Reza Shah's programme of state centralisation in the 1920s and 1930s treated Iran's large nomadic confederations, which had their own armed forces and often their own external relations, as the principal obstacle to a unitary state. The army campaigned against the Lurs, Kurds, Baluch, Qashqai, Bakhtiari and Turkmen, executed or imprisoned tribal leaders including the Bakhtiari khans and the Qashqai ilkhani's family, disarmed the tribes, and from the early 1930s applied a policy known as takht-e qapu, forcing pastoral groups to abandon seasonal migration and settle in fixed villages, sometimes at the point of army guns and often in lowland areas unsuited to their herds. Anthropological and historical accounts, including Lois Beck's work on the Qashqai, describe mass loss of livestock, disease among people and animals kept in unsuitable climates, impoverishment and substantial mortality; forced dress reform and conscription accompanied the settlement. The policy collapsed almost immediately after the Anglo-Soviet occupation of Iran and Reza Shah's abdication in 1941, when large numbers of tribespeople resumed migration. No figures were compiled at the time, and the scale of mortality remains a matter of reconstruction from tribal memory and later fieldwork.
The Pahlavi state disarmed Iran's nomadic confederations and compelled them to settle in fixed villages under army supervision
Iran held no census before 1956. Estimates by Lambton, Amanolahi and others put the nomadic confederations - Qashqai, Bakhtiari, Lur, Kurdish, Baluch, Shahsevan and Turkmen - at roughly a quarter of a national population of some 10-12 million in the 1920s, that is about 2.5-3 million. The 1956 census, after two decades of forced settlement and post-Reza Shah re-nomadisation, counted far fewer.
No defensible range. Contemporary and later accounts describe heavy mortality among forcibly settled pastoralists from disease, malnutrition and loss of herds, and executions of tribal leaders and fighters during the disarmament campaigns, but the Pahlavi state kept no relevant records and no reconstruction has produced a credible total.
Historical and anthropological studies of the Qashqai and Bakhtiari, including Lois Beck's fieldwork, document the imprisonment and execution of tribal leaders, army enforcement of settlement, and the confiscation of herds and destruction of tent camps.
Iran