Great Game
The Great Game is the term widely used to describe the bitter nineteenth-century Anglo-Russian rivalry for influence in Central Asia. British and Russian strategists (mainly young military officers) saw the need for influence over Central Asia from a historical perspective. They argued that most military campaigns against the Indian subcontinent were undertaken through the territory of Central Asia, which at that time included Afghanistan and the eastern part of Iran. Thus for the British, primary influence over Central Asia was pivotal to defense of their interests in India against Russian advancement, while it was crucial for Russia to defend its communications lines with Siberia and the Russian Far East, the "soft underbelly" of the Russian Empire in Winston Churchill's words.
Both sides undertook a number of spying and counterspying operations and highly adventurous geographic expeditions in search of allies and routes for troops, all of which were glorified by such writers as Rudyard Kipling. The Russians conducted the first expedition to Khiva in 1839–1840, but the campaign was unsuccessful, and they lost a number of solders and officers in this ill-prepared expedition. Then in 1842, two British officers, Colonel Charles Stuart and Captain Arthur Connolly, were hanged in Bukhara. The Russians collided with the Kokand Khanate when they captured Tashkent (1865), an important economic outpost of the khanate; Khodzhent (1866); and later Kokand (1875), which established their influence over the Bukhara Khanate (1868), advancing all the way to the borders of Afghanistan, the last political barrier before India. Perceiving this as a direct threat to British interests in India, the British advanced northwest in an attempted to establish direct control over Afghanistan.
In the eighteenth century, Ahmad Shah (reigned 1747–1773), the leader of the Abdali tribe of the Pashtuns, had proclaimed Afghan rule as far east as Kashmir and Delhi, north to the Amu Dar'ya, and west into northern Persia. In the nineteenth century, as internal conflicts gradually weakened the Afghan empire, both the British in India and the Russians to the north sought to bring Afghanistan under their control. This resulted in two Anglo-Afghan Wars (1838–1842 and 1878–1880), which the British finally won, establishing their dominance over Afghanistan's foreign relations. Gradually, both sides, British and Russian, accepted Afghanistan as a buffer zone between their respective empires.
The strategic importance of Central Asia was highlighted again in the early twentieth century by Sir Halford John Mackinder, the British political geographer, who in 1919–1920 went as British high commissioner to southern Russia in an attempt to unify the White Russian forces against the Bolsheviks. He produced a simple geopolitical formula: "Who rules the Heartland [which included Central Asia] commands the World-Island [Eurasian Continent]. Who rules the World-Island commands the World."
Since the Soviet Union's dissolution in 1991, a new competition for political influence and a share in the Central Asian market, especially for its natural resources, has emerged between various actors. This competition has often been described in terms of establishing influence over the newly independent Central Asian Republics on a basis strategically similar to the competition between Britain and Russia in the nineteenth century.
Further Reading
Hopkirk, Peter. (1990) The Great Game: On Secret Service in High Asia. London: Murray.
Meyer, Karl Ernest, and Shareen Blair Brysac. (1999) Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. Washington, DC: Counterpoint.
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