The Black Winter of 1860–61: War, Famine, and the Political Ecology of Disasters in Qajar Iran

One day in late February 1861, a group of five to six thousand women crowded around the cavalcade of the Persian monarch as it passed through the streets of Tehran. The shah, on his way from a hunting expedition, was evidently unaware of a worsening bread shortage in his capital city. Despite the best efforts of the royal guards to pass through the crowd, people were able to stop the procession and, while "yelling for bread," voice their concerns directly to the person of Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar (r. 1848–96). They complained about the scarcity of food in the city and the distressing conditions of their families. Their children have been starving for days, they cried. Food of any sort, especially bread, was extremely difficult to obtain; to survive the shortage, they were forced to go through the city's garbage and dirt in search of something half edible. The shah promised he would address these complaints as soon as he reached the government house. He pledged that he would immediately announce a temporary measure to allow for the distribution of free bread across the city. These assurances secured the passage of the royal carriage through the streets. However, the rest of his cavalcade became a target of popular frustrations. Skeptical about the ultimate outcome of any measures undertaken by the authorities and holding some key officials responsible for the ongoing crisis, women clashed with the royal guards and surrounded the king's son and his minister of war, who was trailing behind the royal carriage. Since he was believed to be one of the landed elites involved in the lucrative grain trade in the city, a still agitated and desperate group of women managed to bring him down from atop his horse and thrash him as much as they could.¹

Popular anger against the authorities that winter was rooted in the widespread perception that they were not sufficiently proactive in addressing the main causes of the terrible subsistence crisis that had engulfed the entire country. Nor did the government seem responsive in extending lasting relief to the most vulnerable people in society. It also appeared that some key officials were involved in market practices that had contributed to the making of famine. Such feelings of anger were current not just in Tehran. Other urban areas, too, experienced subsistence protest in 1860–61. The situation was quite dire in places like Tabriz, Qazvin, Rasht, Sari, and Isfahan.²

That winter most parts of Iran were overwhelmed by food scarcity and price inflation. The crisis had started slowly in June 1860. By mid-November, many areas in the country were in the midst of a severe famine, which only worsened in the following months. In Tehran, for example, the price of one Tabrizi batman of bread improved at least fourfold during this time, moving from five shahis in 1859 to one qiran or 20 shahis in late March 1861. In other parts of the country, price inflation was significantly more serious. We know, for example, in Firuzkuh the price of one Tabrizi batman of bread reached three qirans or 60 shahis.³ It is possible that these were in fact formal prices for barely edible bread in the market. If so, they tell us little about the actual value of quality grain, flour, or bread in the black market, which may well have been significantly more than what these numbers tend to suggest. This dire situation continued until May 1861, when the prices of food started to slowly come down.⁴ Throughout this period the magnitude of public suffering was quite immense. We know, however, very little about the mortality rate as a result of this famine. An informed eyewitness throughout that winter, Edward Eastwick, the secretary of the British legation at Tehran, reported in his travelogue that in a conversation he had with a certain Ibrahim Khan, the interim governor of Ashraf in Mazandaran, he learned that in the midst of the crisis "people [around Ashraf] were dying in great numbers while others were...