Constructors in a foreign land: Messrs. Lynch & Co. on the Bakhtiari road 1897-1913

With railways prohibited in Persia before 1914, roads were the only means to improve the country's transport infrastructure and to allow the inland movement of merchandise. The experience of Lynch & Co. when constructing and operating the Bakhtiari road provides a detailed insight into the difficulties which could face British-owned firms abroad in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as its commercial activities became entangled with those of rival enterprises, local politics and diplomatic anxieties, and as investment decisions and merger negotiations had to be undertaken amid an increasingly uncertain business climate.