Negotiations with Anglo-Persian moved quickly enough that by the summer of 1914 the British government was in a position to buy a 51 per cent stake – and, with it, operational control of the business. Churchill’s eloquence in the House of Commons saw a large majority vote in favour. And so it was that British policymakers, planners and military

The discovery of oil made the piece of paper signed by the Shah in 1901 one of the most important documents of the twentieth century. For while it laid the basis for a multi-billion-dollar business to grow – the Anglo-Persian Oil Company eventually became British Petroleum – it also paved the way for political turmoil. That the terms of the

All over Italy, when they meet, people say to each other, ‘schiavo’, from a Venetian dialect. ‘Ciao’, as it is more commonly spelt, does not mean ‘hello’; it means ‘I am your slave’.32

These quickly solidified into two competing arguments, championed by Sunnī and Shīʿa interpretations, with the latter arguing passionately that only the descendant of Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law, should rule as caliph, and the former arguing for a broader understanding.

Once, wrote the historian al-Masʿūdī, the ancient Greeks and the Romans had allowed the sciences to flourish; then they adopted Christianity. When they did so, they ‘effaced the signs of [learning], eliminated its traces and destroyed its paths’.