The Great Game in Central Asia

The Great Game was the strategic rivalry between the British and Russian empires in Central Asia during the nineteenth century. The phrase — popularised by Rudyard Kipling in Kim (1901) — captured the espionage, the exploration, and the strategic calculation that characterised British and Russian engagement with the khanates of Central Asia, the Afghan kingdom, and the Persian state. The two empires never fought a direct war with one another; their rivalry was conducted through proxies, through intelligence operations, through the dispatch of agents, and through the construction of buffer states. By 1907, when the Anglo-Russian Convention of that year settled the outstanding questions between the two empires, the Great Game was effectively over. The British had won, in the most immediate sense: the Russians had agreed to recognise the Afghan buffer, and the British had recognised the Russian position in Persia. But the rivalry had produced, in Afghanistan, one of the most enduring failures of British imperial policy.

The Origins

The Great Game emerged from a fundamental strategic dilemma. The British Indian Empire, the most valuable possession of the British Crown, was vulnerable to attack from the north-west. A Russian invasion of India, through Afghanistan and the passes of the Hindu Kush, had been a serious British strategic concern since at least the late eighteenth century. The Russian Empire, having expanded across Siberia and into the Kazakh steppe, was the principal threat to the British position. The British response was to construct a series of buffer states — Afghanistan, Persia, the khanates of Central Asia — that would keep the Russians at a distance from the Indian frontier.

The Russian expansion into Central Asia began in the 1730s, with the construction of a line of forts along the northern steppe, and accelerated in the 1860s and 1870s with the conquest of Tashkent (1865), Samarkand (1868), and Khiva (1873). By 1885 the Russian Empire had reached the Afghan border, and the stage was set for a direct Anglo-Russian confrontation. The British, who had fought two disastrous Afghan wars in 1839–1842 and 1878–1880, were determined to avoid a third.

The First Afghan War (1839–1842)

The First Afghan War was provoked by the British attempt to install a friendly ruler — Shah Shuja, a Sadozai prince — on the Afghan throne and to use Afghanistan as a buffer against Russian expansion. The British invasion of Afghanistan in 1839 was initially successful: Kabul was occupied, Shah Shuja was installed, and the British envoy Sir William Macnaghen believed the situation to be under control. The political situation in Kabul, however, was not stable. The British had failed to win the support of the Afghan tribes, and the British occupation produced a popular revolt that culminated in the withdrawal of the British garrison from Kabul in January 1842.

The withdrawal was a catastrophe. The British column of some 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 camp followers was attacked in the Khyber passes and almost annihilated. Dr. William Brydon, the sole European survivor, famously reached the British garrison at Jalalabad on 13 January 1842, “a spectacle of misery” — and even his survival was unusual. The British response was a punitive expedition that recovered Kabul and destroyed the Great Bazaar, but the war was a serious humiliation. As the historian John Keegan has noted, the First Afghan War established the pattern for British engagement with Afghanistan: ambitious intervention, catastrophic withdrawal, and frustrated vengeance.

The Second Afghan War (1878–1880)

The Second Afghan War was provoked by the Russian advance to the Amu Darya and the British fear that the Russians would occupy the Afghan border. The British ultimatum to Sher Ali, the Amir of Kabul, was rejected, and the British invaded Afghanistan from three directions. The war was more successful than its predecessor: the British occupied Kabul, the Treaty of Gandamak (May 1879) gave the British control of Afghan foreign policy, and the British acquired the Khyber Pass and the right to station a resident in Kabul. The residency, however, was an immediate failure: Sir Louis Cavagnari, the British resident, was killed in September 1879 in a Kabul uprising, and the British had to send a punitive expedition to recover the city.

The political settlement of 1880 was a turning point in the history of the Great Game. The British installed Abdur Rahman Khan, a Pashtun prince who had been living in Russian Central Asia, as the new Amir of Kabul. Abdur Rahman was a formidable ruler, and he used the British support to consolidate his authority over the Afghan tribes. The new settlement gave the British control of Afghan foreign policy, in exchange for a British subsidy and a British non-intervention commitment in Afghan internal affairs. The buffer state, in this respect, had been created.

The March to Merv and the Pamir Commission

The Russian advance into Central Asia continued through the 1880s. The conquest of the Turkmen khanate of Merv in 1884 was a particular shock to the British, and the Russian expansion towards the Afghan border produced a series of crises in 1885 — the Panjdeh incident, in which Russian forces attacked an Afghan garrison and killed perhaps 500 Afghan soldiers, came close to producing an Anglo-Russian war. The crisis was defused by direct diplomacy between London and St. Petersburg, and the boundary between Afghanistan and Russian Central Asia was settled by the Anglo-Russian Boundary Commission of 1886.

The British response to the Russian advance was the dispatch of intelligence agents and military missions to Central Asia. The most famous of these was the mission of Captain Francis Younghusband, who in 1890 led a small expedition from Beijing to India through the Pamirs. Younghusband’s expedition, like the expeditions of Colonel Thomas Edward Gordon and Sir Aurel Stein, was a mixture of geographical exploration and strategic intelligence. The British used these expeditions to monitor the Russian advance and to establish contacts with the Central Asian rulers.

The Curzon Years and the Reconstitution of the Game

The Great Game was given new life by the appointment of Lord Curzon as viceroy of India in January 1899. Curzon was a committed imperialist who believed that the British position in India required a vigorous response to the Russian threat. The principal instrument of Curzon’s policy was the creation of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) in 1901, carved out of the Punjab, which gave the British direct control of the tribal belt along the Afghan border. The NWFP was, in effect, an acknowledgement that the British had lost the buffer state strategy: Afghanistan was too weak to resist the Russian pressure, and the British would have to defend the frontier themselves.

The expedition to Tibet of 1903–1904, led by Younghusband, was another product of the Curzon policy. The British invasion of Tibet was provoked by the Russian diplomatic activity in Lhasa and by the British fear that the Tibetans would sign a treaty with the Russians. The British expedition reached Lhasa in August 1904, and the Convention of Lhasa imposed a British trade agent and a series of trading posts on Tibet. The convention was repudiated by the Chinese government, and it was eventually replaced by the Anglo-Chinese Convention of 1906.

The End of the Game

The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, signed on 31 August 1907, was the formal end of the Great Game. The convention partitioned Persia into three zones: a British zone in the south-east, a Russian zone in the north, and a neutral zone in between. Afghanistan was recognised as outside the Russian sphere, and both powers agreed to respect its independence. Tibet was recognised as a Chinese suzerainty. The convention, in effect, settled the outstanding questions of the Great Game: the Russians had agreed to recognise the British position in Afghanistan, and the British had recognised the Russian position in Persia.

The Anglo-Russian Convention was not, on the face of it, a British victory. The British had effectively conceded the Russian position in northern Persia, and the convention was a recognition of the limits of British power in Central Asia. But the convention was followed, within a few years, by the outbreak of the First World War and by the Russian Revolution. The Russian position in Central Asia collapsed with the revolution, and the buffer state strategy of the Great Game was replaced by a direct British presence in the region. The Great Game, in that sense, was a strategic competition that had been overtaken by events before it had been fully resolved.

Historiographical Note

The historiography of the Great Game has been substantially revised since the 1990s. The older British tradition, of which the work of John Morris and the popular accounts by Peter Hopkirk is the most accessible representative, treated the Great Game as a serious strategic competition in which the British had successfully defended the Indian frontier. The post-Soviet scholarship, of which the work of Morrison, the contributions to The History of the Civil War in the North Caucasus and the Russian-language scholarship on Russian Central Asia, has been more critical. The Russian position in Central Asia was, on this more recent view, more secure than the British had realised, and the British “victory” in the Great Game was, in some respects, a victory of British rhetoric over British reality. The current generation of historians, of whom the work of Michael Kimmins, the contributions to The Great Game: Anglo-Russian Rivalry (in the volume edited by the late Gerald Morgan), and the work of the American scholar Bradley Fogo are representative, has produced a more nuanced picture. The Great Game was a real strategic competition; it was also, in important ways, a projection of British fears of Russia onto a Central Asia that was not always as important as the British believed.

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