Henry Drummond Wolff

1830 - 1908

British mission head who gained economic concessions from Iran.

Sir Henry Drummond Wolff was the head of a special British mission sent to Iran (then Persia) after 1881, when, under a conservative government, the British started actively to support concessions. He was instrumental in obtaining important economic and financial concessions from the Persian government and was sent to Persia in 1888 as British envoy. As a result of Wolff's pressure, the Qajar dynasty monarch, Naser al-Din Shah, opened Persia's only navigable river, the Karun, to international navigation. Wolff, with Baron Julius de Reuter's son, was instrumental in settling claims to the Reuter Concession obtained in 1872. One concession granted by Persia was the right to establish a national bank, the Imperial Bank of Persia, which gave the concessionaires exclusive rights to issue bank notes and other negotiable papers. In 1890, Wolff obtained from the shah for British financiers a monopoly over the production, sale, and export of Iranian tobacco. This concession triggered one of the first successful mass demonstrations in the modern history of Iran, the Tobacco Revolt, and so the concession was abandoned.

Bibliography

Keddie, Nikki. Roots of Revolution: An Interpretive History of Modern Iran. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.

— PARVANEH POURSHARIATI

Caricature from Punch, 1882

Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff (1830 – 11 October 1908), son of Joseph Wolff, was a well-known English - Jewish ^[1] diplomat and Conservative Party politician, who started as a clerk in the Foreign Office and was created KCMG in 1862 for various services abroad.

In 1874-1880 he sat in parliament for Christchurch, and in 1880-1885 for Portsmouth, being one of the group known as the Fourth Party. In 1885 he went on a special mission to Constantinople in connection with the Egyptian question, and as a result various awkward difficulties, hinging on the Sultan's suzerainty, were addressed. In 1888 he was sent as minister to Teheran, and from 1892 to 1900 was ambassador at Madrid.

Sir Henry was a notable raconteur, and he did good service to the Conservative Party by helping to found the Primrose League. He was created GCMG in 1878 and GCB in 1889. His grandson, Henry Maxence Cavendish Drummond Wolff was also briefly a Conservative Member of Parliament.

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

1. ^ Biography of Joseph Woolf at the Jewish Encyclopedia

External links

• Rambling Recollections By Sir Henry Drummond Wolff (1908)
• Some Notes of the Past By Sir Henry Drummond Wolff

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