British Diplomatic Oil Crisis: Contemporary Anglo-Saxon Geopolitical Rivalries in the Persian Gulf: Drawing a Lesson? Or Sir Anthony Eden‘s Delusion of Grandeur.

of
Nations, while reserving their respective legal points of view,
the parties began to negotiate. On 3rd April 1933, Sir John Cadman
of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company arrived in Teheran and negotiations
began. The outcome was a revised agreement, the 1933 Concession. It
embodied a new formula for royalties which henceforward could be
calculated under three headings:

1. A fixed sum per ton of
   oil exported or sold in Persia. This
   was to be 4s for ton subject to adjustment to compensate the
   Government for any fluctuations in value of English currency
   as compared with the value of gold in London, taking the
   1933 price as par.

2. A sum varying between
   6d and 1s per ton similarly adjusted
   in gold in consideration of exemption from Iranian taxation
   on the Company’s operations.

3. A sum equal to 20% of
   any distribution of the ordinary stock
   holders or the Company, whether as dividends or in relation
   to general reserves, in excess of a certain minimum annual
   sum (£671, 280).3

   In addition the Persian
   Government would be entitled to a
   sum equal to 20% of the difference between the Company’s
   General Reserve at the end of the Concession and the General
   Reserve at 31st December, 1932.

   (N.B. These payments
   were not given a gold guarantee.)4

   The 1933 Concession
   lasted for eighteen years (as against
   its theoretical life of 60 years to 1993). With the
   Depression easing, oil production in Iran followed an upward
   course. From 5.75 million tons in 1931 it rose to nearly
   10.2 million tons in 1938, outstripping the rate of increase
   in oil production in the rest