31 The Great Game

"The Great Game" was a political and diplomatic confrontation that existed for most of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century between the British Empire and the Russian Empire, over Afghanistan and neighbouring territories in Central and South Asia. It also had direct consequences in Persia and British India. Britain was fearful of Russia invading India to add to the vast empire that Russia was building in Asia. As a result, there was a deep atmosphere of distrust and the talk of war between the two empires. Britain made it a high priority to protect all the approaches to India, and the "great game" is primarily how the British did this. Historians with access to the archives have concluded that Russia had no plans involving India, as the Russians repeatedly stated.

General Sir James Abbott, was a British army officer and administrator in colonial India. The Pakistani city of Abbottabad was founded by and named after him.

The Afghanistan–Tajikistan border is 1,357 km (843 mi) in length and runs from the tripoint with Uzbekistan in the west to the tripoint with China in the east, almost entirely along the Amu Darya, Pyanj and Pamir rivers, except for the easternmost section along the Wakhan Corridor.

The Afghanistan–Turkmenistan border is 804 km (500 mi) in length and runs from the tripoint with Iran to the tripoint with Uzbekistan.

The Afghanistan-Uzbekistan border is 144 km (89 mi) in length and runs from the tripoint with Turkmenistan to the tripoint with Tajikistan along the Amu Darya river. It is by far the shortest of Uzbekistan's external borders.

Colonel Frederick Gustavus Burnaby was a British Army intelligence officer. Burnaby's adventurous spirit, pioneering achievements, and swashbuckling courage earned an affection in the minds of Victorian imperial idealists. As well as travelling across Europe and Central Asia, he mastered ballooning, spoke a number of foreign languages fluently, stood for parliament twice, published several books, and was admired and feted by the women of London high society. His popularity was legendary, appearing in a number of stories and tales of empire.

Captain Sir Alexander Burnes was a Scottish explorer and diplomat associated with the Great Game. He was nicknamed Bokhara Burnes for his role in establishing contact with and exploring Bukhara, which made his name. His memoir, Travels into Bokhara, was a bestseller when it was first published in 1835.

Mikhail Grigorievich Chernyayev was a Russian general, who, together with Konstantin Kaufman and Mikhail Skobelev, directed the Russian conquest of Central Asia during the reign of Csar Alexander II.

The Chitral Expedition was a military expedition in 1895 sent by the British authorities to relieve the fort at Chitral which was under siege after a local coup. After the death of the old ruler power changed hands several times. An intervening British force of about 400 men was besieged in the fort until it was relieved by two expeditions, a small one from Gilgit and a larger one from Peshawar.

Arthur Conolly was a British intelligence officer, explorer and writer. He was a captain of the 6th Bengal Light Cavalry in the service of the British East India Company. He participated in many reconnaissance missions into Central Asia and coined the term The Great Game to describe the struggle between the British Empire and the Russian Empire for domination over Central Asia.

The Durand Line is the international 2,670-kilometre (1,660 mi) land border between Afghanistan and Pakistan in South-Central Asia. It was originally established in 1893 as the international border between British India and Emirate of Afghanistan by Mortimer Durand, a British diplomat of the Indian Civil Service, and Abdur Rahman Khan, the Afghan Emir, to fix the limit of their respective spheres of influence and improve diplomatic relations and trade.

Ney Elias, CIE, was an English explorer, geographer, and diplomat, most known for his extensive travels in Asia. Modern scholars speculate that he was a key intelligence agent for Britain during the Great Game. Elias travelled extensively in the Karakoram, Hindu Kush, Pamirs, and Turkestan regions of High Asia.

The European influence in Afghanistan refers to political, social, and mostly imperialistic influence several European nations and colonial powers have had on the historical development of Afghanistan.

The Battle of Geok Tepe in 1881 was the main event in the 1880/81 Russian campaign to conquer the Teke Turkomans. Its effect was to give the Russian Empire control over most of what is now Turkmenistan, thereby nearly completing the Russian conquest of Central Asia.

Central Asia has long been a geostrategic location because of its proximity to the interests of several great powers and regional powers.

Bronislav Grombchevsky was an ethnic Polish officer in the Imperial Russian Army and an explorer/spy, famed for his participation in The Great Game.

Western imperialism in Asia involves the influence of people from Western Europe and associated states in Asian territories and waters. Much of this process stemmed from the 15th-century search for trade routes to China that led directly to the Age of Discovery, and the introduction of early modern warfare into what Europeans first called the East Indies and later the Far East. By the early 16th century, the Age of Sail greatly expanded Western European influence and development of the spice trade under colonialism. European-style colonial empires and imperialism operated in Asia throughout six centuries of colonialism, formally ending with the independence of the Portuguese Empire's last colony East Timor in 2002. The empires introduced Western concepts of nation and the multinational state. This article attempts to outline the consequent development of the Western concept of the nation state.

The Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, also known as the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Persia, was the joint invasion of Iran by the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union in August 1941. The invasion, codenamed Operation Countenance, was largely unopposed by the numerically and technologically inferior Iranian forces. The multi-pronged coordinated invasion took place along Iran's borders with modern Iraq, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan with fighting beginning on 25 August and ending on 31 August when the Iranian government formally agreed to surrender, having already agreed to a ceasefire on 30 August.

Konstantin Petrovich Kaufman, better known as Konstantin Petrovich von Kaufmann, was the first Governor-General of Russian Turkestan.

Major General Sir Charles Metcalfe MacGregor KCB CSI CIE was a British explorer, geographer and officer of the British Indian Army. He was the Quartermaster General for the British Army in India, the head of the Intelligence Department for the British Indian Army and served under Frederick Roberts in the Second Anglo-Afghan War. The MacGregor Medal is awarded in his honour.

Sir William Hay Macnaghten, 1st Baronet, was a British civil servant in India, who played a major part in the First Anglo-Afghan War.

Sir John McNeill was a Scottish surgeon and diplomat.

The Panjdeh incident was an armed engagement between Afghanistan and the Russian Empire in 1885 that led to a diplomatic crisis between the British Empire and the Russian Empire caused by the Russian expansion south-eastwards towards the Emirate of Afghanistan and the British Raj (India). After nearly completing the Russian conquest of Central Asia the Russians captured an Afghan border fort. Seeing a threat to India, Britain came close to threatening war but both sides backed down and the matter was settled by diplomacy. The effect was to stop further Russian expansion in Asia, except for the Pamir Mountains and to define the north-western border of Afghanistan.

Count Vasily Alekseevich Perovsky (1794–1857) was an imperial Russian general and statesman.

Lieutenant-General Sir Henry Pottinger, 1st Baronet was an Anglo-Irish soldier and colonial administrator who became the first Governor of Hong Kong.

The term pundit or pandit was used in the second half of the 19th century to denote indigenous surveyors who explored regions to the north of British India for the British.

The Second Anglo-Afghan War was a military conflict fought between the British Raj and the Emirate of Afghanistan from 1878 to 1880, when the latter was ruled by Sher Ali Khan of the Barakzai dynasty, the son of former Emir Dost Mohammad Khan. The war was part of the Great Game between the British and Russian empires.

Sir Richmond Campbell Shakespear was an Indian-born British Indian Army officer. He helped to influence the Khan of Khiva to abolish the capture and selling of Russian slaves in Khiva. This likely forestalled the Russian conquest of the Khiva, although it ultimately did not prevent it.

Mikhail Dmitriyevich Skobelev was a Russian general famous for his conquest of Central Asia and heroism during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. Dressed in white uniform and mounted on a white horse, and always in the thickest of the fray, he was known and adored by his soldiers as the "White General". During a campaign in Khiva, his Turkmen opponents called him goz ganly or "Bloody Eyes". British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery wrote that Skobelev was the world's "ablest single commander" between 1870 and 1914 and called him a "skilful and inspiring" leader.

Colonel Charles Stoddart was a British officer and diplomat. He was a famous British agent in Central Asia during the period of the Great Game.

Ármin Vámbéry, also known as Arminius Vámbéry, was a Hungarian Turkologist and traveller.