Great Game
Allegation that "Britain had lost the Great Game by 1842"

Edward Ingram proposes that Britain lost the Great Game. "The Great Game was an aspect of British history rather than international relations: the phrase describes what the British were doing, not the actions of Russians and Chinese." The Great Game was an attempt made in the 1830s by the British to impose their view on the world. If Khiva and Bukhara were to become buffer states, then trade routes to Afghanistan, as a protectorate, along the Indus and Sutlej rivers would be necessary and therefore access through the Sind and Punjab regions would be required. The Great Game began between 1832 and 1834 as an attempt to negotiate trade deals with Ranjit Singh and the Amirs of Sind, and the "first interruption of this magnificent British daydream was caused by the determination of the Amirs of Sind to be left alone." Its failure occurred at the end of the First Anglo-Afghanistan war in 1842 with the British withdrawal from Afghanistan. The failure to turn Afghanistan into a client state meant that The Great Game could not be won.

Nonetheless, Britain would win a decisive victory in the Second Anglo-Afghan War which occurred between 1878 and 1880. The victory also strengthened Britain's influence in Afghanistan, which had become a British protectorate.

In 1889, Lord Curzon, who later became Viceroy of India (1899-1905), wrote a book on the strategic balance between the Russian and British Empires, as well as his travels on the Trans-Caspian railway.

In that book, Russia in Central Asia in 1889 & the Anglo-Russian Question, he commented:

Our relations with Afghanistan in the forty years between 1838 and 1878 were successively those of blundering interference and of unmasterly inactivity.

However, he also portrayed the great game as a then-ongoing and future event in 1889, stating:

...the Transcaspian conquests of the Czar have brought about, and the seal upon which has been set by the completion of the new railway. The power of menace, which the ability to take Herat involves, has passed from English to Russian hands; the Russian seizure of Herat is now a matter not so much of war as of time; and that the Russians will thus, without an effort, win the first hand in the great game that is destined to be played for the empire of the East.

Russia remained a focus for Curzon through and after his time as Viceroy of India.
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