Shoghi Effendi and the Early Development of Bahá’í Administration in North America, 1922–1927

One of the major innovations of Shoghi Effendi’s Guardianship was the development of a worldwide Bahá’í administrative system based on locally and nationally elected spiritual assemblies. This paper identifies the key elements of this system as laid out by Shoghi Effendi in 1922–23 (almost immediately after his accession as Guardian), and elaborated in some details over the next few years in letters he wrote to the American and Canadian Bahá’ís.