What Was the Great Game?
In February 1842, a single British officer named Alexander Burnes — political agent at Kabul, returning from the ruined British residency in the Afghan capital — was ambushed and killed on the road to the Khyber. The single column of the Blackwood’s Magazine correspondent William Hodson that reached Peshawar, on 20 January 1842, brought back word of the destruction of a British army of about 16,000 (the 44th Bengal Infantry, the 5th Bengal Cavalry, the political agents, the camp followers, the wives). The retreat from Kabul is the single most-cited disaster of the Great Game, the strategic rivalry that ran from 1830 to 1907 between the Russian and British Empires in Central Asia (see Hopkirk, The Great Game, 1990).
The setting
The Great Game was a competition for the buffer between the British Indian Empire and the Russian one. By the 1830s the British had taken the western Punjab (annexed 1849), Afghanistan (under the Treaty of Gandamak of 1879), and the khanates of Balochistan; the Russians had taken the Kazakh Steppe (largely consolidated in the 1820s-1840s), Tashkent (1865), Bukhara (1868), Samarkand (1868), Khiva (1873), Kokand (1876), and the Turkmen oases of Merv (1884) and Panjdeh (1885). The frontier narrowed to a band of about 600 kilometres of Afghan, Persian, and Pamiri territory, and it was there that the Great Game was decided.
The term itself was coined in 1841 by Captain Arthur Conolly, a British intelligence officer in Khiva, who was executed at Bukhara in 1842. The term passed into popular usage through Charles Dickens, who picked it up from Conolly’s friend and fellow intelligence officer Charles Stoddart, and through Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim (1901) (Hopkirk, 1990).
The Anglo-Afghan Wars
The two Anglo-Afghan Wars were the major military episodes of the Great Game. The First (1839-1842) was an attempt to replace the Afghan Amir Dost Mohammed with a British-friendly ruler, Shah Shuja. The retreat from Kabul of January 1842, in which the entire British force was destroyed, was the only occasion in the nineteenth century when a whole British army was annihilated. The Second (1878-1880) was triggered by the Russian mission to Kabul of 1878 and ended with the Treaty of Gandamak, which gave the British control of Afghan foreign affairs in exchange for a subsidy.
The Russian conquest of Central Asia
The Russian conquest of the Central Asian khanates was the largest single territorial gain of the period. The Russian military lines advanced in a series of rapid campaigns under Generals Konstantin von Kaufman, Mikhail Skobelev, and Mikhail Annenkov. The conquest was justified in St Petersburg by the standard civilising rationale, but its proximate causes were economic: the Fergana Valley’s cotton, the Kazakh Steppe’s grain and cattle, and the Turkmen’s strategic position on the approaches to Persia and Afghanistan. The conquest brought the Russian frontier to the Afghan and Persian borders and produced the Panjdeh Incident of 1885, in which Russian and Afghan forces clashed in a disputed oasis on the Murghab river. The incident brought the two empires to the brink of war (Hopkirk, 1990; Paine, Imperial Rivals, 1996).
The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907
The Panjdeh Incident was settled by direct Anglo-Russian negotiation. A joint Anglo-Russian boundary commission demarcated the Afghan-Russian frontier between 1884 and 1895. A series of further crises — the 1897-1898 Pamir Boundary Commission, the 1903-1905 Mascate incident, the 1906 Kaisar-i-Hind crisis — was settled by a mixture of British force and Russian patience. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 31 August 1907, signed in St Petersburg by the foreign ministers Alexander Izvolsky and Sir Arthur Nicholson, divided Persia into three zones (a Russian zone in the north, a British zone in the southeast, a neutral zone in between), recognised Afghanistan as a British sphere, and gave Tibet to neither party. The Convention did not end Russian-British competition in Central Asia, but it postponed it. The Convention lasted until 1917, when the Bolshevik government repudiated the secret treaties of the imperial government.
The legacy
The Great Game redrew the political map of Central Asia. The Russian conquest of the khanates produced the modern Soviet, then post-Soviet, states of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan; the British presence produced the modern state of Afghanistan and the Pakistani province of Balochistan. The 1907 convention’s frontiers became the post-1945 frontiers between the Soviet Union, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and they have been redrawn only in detail since. The Great Game is the standard reference in Anglo-Russian relations, and it returned to the popular vocabulary with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the Anglo-American intervention in October 2001 (Hopkirk, 1990).