Author: Richard Macrory Hon KC Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1472813987 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 100
Book Description
In 1839 forces of the British East India Company crossed the Indus to invade Afghanistan on the pretext of reinstating a former king Shah Soojah to his rightful throne. The reality was that this was another step in Britain's Great Game – Afghanistan would create a buffer to any potential Russian expansion towards India. This history traces the initial, campaign which would see the British easily occupy Kabul and the rebellion that two years later would see the British army humbled. Forced to negotiate a surrender the British fled Kabul en masse in the harsh Afghan winter. Decimated by Afghan guerilla attacks and by the harsh cold and a lack of food and supplies just one European – Dr Brydon would make it to the safety of Jalalabad five days later. This book goes on to trace the retribution attack on Kabul the following year, which destroyed the symbolic Mogul Bazaar before rapidly withdrawing and leaving Afghanistan in peace for nearly a generation.
Author: Gregory Fremont-Barnes Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing ISBN: 1472810082 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 144
Book Description
During the 19th century Britain entered into three brutal wars with Afghanistan, each one saw the British trying and failing to gain control of a warlike and impenetrable territory. The first two wars (1839–42 and 1878–81) were wars of the Great Game; the British Empire's attempts to combat growing Russian influence near India's borders. The third, fought in 1919, was an Afghan-declared holy war against British India – in which over 100,000 Afghans answered the call, and raised a force that would prove too great for the British Imperial army. Each of the three wars were plagued by military disasters, lengthy sieges and costly engagements for the British, and history has proved the Afghans a formidable foe and their country unconquerable. This book reveals the history of these three Anglo-Afghan wars, the imperial power struggles that led to conflict and the torturous experiences of the men on the ground. The book concludes with a brief overview of the background to today's conflict in Afghanistan, and sketches the historical parallels.
Author: William Dalrymple Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0307958299 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 494
Book Description
From William Dalrymple—award-winning historian, journalist and travel writer—a masterly retelling of what was perhaps the West’s greatest imperial disaster in the East, and an important parable of neocolonial ambition, folly and hubris that has striking relevance to our own time. With access to newly discovered primary sources from archives in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Russia and India—including a series of previously untranslated Afghan epic poems and biographies—the author gives us the most immediate and comprehensive account yet of the spectacular first battle for Afghanistan: the British invasion of the remote kingdom in 1839. Led by lancers in scarlet cloaks and plumed helmets, and facing little resistance, nearly 20,000 British and East India Company troops poured through the mountain passes from India into Afghanistan in order to reestablish Shah Shuja ul-Mulk on the throne, and as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the Afghans rose in answer to the call for jihad and the country exploded into rebellion. This First Anglo-Afghan War ended with an entire army of what was then the most powerful military nation in the world ambushed and destroyed in snowbound mountain passes by simply equipped Afghan tribesmen. Only one British man made it through. But Dalrymple takes us beyond the bare outline of this infamous battle, and with penetrating, balanced insight illuminates the uncanny similarities between the West’s first disastrous entanglement with Afghanistan and the situation today. He delineates the straightforward facts: Shah Shuja and President Hamid Karzai share the same tribal heritage; the Shah’s principal opponents were the Ghilzai tribe, who today make up the bulk of the Taliban’s foot soldiers; the same cities garrisoned by the British are today garrisoned by foreign troops, attacked from the same rings of hills and high passes from which the British faced attack. Dalryrmple also makes clear the byzantine complexity of Afghanistan’s age-old tribal rivalries, the stranglehold they have on the politics of the nation and the ways in which they ensnared both the British in the nineteenth century and NATO forces in the twenty-first. Informed by the author’s decades-long firsthand knowledge of Afghanistan, and superbly shaped by his hallmark gifts as a narrative historian and his singular eye for the evocation of place and culture, The Return of a King is both the definitive analysis of the First Anglo-Afghan War and a work of stunning topicality.
Author: Archibald Forbes Publisher: IndyPublish.com ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 376
Book Description
This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience. We believe this work is culturally important and have elected to bring the book back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide.
Author: Antoinette Burton Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822376695 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 399
Book Description
Designed for classroom use, The First Anglo-Afghan Wars gathers in one volume primary source materials related to the first two wars that Great Britain launched against native leaders of the Afghan region. From 1839 to 1842, and again from 1878 to 1880, Britain fought to expand its empire and prevent Russian expansion into the region's northwest frontier, which was considered the gateway to India, the jewel in Victorian Britain's imperial crown. Spanning from 1817 to 1919, the selections reflect the complex national, international, and anticolonial interests entangled in Central Asia at the time. The documents, each of which is preceded by a brief introduction, bring the nineteenth-century wars alive through the opinions of those who participated in or lived through the conflicts. They portray the struggle for control of the region from the perspectives of women and non-Westerners, as well as well-known figures including Kipling and Churchill. Filled with military and civilian voices, the collection clearly demonstrates the challenges that Central Asia posed to powers attempting to secure and claim the region. It is a cautionary tale, unheeded by Western powers in the post–9/11 era.
Author: William B. Trousdale Publisher: BRILL ISBN: 9004445226 Category : Reference Languages : en Pages : 275
Book Description
This comprehensive history of Kandahar uses unpublished and fugitive sources to provide a detailed picture of the geographical layout and political, social, ethnic, religious, and economic life in Afghanistan’s second largest city throughout the nineteenth century.
Author: Diana Preston Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: 0802779824 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 320
Book Description
An account of the mid-19th-century war in Afghanistan documents how the British government sought to protect regional interests by attempting to install a puppet ruler only to be defeated by united Afghanistan tribes, in a volume that profiles key contributors and discusses how the war set the stage for subsequent hostilities.
Author: Patrick Arthur Macrory Publisher: Virago Press ISBN: Category : History Languages : en Pages : 292
Book Description
In 1839 a large British army invaded Afghanistan in order to place upon the throne a ruler deemed more friendly to the British in Delhi than the incumbent Dost Mohammed. Many voices in London warned against the foolhardy enterprise, among them that of the Duke of Wellington, who foresaw shame and disaster. The enterprise started well. The army conquered all before it, including reputedly impregnable fortresses. But only two years after being established in Kabul, attached on all sides by the hostile Afghans, the British retreated in mid-winter, 1842, trying to regain India. Of the 16,000 soldiers and others who left the city, only one person survived the journey as far as Jalalabad. It was one of the worse catastrophes to befall the British Empire.
Author: Christine Noelle Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 1136603174 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 466
Book Description
With the exception of two short periods of direct British intervention during the Anglo-Afghan Wars of 1839-42 and 1878-80, the history of nineteenth-century Afghanistan has received little attention from western scholars. This study seeks to shift the focus of debate from the geostrategic concern with Afghanistan as the bone of contention between imperial Russian and British interests to a thorough investigation of the sociopolitical circumstances prevailing within the country. On the basis of unpublished British documents and works by Afghan historians, it lays the groundwork for a better understanding of the political mechanisms at work during the early Muhammadzai era by analysing them both from the viewpoint of the center and the pierphery.
Author: Richard Macrory Hon KC
Author: Gregory Fremont-Barnes
Author: William Dalrymple
Author: Archibald Forbes
Author: Antoinette Burton
Author: William B. Trousdale
Author: Diana Preston
Author: Patrick Arthur Macrory
Author: Christine Noelle
Author: Ehsan Yarshater