What is it about?
Drawing on published documents and research in Russian, Uzbek, British and Indian archives, this article explains how a hasty attempt by Russia to put pressure on the British in Central Asia unintentionally triggered the second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878 - 80. This conflict is usually interpreted within the framework of the so called 'Great Game', which assumes that only the European 'Great Powers' had any agency in Central Asia, pursuing a coherent strategy with a clearly-defined set of goals and mutually-understood rules. The outbreak of the Second Anglo-Afghan war is usually seen as a deliberate attempt by the Russians to embroil the British disastrously in Afghan affairs, leading to the eventual installation of 'Abd al-Rahman Khan, hosted for many years by the Russians in Samarkand, on the Afghan throne. In fact the Russians did not foresee any of this. ‘Abd al-Rahman’s ascent to the Afghan throne owed nothing to Russian support, and everything to British desperation. What at first seems like a classic 'Great Game' episode was a tale of blundering and unintended consequences on both sides. Central Asian rulers were not merely passive bystanders who provided a picturesque backdrop for Anglo Russian relations, but important actors in their own right.
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Why is it important?
The 'Great Game' is a concept that is still widely used to explain inter-state relations in Central Asia. This article explains why this is a mistake. It also makes a substantial empirical contribution to understanding why the second Anglo-Afghan War broke out in 1878 - this is a conflict whose origins and outcome are important to understanding Afghanistan today.
Perspectives
I first got the idea for this article when I visited a memorial to a group of soldiers near the village of Jam, in the Zarafshan Valley in Uzbekistan. According to the inscription they died in the summer of 1878 'on the expedition to India', but the memorial was constructed in 1913 - a rare survival of a Tsarist-era monument, most of which were destroyed by the Bolsheviks. I then found substantial materials on this 'expedition to India' both in published sources and in two Russian archives - the State Military-Historical archive and the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, both in Moscow. This convinced me that there was enough material for a substantial article, which would also show up the absurdity of the 'Great Game' narrative which is so often applied to 19th-century Central Asia.
Alexander Morrison
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Beyond the ‘Great Game’: The Russian origins of the second Anglo–Afghan War, Modern Asian Studies, May 2017, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/s0026749x1500044x.
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