The Great Game describes the rivalry between the British and Russian empires through the 19th century. The game was primarily concerned with the control of certain regions in Central Asia and the defence of British India. The rivalry, although sometimes overimagined and exaggerated, took the form of international diplomacy, troop movements and invasions, espionage, and one instance of open warfare. The game had indirect consequences, too, in other areas of the world, such as in the Scramble for Africa. The Great Game effectively ended following Russia's embarrassing loss to Japan in 1905 and the arrival of the much more real and dangerous threat posed by Imperial Germany's ambitions in Europe.
The term 'Great Game' was coined in the 19th century by Arthur Connolly, a British officer and explorer, but became more widely used following its appearance in the 1901 novel Kim by Rudyard Kipling (1865 to 1936). The term refers to the relations between the British and Russian empires and their efforts to undermine each other and their respective alliances.
The game ran through the 19th century, beginning in the 1820s and ending prior to the First World War (1914 to 18). It has been described by such historians as L. James as a type of cold war, since, like the more modern Cold War between the USA and USSR, it involved no direct conflicts but rather the moves of the game involved wars by proxy, espionage, diplomatic strategies, and bluff. The exception to this is the Crimean War (1853 to 56), when both sides fought directly against each other to establish naval supremacy, particularly in the Black Sea.
The Russian Empire included around 160 million people and was ruled by the authoritarian tsar. Britain, in contrast, was a well-established parliamentary democracy. The British Empire enclosed some 400 million people in over 50 countries. Although British rule in its colonies was far from being as democratic as in the home country, British rulers and diplomats regarded themselves as superior to their Russian counterparts because Russia was ruled by an unelected autocrat, and Russia was far behind in terms of the Industrial Revolution.
Britain and Russia were particularly keen to control certain parts of Asia. Britain feared above all that Russia might attack British India – the empire's most valuable possession – via the North-West Frontier, that is the border between what is today Pakistan and Afghanistan. In the 19th century, this region, with its difficult terrain and strategically important mountain passes like the Khyber Pass, was very much seen as the gateway to the subcontinent for any army invading from Central Asia, just as it had been for Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE.
Persia (modern Iran) and Afghanistan acted as a buffer zone between the British and Russian empires, but each power sought to gain influence in that zone at the expense of their rival. This influence largely came from supporting one ruler or another against rival political factions. The British suspected that the Russians wanted to invade Afghanistan and control it, and the Russians thought the British had the same objective. If Russia controlled Afghanistan, it could use that state as a launchpad for an invasion of India. Similarly, Britain could use Afghanistan as a base to strike Russian-controlled states in Central Asia. The British certainly adopted a more aggressive policy towards Afghanistan in the belief that if they did not get there first, the Russians would.
The Great Game often involved the players indulging in espionage, rumours, propaganda, brinksmanship, and downright paranoia, but it was not always about imaginary threats. In 1837, Persia, with Russian support, had besieged the city of Herat in northern Afghanistan. The British then tried and spectacularly failed to control Afghanistan in the First Anglo-Afghan War (1838 to 42). Russia was at the same time challenging Britain in the east, establishing commercial concessions in China, and, by annexing Chinese Amur in 1858 and Ussuri in 1860, was able to establish a naval base at Vladivostok. Russia then made more land grabs in the old Mongol khanates of Central Asia, taking over Khiva in 1864, Tashkent in 1865, and Samarkand in 1868.
The British, in the form of the British East India Company (a state-sponsored but private trading company with its own army), were not idle either, consolidating their control of the Indian subcontinent, particularly in the northwest. Sind was taken over in 1843, Jammu and Kashmir in 1846, Punjab by 1849, following success in the Second-Anglo Sikh War, and Baluchistan in 1876. The British had another stab at controlling the Afghan buffer zone in the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878 to 80), an unsuccessful effort made partly in response to Russia's diplomatic moves to gain more direct influence in the court of the Afghan ruler Amir Sher Ali.
While these Asian episodes ran their course, the Great Game was witnessing moves in other parts of the world. In the Crimean War, Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire decisively defeated Russia, which was pushing to grab parts of the disintegrating Ottoman Empire. The status quo in the region around the Black Sea was preserved. Another significant war was the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857 to 8, an internal rebellion against British rule in India. British diplomats now feared any Anglo-Russian war would be seized upon by separatists in India who wanted freedom from British rule. Another rebellion on the scale of the Sepoy Mutiny would be a disaster for the British.
In 1884, Great Britain and Russia established close family ties when a granddaughter of Queen Victoria (reign 1837 to 1901), Alexandra Feodorovna (1872 to 1918), married Tsar Nicholas II (reign 1894 to 1917). The Great Game was unaffected by this development since Russian troops were mobilised to the border with Afghanistan in 1885 in the so-called Pandjeh incident. The construction of new Russian railways in Central Asia, such as the Transcaspian Railway (through what is today Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan and right up to the border with Afghanistan), meant that such a force could now be easily resupplied and boosted if required. Russia could theoretically mobilise around 300,000 troops on the border in less than three months. Britain's Anglo-Indian army on the frontier was significantly smaller at around 95,000 men. As the 19th century came to a close, reinforcing this army would be no easy feat for the British since there were significant military commitments elsewhere in the empire, notably the Boer War in Southern Africa (1899 to 1902).
Despite Britain and Russia's ambitions in the region, Afghanistan remained fiercely independent and seemingly unconquerable. As neither the Russians nor the British could control such a hostile region, the British settled for a policy of containment, one which became known as 'masterly inactivity'.
A much more aggressive policy was adopted by the British regarding Tibet, then an almost totally inaccessible state ruled by the Dalai Lama and Buddhist monks, but, at least on paper, under the suzerainty of China. The British had somehow got it into their minds that Russia intended to invade Tibet and create further mischief in Central Asia from there. To preempt such an occurrence, a British force led by the soldier-explorer Francis Younghusband (1863 to 1942) invaded Tibet in 1904. The Tibetans had little means to resist this attack by a modern army, and most of the brief military encounters turned into massacres. When Younghusband finally arrived in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa, an almost mythical place, since it was so difficult for foreigners to reach, he found no Russians and no evidence that there had ever been any there. The British withdrew from Tibet following assurances by the Chinese emperor that he would not allow any rival power to hold sway over Tibet.
The British government and colonial officials became rather paranoid about Russia's intentions, and any foreigner travelling in Central Asia was viewed with a high degree of suspicion. Even renowned explorers like the Swede Sven Hedin (1865 to 1952) could not receive official blessing or aid for their scientific expeditions. Hedin might well have been looking for the sources of great rivers like the Brahmaputra and Indus, but who was to say he was, as a skilled cartographer, not also gathering intelligence of great use for an enemy intent on invading South Asia? "Russophobia infected the minds of nearly every nineteenth-century British statesman, diplomat and strategist, and was strongly felt among all classes and shades of political opinion" (James, 180). That an actual invasion of India by Russian forces was logistically so difficult as to make its success unlikely was a point the British (and one or two dreaming Russian generals) tended to ignore.
British-paid spies (and presumably spies on Russian payroll, too, but we know far less about these) were tasked with amassing as much intelligence data as possible on the enemy's intentions, military capacity, and troop movements across Central Asia. Locals were recruited who, posing as beggars, could cross borders unnoticed and unmolested. Telegraph operators and post office staff were bribed to make copies of communications between Russian officials. Spies, posing as household staff, were even placed within Russian consulates. There was no shortage of double agents, either, who kept themselves busy and protected their cover by sending each side false information. The spying became an industry in itself, perpetuating suspicions with dubious reports that were designed really only to secure a fee for the author. Nevertheless, the flurry of reports going back and forth across Asia fed a diplomatic paranoia that would not go away.
A part of the Great Game was to extend it to other players, each main party trying to upset the traditional alliances of the other. In 1882, Britain took over the Suez Canal in Egypt, important as a connector between Europe and British India. The French government had traditionally seen Egypt as its own particular domain and was not at all happy at this development, particularly as it followed similar disputes elsewhere during the Scramble for Africa when European empires grabbed what they could of the continent. The situation in 1885, when Russia mobilised troops on the Afghan border, was seized upon by the French. The French government "used Britain's embarrassment in Central Asia to secure concessions in Africa and the Pacific" (James, 382).
Russia sought to exploit this lingering Franco-British discord and formed an alliance with France. A decade later, in 1892, a group of Russian ships entered the Mediterranean via the Bosphorus and weighed anchor in the French naval base at Toulon. The British Royal Navy was appalled at a potential naval alliance between its main European rival, France, and Russia, as this would mean it could no longer control the Mediterranean.
Franco-Anglo-Russian relations were further complicated by the Russo-Japanese War (1904 to 5). France was now Russia's ally, but Britain had signed an alliance with Japan in 1902. Japan won the war without any direct help, largely thanks to its more efficient navy, and Russia's, although third in the world in size, was shown to be obsolete. Japan seized Manchuria, and Russia's empire was prevented from expanding into China. Russia's defeat was a contributing cause of the Russian Revolution of 1905, when Tsar Nicholas only just held on to power. From a British perspective, the war with Japan was significant, since it had shown something the spies had chosen not to reveal: Russia was militarily incapable of invading India. The Great Game had been just that, a mere game for overly imaginative imperialists. Playing a game for its own sake, though, came at a high price, one paid for by ordinary people whose lives, livelihoods, and even states were destroyed.
Significantly, Anglo-French relations improved following the Moroccan Crises of 1905 and 1911 when Imperial Germany tried to muscle its way into French Morocco. British support for France led to Germany backing down. The Great Game effectively ended in 1907 when the Anglo-Russian Convention was signed, which finally diffused the simmering tensions over rival claims to Afghanistan, Tibet, and Persia. Russia agreed not to interfere in British India, and both sides agreed upon their spheres of influence in Persia. This new position reflected both Russia's weakness after the disastrous defeat to Japan and the fact that Britain and France had finally decided that Germany was the greater threat to global peace. Mutual suspicion remained, but, again in 1907, Britain, France, and Russia joined together in the Triple Entente alliance bloc. It was the Entente powers who were victorious against Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War One.