Great Game
In July 1840, a British intelligence officer named Captain Arthur Conolly wrote a letter to a newly appointed political agent in Kandahar. "You've a great game, a noble game, before you," he told Major Henry Rawlinson. Conolly had coined that phrase, the Great Game, to describe something larger than any single posting. He meant the long rivalry between the British and Russian empires over influence across Central Asia. The contest stretched from the shore of the Caspian Sea to the Eastern Himalayas, settling chiefly over Afghanistan, Persia, and Tibet. Two empires expanded toward each other from opposite directions, with no agreed frontier between them. They distrusted each other deeply. Yet they never went to war directly. How did a rivalry this vast and this tense avoid open war between its principals? Why did Afghanistan, a poor and barren land in the eyes of one ruler, become the prize neither side could ignore? And how did a phrase borrowed from games of cards and dice come to name an age of spies, sieges, and lines drawn on maps?
Le grand jeu, the French equivalent of the phrase, dates back to at least 1585, carrying meanings of risk, chance, and deception. The expression "the Great Game" itself was used well before the 19th century, tied to games of risk such as cards and dice. Conolly, who had been appointed a political officer, believed Rawlinson's new post offered a chance to advance humanitarianism in Afghanistan. In his letter he urged that Britain "play the grand game," help Russia to all she had a right to expect, and shake hands with Persia. He hoped Britain would fill "the noble part that the first Christian nation of the world ought to fill." A Russian diplomat, Karl Nesselrode, reportedly used a parallel term, the "Tournament of Shadows." The phrase reached the wider public through Rudyard Kipling's 1901 novel Kim, which tied it firmly to great power rivalry. It was first used academically by Professor H.W.C. Davis in a 1926 presentation titled The Great Game in Asia. The label only became common after the Second World War, and grew more popular still after the 1979 advent of the Soviet-Afghan War.
Napoleon proposed a joint Franco-Russian invasion of India to Tsar Paul I of Russia. In 1801, expecting British action against Russia in Europe, Paul decided to strike where he thought the British Empire was weakest. He wrote to the Ataman of the Don Cossacks, Vasily Petrovich Orlov, directing him to march to Orenburg, conquer the Central Asian khanates, and from there invade India. Paul was assassinated that same year, and the invasion was terminated. Historian Peter Hopkirk noted that the Tsar could not obtain a detailed map of India before the Cossacks left Orenburg. Paul had told Orlov, "My maps only go as far as Khiva and the River Oxus." Hugh Seton-Watson observed that the grotesque plan had no military significance but showed its author's state of mind. The British public learned of the incident only years later, yet it imprinted on the popular consciousness and fed mutual suspicion. The British line of thinking ran simple and persistent. If Russia gained control of Afghanistan, it might serve as a staging post for an invasion of India. Britain believed Russia wanted to add the "jewel in the crown," India, to its growing Asian empire. The result was an atmosphere of distrust and the constant threat of war.
In 1807, Napoleon dispatched General Claude Matthieu, Count Gardane, on a French military mission to Persia, hoping to persuade Russia to invade India. Britain answered the following year, sending its own missions with military advisers to Persia and Afghanistan under Mountstuart Elphinstone. The shah of Iran, Fath-Ali Shah Qajar, became a figure in these intrigues. He first received limited British support in 1801, then promised Napoleon in 1807 to invade British India in exchange for French aid, a deal that fell through despite the Treaty of Finckenstein. In the 1809 preliminary Treaty of Tehran, Persia agreed to stop any foreign army passing to India. Britain agreed to train sixteen thousand Persian soldiers and, if Persia were invaded by a European state, pay a subsidy of one hundred thousand pounds. Russia nonetheless defeated Iran. The Treaty of Gulistan in 1813 gave the Russian Empire a theoretical right to intervene in Persia at any time, a humiliation for the shah. The Russian invasion of Iran in 1826 to 1828 led to another Russian victory and left Qajar Iran with minimal power. That defeat placed Persia squarely into the colonial contest between Russia and Britain, where it would remain for nearly a century.
On the 12th of January 1830, Lord Ellenborough, president of the Board of Control for India, tasked Lord William Bentinck, the Governor-General, with establishing a trade route to Bukhara. By one major view, that order marks the start of the Great Game. Britain envisioned a series of buffer states, Turkey, Persia, Khiva, and Bukhara, screening its protected lands stretching from the Persian Gulf to India. British sea-power would guard the trade sea-lanes. Britain believed it was the world's first free society and the most industrially advanced country, with a duty to use its iron, steam power, and cotton goods to develop Central Asia. Lord Palmerston captured the standoff in 1835: "Here we are, just as we were, snarling at each other, hating each other, but neither wishing for war." Russia's vision reached back further. In 1557, Bukhara and Khiva sent ambassadors to Ivan IV seeking permission to trade in Russia. For centuries afterward, Russian envoys spent much of their time trying to free Russians taken as slaves by the khanates. Beginning in the 1820s, Russian troops advanced south from Siberia in search of secure boundaries. Between 1824 and 1854, Russia occupied the entire Kazakh Khanate. Like Britain, Russia cast itself as a civilizing power on a humanitarian mission among peoples it perceived as semi-barbarous. According to historian Barbara Jelavich, it was logistically impossible for Russia to invade India, and the Tsars knew it. Invasion plans were a way to extract better outcomes in Europe.
In 1782, George Forster, a civil servant of the East India Company, set out from Calcutta and crossed Kashmir, Afghanistan, Herat, and the Caspian Sea before reaching London. His account appeared in 1798. William Moorcroft, the Company's horse stud superintendent, left India for Bukhara in 1820 to buy Turkoman horses and reached it in 1825. He and his two companions, George Trebeck and George Guthrie, all died of fever on the return journey. Captain Alexander Burnes journeyed into Afghanistan and through the Hindu Kush to Bukhara, returning in 1832. His book, Travels To Bukhara, became an overnight success in 1834. The work could turn deadly. In 1838, Colonel Charles Stoddart arrived in the Emirate of Bukhara to arrange an alliance with Nasrullah Khan. The Khan had him thrown into a vermin-infested dungeon because he had neither bowed nor brought gifts. In 1841, Arthur Conolly, the man who named the Great Game, arrived to secure Stoddart's release. He too was imprisoned, and on the 17th of June 1842 both men were beheaded. On hearing of the executions, Emperor Nicholas I of Russia refused to receive Bukhara's gifts or emissaries any longer. Britain afterward actively discouraged its officers from traveling in Turkestan. Elsewhere the diplomacy succeeded. In 1840, Lieutenant Richmond Shakespear negotiated the release of 416 Russian captives and escorted them into Russia, and was knighted for it.
In October 1838, Lord Auckland issued the Simla Manifesto, propaganda meant to blacken the reputation of Dost Mohammad Khan, the Emir of Afghanistan. The document claimed the Emir had openly threatened to call in every foreign aid he could command. That same year the British marched into Afghanistan and deposed him, sending him into exile in India. They installed the previous ruler, Shah Shuja Durrani, who shared their more progressive vision. Shah Shuja was not popular with the Afghans, and tensions grew. In 1841 the British envoy, Captain Alexander Burnes, was killed in Kabul. By January 1842 the Afghans were in full revolt, and the British decided to withdraw. The Kabul garrison of 4,500 troops and 12,000 camp followers set out for Jalalabad, eighty miles and five days away. They were attacked by 30,000 Afghans. Of that entire column, only one man, the wounded Dr William Brydon, reached Jalalabad on a wounded horse. So perished the Army of the Indus. A punitive expedition recaptured Kabul and freed the captives later that year, but the new Governor-General, Lord Ellenborough, withdrew all British garrisons and freed Dost Mohammad to return to his throne. The restored Emir is reported to have marveled at the size of British resources, then asked why the rulers of so vast an empire had crossed the Indus to deprive him of his poor and barren country. Historian Edward Ingram argued the British had lost the Great Game with that withdrawal in 1842, because they could never turn Afghanistan into a client state.
After the Crimean War ended in 1856 with Russia's defeat, Alexander II of Russia waited a few years, then advanced into Central Asia in two campaigns. Russia occupied Chimkent in 1864, Tashkent in 1865, Khokhand and Bukhara in 1866, and Samarkand in 1868. Khiva fell in 1873. With the empires now pressing close, the contest shifted toward the cartographer's pen. On the 21st of January 1873, Britain and Russia signed an agreement defining Afghan territory and accepting the Amu Darya as the northern boundary. In 1885 a Russian force annexed the Panjdeh district north of Herat, overwhelming an Afghan force of 500 in what became known as the Panjdeh incident. Britain did not aid Afghanistan as the Treaty of Gandamak required, and the Amir concluded he could not rely on the British against Russian aggression. The final settlements turned on remote peaks and lakes. The Pamir Boundary Commission of 1895, conducted by Major-General Gerard with a Russian deputation under General Povalo-Shveikovsky, demarcated the border and proved the impracticality of any Russian invasion of India through the Pamir mountains. Afghanistan became a buffer state, given an odd eastern appendage, the Wakhan Corridor, to keep the empires apart. In a final courtesy, the Russians agreed to call Lake Zorkul by the name Lake Victoria, in honour of Queen Victoria, in exchange for British use of the name Nicholas Range on official maps. One peak was named Mount Concord. The rivalry formally closed in the Anglo-Russian Convention of August 1907, when the two empires divided their spheres in Afghanistan, Persia, and Tibet and turned together to face the German Empire. As Konstantin Penzev put it, echoing Kipling's fictional summary, unofficially the Great Game in Central Asia will never end. When everyone is dead, the Great Game is finished, not before.
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Common questions
What was the Great Game between Britain and Russia?
The Great Game was a 19th-century rivalry between the British and Russian empires over influence in Central Asia, primarily in Afghanistan, Persia, and Tibet. The two colonial empires used military interventions and diplomatic negotiations to acquire and redefine territories, with Russia conquering Turkestan and Britain expanding and setting the borders of British India.
Who coined the term the Great Game?
The term Great Game was coined in 1840 by British intelligence officer Captain Arthur Conolly. In a letter to Major Henry Rawlinson he wrote, "You've a great game, a noble game, before you," and Rudyard Kipling later popularized the phrase in his 1901 novel Kim.
Did the Great Game lead to a war between Britain and Russia?
The Great Game never erupted into a full-scale war directly between Russian and British colonial forces, despite distrust, diplomatic intrigue, and regional wars. The two nations did fight each other in the Crimean War from 1853 to 1856, which affected the Great Game.
Why did Britain fear Russian expansion during the Great Game?
Britain feared that Russia's southward expansion would threaten India, its most valuable colony. The British line of thinking held that if Russia gained control of Afghanistan, it could be used as a staging post for an invasion of India, so Britain made protecting all approaches to India a high priority.
When did the Great Game start and end?
By one major view the Great Game began on the 12th of January 1830, when Lord Ellenborough tasked Lord Bentinck with establishing a trade route to Bukhara, though historians disagree on the dating. It traditionally came to a close between 1895 and 1907, ending formally with the Anglo-Russian Convention of August 1907.
What happened in the First Anglo-Afghan War during the Great Game?
In 1838 the British marched into Afghanistan and deposed Dost Mohammad Khan, installing Shah Shuja Durrani, but the Afghans revolted by January 1842. During the British withdrawal a Kabul garrison of 4,500 troops and 12,000 camp followers was attacked by 30,000 Afghans, and only Dr William Brydon reached Jalalabad, an event that destroyed the force known as the Army of the Indus.
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