1953 Iranian coup

On 26 May 1908, a British drilling crew working for William Knox D’Arcy struck oil at Masjed Soleiman in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains. It was the first major oil discovery in the Middle East, and it would transform Iran’s relationship with the outside world forever. Within a year, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) was incorporated, and the machinery of foreign control over one of the world’s most strategically vital nations was set in motion. What followed over the next century was a sustained pattern of British, and later American, interference in Iranian sovereign affairs — a story of…