2026-06-25 –, Room 302 (Seats 48)
The Allied occupation of Iran (1941–1946) imposed one of the twentieth century’s most abrupt and total border closures, severing pre-war global supply chains for essential commodities and turning a sovereign transit state into a wartime logistical corridor. Rather than offsetting this enforced external disconnection through institutional openness or market flexibility, Iranian governments deliberately layered a second, internal closure: sweeping, non-transparent state monopolies over sugar, tea, grain, and other staples, coupled with opaque rationing. Archival price series document the result: sugar prices rose 2,300 %, tea 2,666 %, and artificial famines erupted in a country untouched by combat.
This double closure—external borders sealed by foreign armies, internal economic borders sealed by domestic policy—lies at the heart of the conference theme “Closed Borders and Global Connections” and prompts the central research question:
How does the deliberate imposition of a closed domestic economy through unaccountable state monopolies, when physical borders are already forcibly closed, transform externally induced scarcity into accelerated societal collapse?
Drawing on five years of multi-archival research (Iranian National Archives, British and U.S. diplomatic records, quantitative price and revenue datasets), this paper advances the “Closed Borders–Closed Economy Paradox”: the simultaneous closure of both frontier types institutionalises rent-seeking, erodes public trust, and converts manageable supply shocks into self-reinforcing crises of governance and subsistence. The Iranian case provides a historically grounded, theoretically generalisable framework for understanding resilience and failure in sanctioned, blockaded, or pandemic-isolated economies across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
closed borders, closed economy, state monopoly, occupied Iran, rent-seeking, artificial famine, institutional trust, global supply chains
Marziye Mansoury is a PhD candidate in History at Alzahra University, Tehran, Iran. Her research spans the Second World War through the early Cold War (1941–1961), focusing on the political economy of the Allied occupation of Iran, the engineering of scarcity of essential goods through state monopolies and border closures, and the social consequences of fiscal policy. She has published several peer-reviewed articles on Iran's wartime economic crises, examining state monopoly policies, the performance of the administrative apparatus, and the lived experience of economic hardship. Her current paper, "Closed Borders, Closed Economies: The Paradox of State Monopoly and Wartime Shortages in Occupied Iran, 1941–1946," introduces the concept of the "double closure" – external borders sealed by foreign armies and internal economic borders sealed by unaccountable state monopolies – as a framework for understanding how manageable supply shocks can accelerate societal collapse.
Central to her work is the conviction that economic history is inseparable from social history. Budgetary documents, as economic evidence of resource distribution, reveal how states prioritize – or fail to prioritize – the welfare of their citizens. By studying the lived experience of past economic crises, she argues, we can extract policy lessons for the present: effective crisis management depends not on abstract models but on context-specific strategies that align with each society's institutional and social realities. Her ongoing research extends this analysis into the post-war period (up to 1961), examining how wartime fiscal structures shaped Iran's development trajectory.