Rockefeller Archive Center

Rockefeller Archive Center Research Reports are created by recipients of research travel stipends and by many others who have conducted research at the RAC. The reports demonstrate the breadth of the RAC's archival holdings, particularly in the study of philanthropy and its effects. Read more about the history of philanthropy at resource.rockarch.org. Also, see the RAC Bibliography of Scholarship, a comprehensive online database of publications citing RAC archival collections.

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The Origins of the Near East Foundation's Iran Programmes, 1943-1950

July 9, 2020

In October 1950, Edward C. Miller and Halsey B. Knapp, both finance officers for the philanthropic Near East Foundation (NEF), embarked on a three-month tour of the Middle East. Founded in 1915 as a direct response to the humanitarian crisis caused by the Armenian Genocide, Near East Relief (as it was then known) had gained an international reputation for its humanitarian and relief programmes. But by 1930, it transformed itself into the Near East Foundation from, in the words of Keith David Watenpaugh, "an ad hoc food relief organization to…a bureaucratized, multidisciplinary, nongovernmental 'development' organization.'" During their travels, Miller and Knapp examined the multitude of agricultural, education, and sanitation programmes operated by the NEF in Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and Greece. Their goal was to seek an answer to the question: "What is the present standing of the Near East Foundation?"

International Relations; Near East Foundation

Economic Expertise and Rural Improvement in Iran, 1948-1963

November 29, 2017

Americans played a key role in Iran's oil-based development program of the 1950s and early 1960s, both through the U.S. government's official overseas development programs and private organizations. Oil has historically been viewed as a key foundation of the Pahlavi regime of Mohammed Reza Shah (r. 1941-1979). According to Ruhollah Ramazani, following the U.S.-supported 1953 coup d'etat, "neither political consolidation nor economic rehabilitation could be envisaged" without the financial resources accrued from oil, "the backbone of the Iranian economy." Iran's oil was placed in the hands of an international consortium of oil companies through a new oil agreement with the shah's government in 1954, and annual revenues from the consortium's sale of Iranian oil abroad grew from $33 million to $338 million between 1955 and 1960. Yet oil power needed expertise to be applied effectively, and from the U.S. point of view the Pahlavi state seemed rickety and corrupt, in need of American "know-how" to turn its oil power into lasting socio-economic growth and political stability for the shah's regime.

Agrarian and Rural; Ford Foundation

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