The Persian shah, heeding British advice, opens the Karun River in Khuzestan Province to foreign shipping in 1888 and gives Baron von Reuter permission to open Iran's first bank, the Imperial Bank of Persia.

In 1890 the shah gives another British company a monopoly over the country's tobacco trade.

The tobacco concession is obtained through bribes to leading officials and arouses considerable opposition among the clerical classes, the merchants, and the people.

When a leading cleric, Mirza Hasan Shirazi, issues a fatwa (religious ruling) forbidding the use of tobacco, the ban is universally observed, and the shah is once again forced to cancel the concession, at considerable cost to an already depleted treasury.