The previous GeoCurrents post showed that the location of oil and natural gas deposits provides a partial explanation of the differences in the distribution of wealth and economic productivity across the country. But other factors must also be considered. Could language and ethnicity play a role? It has often been argued that the Persian, or Farsi-speaking, central area of Iran is more developed than the non-Persian peripheries. In 2017, for example, the Kurdish Human Rights Association asserted that “Persian province are the richest and non-Persian provinces are the poorest,” arguing that discrimination against Kurds and other minority groups explains this pattern.
But is it actually true that “the Persian province” are the richest parts of Iran? Although this assertion does have some validity, it is also misleading, as we will see in the next few GeoCurrents posts.
A little background on the ethnic situation is first needed. Iran is a multi-lingual country with a well-established sense of common national identity across most of its ethnic groups. Farsi, or Persian, is the national language and is spoken by almost everyone in the country. But it is the mother tongue of only around 50 to 62 percent of Iran’s population. According to some estimates, as many as twenty-five percent speak Azeri, or Azerbaijani, as their first language (see the pie chart below), although most sources put the figure at around 15 percent. The modified Wikipedia map posted below shows the distribution of the most important languages of Iran. As can be seen, Farsi/Persian dominates the central region, with minority languages located in most peripheral areas.
For the next set of maps, I have isolated the Farsi/Persian-speaking region from the language map posted above so that it can be compared with the economic maps of Iran analyzed in the preceding GeoCurrents posts. The second figure below compares the map of Farsi speakers with two maps of per capita GDP, and the first compares it with a map of per capita average income. As these comparisons show, there is a correlation between Persian ethnicity and higher-than-average economic productivity and income, but it not particularly strong. Several non-Persian areas, for example, have elevated economic figures.
The rest of today’s post examines the relatively prosperous but non-Farsi-speaking Caspian region of north-central Iran. As the per capita income map shows, the largest contiguous block of counties in the highest per-capita-income category is found in north-central Iran. This relatively prosperous region is anchored by Tehran and Alborz provinces, Iran’s political and economic core. But it also extends across the formidable Alborz (Elburz) mountains to encompass Mazandaran province on the south shore of the Caspian Sea. Some high-income counties are also found in Gilan Province, located to the northwest of Mazandaran. Mazandaran is also shown on most maps as having higher-than-average per capita GDP.
The Caspian region of Iran is highly distinctive and linguistically diverse. Mazandaran has its own language, Mazandarani, which is related to Farsi but far from interintelligible with it. The Caspian coastal plain is densely populated, with the highest rural population density in Iran by a wide margin. Mazandaran province has no large cities, but it does have a well-developed network of medium-sized urban centers. The Caspian region also has a highly productive agricultural economy, focused on rice, citrus and other fruits, vegetables, tea, and aquiculture. Much of this production is only possible because this region, quite unlike the rest of Iran, has a humid subtropical climate. Most of its mountainous areas are covered by lush, broadleaved forests. Until the 1950s, Caspian tigers lived in this region, and leopards still do.
Iran’s Caspian region also has a distinctive political history. It resisted conquest by the Umayyad Caliphate and did not come under Muslim rule until 760 CE/AD, more than a century after the rest of Iran. According to the Wikipedia article on “Tabaristan” (the historical name of Mazandaran):
For a certain period, the Caspian shore of Iran served as a center for ancient Iranian national consciousness. In 783, during a rebellion in Tabaristan, the locals gave up their Arab husbands to the rebels. Dynasties such as the Bavandids and Ziyarids continued to commemorate their pre-Islamic background, with traditional Iranian festivals such as Nowruz and [Zoroastrian] Mehregan continuing to exist in Tabaristan
Long after Islamization, moreover, the Caspian generally remained partly or entirely autonomous, as well as culturally distinctive and sophisticated. The Wikipedia article on Tabaristan also notes that:
The writing tradition of the [Mazandarani] language is approximately as old as that of New Persian. This was due to the long-lasting independent and semi-independent local kingdoms, ruled by the ispahbads
But despite its profound cultural, historical, and environmental differences from the rest of Iran, the Caspian region is still part of the larger core region of the country. Its people consider themselves, and considered by others, to be an integral part of the Iranian nation. Iran’s powerful sense of national identity, in other words, is by no means limited to the Farsi- or Persian-speaking population, as it transcends most language boundaries in the country. The Azeri region of northwestern Iran is also tightly integrated with the Iranian national project, as we will see in the next post.