The White Revolution

The White Revolution is Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi’s own account of the reform program known as “the Revolution of the Shah and the People.” The Persian text appeared in Tehran in 1967 (Ordibehesht 1346), with an English edition the same year from the Pahlavi Library.

The Shah sets out the program’s founding principles, put to a national referendum on 26 January 1963: land redistribution to peasant families, the Literacy Corps, the Health Corps, women’s suffrage, nationalization of forests and waters, and profit-sharing for factory workers. He frames it as an alliance of monarchy and people against the great landlords.

Written four years into the reforms and mid-implementation, the book aimed partly to answer opposition and to document tangible gains — land reform reached millions of rural households — for domestic and international audiences.

It is the canonical first-person record of a program historians now read as both a genuine modernization drive and a pivotal moment in modern Iranian history. It is essential for understanding the 1960s reforms in the words of the man who launched them.