The forgotten famine
A country that had declared itself neutral was occupied by three empires at once. Then something like a tenth of its people starved — and almost no one remembers it happened.
Between 1917 and 1919, Iran — then Persia, and formally neutral in the First World War — suffered one of the worst famines of the modern era. Estimates of the dead vary, but the mainstream figure is roughly two million people. British, Russian, and Ottoman armies occupied the country and requisitioned its food and transport; drought, hoarding, and the 1918 flu did the rest. We grade the catastrophe and the occupation as fact, and we treat the loudest counter-claim — that this was a deliberate British genocide of eight to ten million — as what the record shows it to be: not accepted by historians. This is the anchor of Crimes of Empire, and it belongs there because empire kills not only by intent but by indifference.
What this page is about
In the last two years of the First World War, a famine tore through Iran — a country that had declared its neutrality and was occupied anyway, by British, Russian, and Ottoman forces at the same time. The most widely accepted estimate is that around two million people died of starvation and disease, on the order of a tenth of the population. It was caused by several things at once: drought and a failed harvest, the collapse of trade and transport, hoarding and profiteering, the 1918 influenza pandemic — and the occupying armies' requisitioning of grain and pack animals from a population that was already going hungry. The British role as an aggravating factor is documented.
It is one of the great forgotten disasters of the twentieth century. Recent scholarship has asked why it is barely memorialized, even in Iran. We keep two ledgers here, as this hub always does: the crime, and the way it was licensed. For this famine, the “licensing” is not a genocide doctrine and we do not pretend it was one — it is the plainer, colder fact that three empires treated a neutral country as a supply depot and a buffer zone, and treated its starving as someone else's problem. That is empire by indifference, which is the honest reading of this case and one end of a spectrum the rest of the hub traces to its other, more explicit extreme.
The same investigation, restaged one beat at a time. Step through it here, or present it fullscreen.
The Forgotten Famine
A country that declared itself neutral was occupied by three empires at once. Then something like a tenth of its people starved — and almost no one remembers it happened.
The claim this page defends
A neutral country was occupied by three empires during the First World War, roughly two million of its people died in a famine those occupiers' requisitioning helped cause, and the catastrophe has been almost entirely forgotten — a case that shows empire kills by indifference as surely as by intent, without needing the inflated genocide figure that has been attached to it.
A neutral country, occupied and starved: 1907 – 1919
- 1907. The Anglo-Russian Convention carves Persia into British and Russian “spheres of influence” without Persia at the table — the country treated as a board for other powers' games.
- 1914. Persia declares neutrality in the First World War. It is occupied anyway — British, Russian, and Ottoman forces all operate on its soil.
- 1917–1918. Drought and a failed harvest collide with wartime disruption. Occupying armies requisition grain, food, and pack animals; trade and transport break down; hoarding and profiteering spike prices out of reach.
- 1918. The global influenza pandemic reaches a population already weakened by hunger, multiplying the death toll.
- 1917–1919. On the order of two million people die of starvation and disease — one of the deadliest famines of the era.
- After. The famine all but vanishes from public memory, in Iran and abroad; serious scholarship on how and why it was forgotten arrives only in recent years.
The record, claim by claim
A catastrophic famine killed on the order of two million Iranians between 1917 and 1919.
FACTThe Persian famine of 1917–1919 was one of the worst of the modern era. Exact figures are impossible to fix a century on, but the mainstream estimate is roughly two million dead of starvation and disease — on the order of a tenth of the country's population at the time. It was multi-causal: a drought and failed harvest, the wartime collapse of trade and transport, hoarding and profiteering, the 1918 influenza pandemic striking a population already weakened by hunger, and the demands of occupying armies. That the famine was real and enormous is not in dispute; only its precise scale and the apportioning of blame are debated.
Iran declared neutrality in WWI and was occupied anyway — by British, Russian, and Ottoman forces at once.
FACTPersia declared itself neutral when the First World War began. Its neutrality was ignored. British, Russian, and Ottoman armies all fought and operated on Iranian soil, treating the country as a theater and a supply line in a war it had tried to stay out of. This was the continuation of a longer pattern: the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention had already divided Persia into foreign spheres of influence with no Iranian consent. Occupation is the essential context for the famine — it is why a domestic drought became a mass-death event.
The occupying armies' requisitioning of food and transport made the famine far worse — Britain among them.
FACTA drought did not have to become a famine of this scale; the occupation is what turned scarcity into mass starvation. Occupying forces requisitioned grain, foodstuffs, and pack animals from a population that was already short of both, and the war's disruption of trade and transport choked off relief. Britain, as the dominant military presence in much of the country, is documented as an aggravating factor — its requisitioning and its handling of supply drew contemporary and later criticism. This is the defensible core of the 'imperial responsibility' argument, separate from the disputed question of scale and intent.
The claim that 8–10 million died in a deliberate British genocide — an 'Iranian holocaust.'
FALSE / MISLEADINGThis framing comes almost entirely from one author, Mohammad Gholi Majd, whose book calls the famine a deliberate genocide of eight to ten million people caused primarily by Britain. Mainstream historians do not accept it. The arithmetic alone is the problem: Iran's population then was only about 18–20 million, so Majd's figure would mean roughly half the entire country died — far beyond what the demographic record supports, and well above the ~2 million most scholars cite. And the evidence points to multiple causes — drought, disease, hoarding, the requisitioning of all three occupying armies — not a single-actor extermination plan. We flag the 8–10 million 'genocide' claim because it circulates widely and because inflating the number ultimately makes the real, documented crime easier to dismiss. The honest charge against Britain is grave enough without it.
The famine is a crime of imperial indifference — the licensing was disregard, not an extermination doctrine.
SOME SMOKEThis hub pairs each crime with the justification that licensed it, usually a doctrine that cast the victims as less than human. This case sits at the honest, harder-to-quote end of that spectrum. There is no famine-specific extermination ideology to quote, and we will not invent one. What the record does show is the imperial mindset of the era: a neutral country carved into 'spheres of influence' in 1907 without its consent, treated in wartime as a supply depot and a buffer, its starving population regarded as an administrative inconvenience rather than a people with a claim on the occupiers' conscience. That is dehumanization by disregard — killing not by design but by the refusal to count the dead as fully mattering. We pose this as the lens the case fits, not as a claim about any individual's intent.
Two million, not ten — and why the number matters
- The famine and the occupation are solid. A neutral country occupied by three empires, on the order of two million dead, and requisitioning that turned a drought into mass starvation — these are documented and widely accepted.
- The 8–10 million ‘genocide’ figure is not. It rests on a single author and would require roughly half the country to have died. We report it because it spreads, and we mark it false-or-misleading rather than launder it into the ledger. Inflating the toll hands skeptics an easy way to wave the whole thing away.
- The lens is posed, not proven. “Empire by indifference” is our reading of a documented pattern of disregard, graded SOME SMOKE. We do not claim Britain planned the famine, and we do not invent a doctrine that was never spoken.
- Forgetting is part of the crime. That two million deaths could nearly disappear from history — including inside Iran — is itself the thing recent scholarship is trying to correct, and the reason this page exists.
The crime that had no doctrine
This page anchors Crimes of Empire precisely because it is the hard case. The rest of the hub documents crimes that came with a script — the slavers, the settlers, the colonial administrators who wrote down, in their own words, why the people they were destroying did not fully count. The Persian famine had no such script. No one declared a plan to starve two million Iranians. And that is the point: empire did not need a plan. It needed only to occupy a neutral country, take its food for the war, and decline to see the starving as a people to whom anything was owed. Killing by disregard is still killing. The famine also shows the second crime this hub tracks — the disappearance of the record, the way a catastrophe on this scale can be kept out of what we're allowed to remember. The inflated genocide claim and the near-total forgetting are two failures of the same ledger: one that overstates, one that erases. This page tries to hold the honest middle — two million dead, three empires present, and a crime of indifference that deserves to be remembered as it actually happened.
Questions worth taking seriously
If you reject the 10 million figure, aren't you minimizing the crime?
No — it's the opposite. Two million dead in a famine the occupiers made worse is a massive crime on its own. Attaching a figure that isn't supported — eight to ten million would mean about half the country died — gives critics an easy reason to wave the whole story away as propaganda. Getting the number right protects the real charge; it doesn't shrink it.
Britain didn't cause the drought. Why blame the empire?
Because a drought doesn't have to become a famine of this size. Iran was neutral and occupied by three empires; their armies took grain and pack animals from people who were already hungry, and the war shut down the trade and transport that could have brought relief. The empire isn't blamed for the weather — it's blamed for turning a survivable shortage into mass starvation, and for treating the dying as beneath notice.
The hub says every crime came with a dehumanizing justification. Where's the quote here?
There isn't a famine-specific one, and we won't invent it. This case is the honest exception that shows the range: some imperial crimes came with an explicit doctrine that the victims were less than human; this one came with something quieter — indifference. A neutral country was carved up in 1907 without its consent and used as a supply depot in a war it tried to avoid, its starving treated as an administrative problem. That's dehumanization by disregard, graded as a posed lens rather than a quoted doctrine.
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This site aggregates and grades a record that other outlets and primary sources have already put on the record. Every FACT-graded claim above is sourced to court filings, government reports, sworn whistleblower disclosures, published investigative journalism, or named-source statements. The citations are the accountability mechanism; this section is how you get on the record too.
The record
- Zahra Edalati & Majid Imani — “Imperial wars and the violence of hunger: remembering and forgetting the Great Persian Famine 1917–1919,” Third World Quarterly (2023)
- Persian famine of 1917–1919 — scale, multi-causal analysis, and the three-empire occupation of neutral Iran
- “The Great Persian Famine (1917–1919): Causes, Consequences and Legal Reflections on Historical Responsibility”
- Mohammad Gholi Majd — “The Great Famine & Genocide in Iran: 1917–1919” (the contested 8–10 million claim, attributed and disputed)
- Black Book Audit — Crimes of Empire (hub)