth century. Using U.S. State Department records, as well as Persian and British sources, Majd describes and documents a veritable holocaust about which practically nothing has been written.

A Victorian Holocaust

A Victorian Holocaust PDF Author: Mohammad Gholi Majd
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 0761870156
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 135

Book Description
The death by famine of tens of millions of human beings in Asia and Africa during the Victorian era (1837–1901) is “the secret history of the nineteenth century” about which Western history books contain nothing. The Great Famine of 1869–1873 in Iran took 10–12 million lives, or two-thirds of the population, and is part of this secret history. While the famines that ravaged China and India during 1876 to 1902 have received some recent scrutiny, the precursor of these cataclysmic famines, the Great Famine of 1869–1873 in Iran, has remained practically unknown. This study is the first monograph on the subject in the English language. This famine in Iran killed on a scale similar to the 1876–79 famine in China, which has been called the worst to afflict the human species. This study is based on British diplomatic reports and semi-official sources, European travel accounts, Persian documents and writings, British and American newspapers, and the reports by American missionaries who witnessed the famine. These sources enable one to provide a chronological and numerical account of the death and suffering as the famine spread from the southern and central regions to the rest of the country. The population statistics and rich micro-level data on famine losses in rural and urban areas indicate that during the nearly five years of famine, two-thirds of the population had perished. Not until 1910 did Iran come close to recovering its 1869 population. Soon after, Iran was plunged into the Great Famine of 1917–19, which claimed another 8–10 million, and again the 1942–43 famine and typhus epidemic that carried off an additional 4 million persons. In the seventy-five year span of 1869–1944, Iran had suffered three famines that had taken 25 million lives. Iran’s 1944 population of 10–12 million was unchanged from 11 million recorded in 1841, a perfect case of a Malthusian catastrophe. It is difficult to find another country in which a century of population growth had been wiped out by famine. Having previously described and quantified the 1917–19 and 1942–43 famines, Majd does the same for the 1869–73 famine. This book is the third of a trilogy on famines in Iran during the last 150 years.

Iran Under Allied Occupation In World War II

Iran Under Allied Occupation In World War II PDF Author: Mohammad Gholi Majd
Publisher: UPA
ISBN: 0761867392
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 748

Book Description
Occupied Iran in World War II became the most important supply route to Russia and source of fuel to the Allies. Having pledged to meet Iran’s “minimum needs”, the Allies commandeered the means of transport, seized food and fuel, severely restricted imports, forced Iran to print money, brought Polish refugees from Russia, and initially did little to contain the chaos and insecurity. The resulting famine and typhus epidemic of 1942-43 had claimed 4 million lives amounting to a quarter of the population. This was in addition to the 8-10 million lost in the Great Famine of 1917-19. Iran’s 1944 population was the same as 1900, a perfect case of a Malthusian Catastrophe. Having previously described the World War I famine, and using US diplomatic, military, and intelligence records, as well as primary British sources, Majd completes the task by also telling the story of the World War II Iranian famine.

Mao's Great Famine

Mao's Great Famine PDF Author: Frank Dikötter
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 080277928X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 449

Book Description
Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize An unprecedented, groundbreaking history of China's Great Famine that recasts the era of Mao Zedong and the history of the People's Republic of China. "Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell. Mao Zedong threw his country into a frenzy with the Great Leap Forward, an attempt to catch up to and overtake Britain in less than 15 years The experiment ended in the greatest catastrophe the country had ever known, destroying tens of millions of lives." So opens Frank Dikötter's riveting, magnificently detailed chronicle of an era in Chinese history much speculated about but never before fully documented because access to Communist Party archives has long been restricted to all but the most trusted historians. A new archive law has opened up thousands of central and provincial documents that "fundamentally change the way one can study the Maoist era." Dikötter makes clear, as nobody has before, that far from being the program that would lift the country among the world's superpowers and prove the power of Communism, as Mao imagined, the Great Leap Forward transformed the country in the other direction. It became the site not only of "one of the most deadly mass killings of human history,"--at least 45 million people were worked, starved, or beaten to death--but also of "the greatest demolition of real estate in human history," as up to one-third of all housing was turned into rubble). The experiment was a catastrophe for the natural world as well, as the land was savaged in the maniacal pursuit of steel and other industrial accomplishments. In a powerful mesghing of exhaustive research in Chinese archives and narrative drive, Dikötter for the first time links up what happened in the corridors of power-the vicious backstabbing and bullying tactics that took place among party leaders-with the everyday experiences of ordinary people, giving voice to the dead and disenfranchised. His magisterial account recasts the history of the People's Republic of China.

Late Victorian Holocausts

Late Victorian Holocausts PDF Author: Mike Davis
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1781683603
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
Examining a series of El Niño-induced droughts and the famines that they spawned around the globe in the last third of the 19th century, Mike Davis discloses the intimate, baleful relationship between imperial arrogance and natural incident that combined to produce some of the worst tragedies in human history. Late Victorian Holocausts focuses on three zones of drought and subsequent famine: India, Northern China; and Northeastern Brazil. All were affected by the same global climatic factors that caused massive crop failures, and all experienced brutal famines that decimated local populations. But the effects of drought were magnified in each case because of singularly destructive policies promulgated by different ruling elites. Davis argues that the seeds of underdevelopment in what later became known as the Third World were sown in this era of High Imperialism, as the price for capitalist modernization was paid in the currency of millions of peasants' lives.

The Iranian Crisis and the Birth of the Cold War

The Iranian Crisis and the Birth of the Cold War PDF Author: Benjamin F. Harper
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498576974
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Book Description
This work examines the Iranian Crisis of 1946 and its active role in shaping the Cold War that followed. It is intended to serve as a case study of how the United States was able to successfully flex its short-lived atomic monopoly and achieve its international objectives in the early postwar era. This writing engages with the robust academic field of U.S. foreign relations that over the past number of years revisited and reimagined the origins and driving forces of the Cold War. The Soviet Union’s violation of a troop withdrawal agreement at the conclusion of the Second World War, coupled with its active support of Kurdish and Azeri separatist movements, aggressively tested the new and evolving international order. The primary objective of this work is to understand how the international community achieved a relatively peaceful withdrawal of Soviet forces from Iranian territory. I contend that: 1) Iran possessed, due to its wartime role and latent economic potential, a degree of leverage in negotiations with the United States and Russia that other nations did not; 2) that the Iranian prime minister, Ahmad Qavām, shrewdly manipulated both superpowers with his own brand of masterful statecraft while pursuing his own “Iran-centric” objectives; 3) that the United States used its preponderance of military, economic, and diplomatic might to effectively achieve its postwar aims; and 4) the primary actors in the crisis solidified the legitimacy of the United Nations and its Security Council, which had previously been in jeopardy. While lesser known than the Berlin Airlift or the Korean War or the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Iranian Crisis revealed for the first time what a superpower clash might look like. This event provides a stunning example of crisis management by the primary participants. The Iranian Crisis was indeed the birth of the Cold War, and it established a model for state actions during and after this long conflict. The Crisis also provides a powerful example of how third-party entities outside of Europe, despite possessing relatively meager military and economic might, had the ability to alter and occasionally manipulate superpower behavior.

Famine in European History

Famine in European History PDF Author: Guido Alfani
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107179939
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
The first systematic study of famine in all parts of Europe from the Middle Ages to present. It compares the characteristics, consequences and causes of famine in regional case studies by leading experts to form a comprehensive picture of when and why food security across the continent became a critical issue.

Red Famine

Red Famine PDF Author: Anne Applebaum
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385538863
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 587

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A revelatory history of one of Stalin's greatest crimes, the consequences of which still resonate today, as Russia has placed Ukrainian independence in its sights once more—from the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gulag and the National Book Award finalist Iron Curtain. "With searing clarity, Red Famine demonstrates the horrific consequences of a campaign to eradicate 'backwardness' when undertaken by a regime in a state of war with its own people." —The Economist In 1929 Stalin launched his policy of agricultural collectivization—in effect a second Russian revolution—which forced millions of peasants off their land and onto collective farms. The result was a catastrophic famine, the most lethal in European history. At least five million people died between 1931 and 1933 in the USSR. But instead of sending relief the Soviet state made use of the catastrophe to rid itself of a political problem. In Red Famine, Anne Applebaum argues that more than three million of those dead were Ukrainians who perished not because they were accidental victims of a bad policy but because the state deliberately set out to kill them. Devastating and definitive, Red Famine captures the horror of ordinary people struggling to survive extraordinary evil. Applebaum’s compulsively readable narrative recalls one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century, and shows how it may foreshadow a new threat to the political order in the twenty-first.

The Hungry Steppe

The Hungry Steppe PDF Author: Sarah Cameron
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501730452
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 395

Book Description
The Hungry Steppe examines one of the most heinous crimes of the Stalinist regime, the Kazakh famine of 1930–33. More than 1.5 million people perished in this famine, a quarter of Kazakhstan's population, and the crisis transformed a territory the size of continental Europe. Yet the story of this famine has remained mostly hidden from view. Drawing upon state and Communist party documents, as well as oral history and memoir accounts in Russian and in Kazakh, Sarah Cameron reveals this brutal story and its devastating consequences for Kazakh society. Through the most violent of means the Kazakh famine created Soviet Kazakhstan, a stable territory with clearly delineated boundaries that was an integral part of the Soviet economic system; and it forged a new Kazakh national identity. But this state-driven modernization project was uneven. Ultimately, Cameron finds, neither Kazakhstan nor Kazakhs themselves were integrated into the Soviet system in precisely the ways that Moscow had originally hoped. The experience of the famine scarred the republic for the remainder of the Soviet era and shaped its transformation into an independent nation in 1991. Cameron uses her history of the Kazakh famine to overturn several assumptions about violence, modernization, and nation-making under Stalin, highlighting, in particular, the creation of a new Kazakh national identity, and how environmental factors shaped Soviet development. Ultimately, The Hungry Steppe depicts the Soviet regime and its disastrous policies in a new and unusual light.