Reuter Concession

The Reuter Concession was a contract signed on July 25, 1872, by which Naser al-Din Shah Qajar of Persia granted the German-born British banker and Reuters news agency founder Paul Reuter sweeping industrial and commercial monopolies. It gave Reuter exclusive rights for 70 years to build railroads and tramways and to work most Persian mines, 25 years of control over Persian customs, monopolies over forests and irrigation works, and first refusal on establishing a national bank. The British diplomat George Curzon later called it the most complete surrender of a kingdom's industrial resources into foreign hands ever made. Domestic Persian outrage and Russian hostility, combined with a lack of British government backing, led the Shah to cancel the concession within about a year, though it prefigured a second Reuter concession that established the Imperial Bank of Persia.