A Survey of the 1st National Legislative Assembly’s Negotiations on the Abolition of Feudal Land Ownership

On the eve of the Constitutional Revolution when the parliament was first established in Iran (1906), a large amount of governmental property, then termed as ‘Net Property’, was exploited through a kind of lease agreement to landlords and users in return for revenues under a feudal system. One of the most important bills passed by the first parliament was the Act on Abolition of Feudal Ownership of Public Property. The present library survey reviews the proceedings from the parliamentary discussions leading to the above-mentioned Act. It was found that efforts to raise the government’s income through reducing pays to the lessees of public property and to increase the revenues from the returned property on lease had been the most important motivation behind the Act. It was also observed that, although landlords were members on one of the six parliamentary committees at that time, no serious objection had been raised and that the act had been adopted unanimously after only five parliamentary hearings. The documents reviewed also revealed that at least 15 percent of the PMs had actively participated in drafting the Act. It was concluded the MPs’ main drive in passing the Bill had been escalation of government financial resources.