War and Peace in Qajar Persia: Implications Past and ... - Oguzlar.az

Crime, security, and insecurity 175usually not mounted and often unarmed. The literature addressing that periodhas distinguished banditry as committed by gangs of armed and mountedrobbers and highwaymen or tribesmen, and implies that it was the mosttraditional form of property crime. Rural areas were subjected to acts ofbanditry and plunder rather than theft, or perhaps rural thefts were consideredinsignificant and were not reported, as they probably did not come asreadily to the knowledge of the authorities.The sources examined for this study cover about 60 years from 1850 tothe early twentieth century. These consist of two intelligence reports preparedby British agents on Fars and Astarabad and five Persian newspapers, bothofficial and non-official. The intelligence reports are “Mokhaberat Astarabad,”1908–1924, 2 (2) and “Vaqaye’e Etefaqiyeh,” 1875–1903, 3 which covered Fars.The official newspapers are the Ruznameh-ye Vaqaye’e Etefaqiyeh and theRuznameh-ye Dowlat-e Eliyeh, 1852–1881, and the Ruznameh-ye Iran, 1882–1894. The non-official newspapers are Habl al Matin, published in Calcuttafrom 1900 to 1925 and Ra’d published from 1909 to 1914. Because of thedissimilarity of our sources, this study is divided into two parts. In the firstpart I shall examine the conditions of Fars and Astarabad, based on the intelligencereports. The second part will deal with the whole country, based onthe information contained in the newspapers.It should be taken into consideration that not all crimes were reported.Many times they were settled between the parties concerned and did not reachthe authorities. Furthermore, it is possible that those which were more sensationalmade it into the news and the less so went unreported. It is also possiblethat the official newspapers did not publish the worst news, whereasafter the Constitutional Revolution when newspapers became free, theyperhaps purposely exaggerated the news of insecurity and robbery.Criminal justice was arbitrary and usually very harsh and was consideredto act as a deterrent, though it did not seem to have had this effect.Punishment often had a private character, and was extremely capricious. Incertain instances punishment was administered collectively on the communityof the culprit. In theory, when a criminal was arrested, he was eithertried in a religious court, and the sentence was then submitted to the governmentto carry out, or the culprit was tried by common law. However, thisrule was not always carried out in a systematic manner and criminals wereoften punished arbitrarily by the governors or tribal chiefs. The arrest of thievesand the administration of justice were easier in urban areas than in the opencountry, where the robbers were generally armed and mounted.Before discussing the nature of crime, two factors must be mentioned: thesize of the population and the physical aspect of the country. We have noaccurate statistic of the population of Iran for this period, but is has beensuggested that there was an overall increase of the population despite periodsof famine and epidemics and it has been estimated as between 5 and 6million. City populations grew from 10 per cent to 20 or 25 per cent, whilethe nomadic population fell from 50 per cent of the population in 1800, to