Ervand Abrahamian is one of the leading experts on modern Iran and has written extensively about the history of the country. In his most recent piece of work, The Coup, he covers the nationalization of oil in Iran, and how the poor negotiations among Britain, the United States and Iran led to a coup orchestrated by the CIA and Britain to overthrow the leader of Iran, Mohammad Moseddeq. There have been several books written covering these events, but in The Coup Abrahamian challenges three commonly held beliefs about the events in 1953: that that the British acted in good faith in the negotiations of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (AIOC) in good faith; that the United States was a broker in these negotiations; and that the talks failed because of Mosaddeq’s intransigence.
Abrahamian draws on a wide range of sources to support these claims. His research included many memoirs and firsthand accounts, oral histories, newspapers, and secondary works from Iranian records. He combines this research with British archival material and published documents from the Foreign Relations of the United States series published by the U.S. Department of State, in which he highlights the flawed and incomplete volume on the crisis in their records. …show more content…
The AIOC and British government tried to minimize the impact of nationalization on their profits by instituting an economic embargo and attempting to undermine the government through a variety of means. These problems eventually led to negotiations but as Abrahamian tells the reader, in London and Washington, he believed that there were no genuine negotiations going on and that the motives behind the attempted blocking of nationalization were solely an attempt to protect their
Abrahamian draws on a wide range of sources to support these claims. His research included many memoirs and firsthand accounts, oral histories, newspapers, and secondary works from Iranian records. He combines this research with British archival material and published documents from the Foreign Relations of the United States series published by the U.S. Department of State, in which he highlights the flawed and incomplete volume on the crisis in their records. …show more content…
The AIOC and British government tried to minimize the impact of nationalization on their profits by instituting an economic embargo and attempting to undermine the government through a variety of means. These problems eventually led to negotiations but as Abrahamian tells the reader, in London and Washington, he believed that there were no genuine negotiations going on and that the motives behind the attempted blocking of nationalization were solely an attempt to protect their