The Great Game 1856 1907

The Great Game sheds new light on Asia’s political influence on Russia at the turn of the twentieth century. Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRL The Great Game, 1856–1907 presents a new view of the British-Russian competition for dominance in Central Asia in the second half of the nineteenth century. Evgeny Sergeev offers a complex and novel point of view by synthesizing official collections of documents, parliamentary papers, political pamphlets, memoirs, contemporary journalism, and guidebooks from unpublished and less studied primary sources in Russian, British, Indian, Georgian, Uzbek, and Turkmen archives. His efforts amplify our knowledge of Russia by considering the important influences of local Asian powers. Ultimately, this book disputes the characterization of the Great Game as a proto–Cold War between East and West. By relating it to other regional actors, Sergeev creates a more accurate view of the game’s impact on later wars and on the shape of post–World War I Asia.

The work of explorers, surveyors and spies in the race to conquer Southern Asia is vividly recounted in this history of British imperial cartography. In the 19th century, the British and Russian empires were engaged in bitter rivalry for the acquisition of Southern Asian. Although India was the ultimate prize, most of the intrigue and action took place along its northern frontier in Afghanistan, Turkestan and Tibet. Mapping the region and gaining knowledge of the enemy were crucial to the interests of both sides. The Great Trigonometrical Survey of India began in the 18th century with the aim of creating a detailed map of the subcontinent. Under the leadership of George Everest—whose name was later bestowed to the world’s tallest mountain—the it mapped the Great Arc running from the country’s southern tip to the Himalayas. Much of the work was done by Indian explorers known as Pundits. They were the first to reveal the mysteries of the forbidden city of Lhasa, and discover the true course of Tibet’s mighty Tsangpo River. These explorers performed essential information gathering for the British Empire and filled in large portions of the map of Asia. Their adventurous exploits are vividly recounted in Mapping the Great Game.

The Great Game for Central Asia led to British involvement in Balochistan, a sparsely-populated area in Pakistan, mostly desert and mountain, and containing the Bolan Pass, the southern counter- part of the more famous Khyber. It occupies a position of great strategic importance between Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and the Arabian Sea. Heathcote's book is a history of the Khanate of Kalat and of British operations against the Baloch hill tribes who raided frontier settlements and the Bolan caravans. Its themes include rivalry between British officials in Sind and the Punjab, high profile disputes between British politicians over frontier policy and organization, and the British occupation of Quetta, guardian city of the Bolan, in the run-up to the Second Afghan War. Among the many strong characters in this story is Sir Robert Sandeman, hitherto hailed as "the peaceful conqueror of Balochistan," now revealed as a ruthless careerist, whose personal ambitions led to the fragmentation of the country under British domination. The closing chapter summarizes subsequent events up to modern times, in which the Baloch have maintained a long-running struggle for greater autonomy within Pakistan.

Colonel F. M. Bailey, whose extraordinary adventures are told here, was long accused by Moscow of being a British master-spy sent in 1918 to overthrow the Bolsheviks in Central Asia. As a result, he enjoyed many years after his death an almost legendary reputation there—that of half-hero, half-villain. In this remarkable book, which was first published in he tells of the perilous game of cat-and-mouse, lasting sixteen months, which he played with the Bolshevik secret police, the dreaded Cheka. At one point, using a false identity, he actually joined the ranks of the latter, who unsuspectingly sent him to Bokhara to arrest himself. Told with almost breathtaking understatement, Bailey’s narrative—set in a region once more back in the headlines—reads like vintage Buchan. “...one of the best books about secret intelligence work ever written.” Peter Hopkirk.

Fitztroy Maclean was one of the real-life inspirations for super-spy James Bond. After adventures in Soviet Russia before the war, Maclean fought with the SAS in North Africa in 1942. There he specialised in hair-raising commando raids behind enemy lines, including the daring and outrageous kidnapping of the German Consul in Axis-controlled Iraq. Maclean's extraordinary adventures in the Western Desert and later fighting alongside Tito's partisans in Yugoslavia are blistering reading and show what it took to be a British hero who broke the mould . . .

Asia was the principle focus of empire-builders from Alexander and Akbar to Chinggis Khan and Qianlong and yet, until now, there has been no attempt to provide a comprehensive history of empire in the region. Empire in Asia addresses the need for a thorough survey of the topic. This volume covers the long 19th century, commonly seen in terms of 'high imperialism' and the global projection of Western power. This volume explores the dynamic, volatile and often contested processes by which, by the early years of the 20th century, Asian states, space and peoples became deeply integrated into the wider dynamics of global reordering. Drawing on case studies from across Asia, the contributors discuss key themes including ideology, concepts of identity, religion and politics, state building and state formation, the relationships between space, people, and sovereignty, the movements of goods, money, people and ideas, and the influence and impact of conflict and military power. The two volumes of Empire in Asia offer a significant contribution to the theory and practice of empire when considered globally and comparatively and are essential reading for all students and scholars of global, imperial and Asian history.

Since the outbreak of the Pacific War, British India had been taken as the main logistic base for China's war against the Japanese. Chinese soldiers, government officials, professionals, and merchants flocked into India for training, business opportunities, retreat, and rehabilitation. This book is about how the activities of the Chinese sojourners in wartime India caused great concerns to the British colonial regime and the Chinese Nationalist government alike and how these sojourners responded to the surveillance, discipline, and check imposed by the governments. This book provides a subaltern perspective on the history of modern India-China relations that has been dominated by accounts of elite cultural interaction and geopolitical machination.