The Great Game
The nineteenth-century strategic rivalry between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia, Persia, and Afghanistan, the buffer lands guarding British India.
For most of the nineteenth century, two empires stalked each other across the deserts and mountains of Central Asia without ever quite going to war. Britain held India, the richest possession on earth. Russia was expanding south at a rate of roughly fifty square miles a day. The space between them kept shrinking, and British strategists could not stop imagining the day a Cossack army would come down through the passes into the plains of India. That anxiety, more than any actual invasion, was the Great Game.
Fear of losing the jewel
India was the jewel in the British crown, and Afghanistan and Persia were the walls around it. Russia, having crushed the Caucasus by the 1860s, swallowed the ancient khanates one by one: Tashkent in 1865, Samarkand in 1868, Khiva in 1873, Kokand in 1876. At the century's start, some two thousand miles separated the two empires' frontiers; by its end, a few hundred did. The British answer was to keep Afghanistan and Persia as buffer states, neutral ground that neither side would let the other own.
Spies, surveys, and disastrous wars
The Game was mostly played by young officers with theodolites and forged passports. British agents mapped mountain passes disguised as horse traders; Russian envoys courted the emirs of Bukhara and Khiva. Persia and Afghanistan were treated as chessboards rather than players, their rulers bribed, threatened, and occasionally deposed. Arthur Conolly, the British officer who coined the phrase the Great Game, was beheaded at Bukhara in 1842 for his trouble; Rudyard Kipling later made the term famous in his novel Kim.
When the maneuvering turned to war, Britain paid dearly. The First Anglo-Afghan War ended in 1842 with the annihilation of a retreating column of some 16,000 in the snow between Kabul and Jalalabad, one of the worst disasters in British imperial history. A second Afghan war followed in 1878. Neither conquered Afghanistan; both confirmed it as the ungovernable hinge on which the whole rivalry turned. In 1885 the two empires nearly came to blows over the Panjdeh oasis, a patch of Turkmen desert almost no one in London could find on a map.
Carving up Persia
The Game ended not with a victory but with a handshake. By 1907 both powers had a bigger fear: Germany. On August 31 they signed the Anglo-Russian Convention in St. Petersburg, slicing Persia into a Russian sphere in the north, a British sphere in the south, and a neutral zone between. Russia renounced Afghanistan; both kept out of Tibet. The Persians, whose country had just been divided, were not consulted.
The Great Game left the map of Central Asia and the modern borders of Afghanistan roughly where the surveyors drew them. It also left a template. Every later contest over the same ground, Soviet tanks in Kabul in 1979, pipelines and bases in the 2000s, gets called a new great game, because the players change but the board, and the fear of who controls it, do not.