The Petrochemical Paradise: Iranian Capital and American Expertise in Khuzestan, 1956-1963

Following the coup of August 1953, the government of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi launched the Second Seven Year Plan, an economic development program designed to improve living conditions and increase the productivity of Iran's economy in order to mollify political discontent. As the United States showered the shah's government in military and economic aid, American non-government organizations flocked to the country in order to take part in the $1 billion development plan. Americans developed a particular interest in Khuzestan, Iran's oil-rich province. The engineering firm Development & Resources Corp., managed by David C. Lilienthal and Gordon S. Clapp, launched a $140 million program to develop Khuzestan, modeled after the TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority), a major project of the New Deal era in the United States. Lilienthal and Clapp sought to tie Iran's petrochemical resources to its water and soil, an ambitious venture meant to grow the country's nascent industrial base while simultaneously delivering benefits to its agricultural population. The project demonstrated the vaunted ambition of American and Iranian developmentalists, and was undone due to divisions within the shah's government and the broader failures of the Second Plan in the early 1960s. This paper draws on the archives of the Development & Resources Corp., interviews with Iranian technocrats, and the archives of the US government to illustrate the ways in which American technical expertise engaged with Iran's national development strategy after the 1953 coup. Through a conquest of nature, the harnessing of fossil fuels, and the application of natural gas and oil resources to agriculture, Iranian and American developmentalists imagined a new form of society--the petrochemical paradise--born in the arid backwater of Khuzestan. While the program was a failure, it produced the conditions for future development ventures, setting the stage for the crisis of water management that currently afflicts the Khuzestan province.