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their holdings to just two villages where they had homes they used for vacations and
hunting.
Q: When they sold their villages, would it go to somebody else?
MILLER: Yes, the villages were sold in the bazaar, and rich merchants who were rising
and wanted villages as prestige bought them. The process of change was slow.
The decision to sell or keep a village would depend on the quality of the village, whether
it was profitable, very often there was prestige to own a village particularly in the
marginal areas. Agriculture itself as an economic force was changing. Certainly, the
methods of agriculture were changing. Typically water was the limiting and governing
principle or, in the areas of rainfall, predictable rainfall, where wheat could be grown
without fear of drought, or rice would be grown in the north, where there was plentiful
rainfall for ice and for crops like tea, or fruit orchards. Water was a key determinant. If
you bought a village you’d have to know how much water came with the village. Water
would define how many people could work and how much land could be planted. For
thousands of years in Iran, the measurement of work was by how much land could be
plowed by a man and an ox in a day. Land divisions, so-called, were based on that manox
scale of measurement. With mechanization, in the twentieth century, the nature of
plowing and land division and irrigation was changing. Land reform did not significantly
affect overall output, really, but it was driving people off the land. The traditional
agriculture was a form of intensive farming; so-called land reform, actually drove half of
the village workers into the cities unnecessarily, unnecessarily because they were living
quite a reasonable life in the villages. If better education and health were provided to the
villages you would have had a much better situation.
Q: What with the clearances_________…
MILLER: Yes it is. It was something like that, not intended with that in mind. This class
of people driven to the cities were called Khoshnashin. They were the so-called
“landless.” They were the workers in villages, they were the ones who didn’t have land
tenure by family inheritance because they had ploughed the same plots for hundreds of
years, but were otherwise involved in harvesting and planting and did other jobs in the
village. It changed the nature of villages, so-called land reform. Land reform as conceived
in the 1960’s was an inappropriate idea imposed by Western land reform theorists who
tried to apply methods used elsewhere on a very complicated traditional land system.
This is how Mossadeq come back into the picture. Mossadeq was deeply interested in
land reform. He was a big landowner, and understood well the complications. He said,
“First step for reform of Iranian agriculture was to make a national cadastral survey. It
was necessary to determine what kind of land Iran has, then determine how can it best be
farmed, how many workers would be able to usefully work on it. What about village
schools, and social infrastructure once provided by landlords.” If the land is to use
machinery what would be the optimum kinds of tractors, combines, etc. Mossadeq asked,
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