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This book DOES NOT disappoint!Drew’s Reviews

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Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42 Paperback – Illustrated, January 14, 2014

by William Dalrymple (Author)

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A Best Book of the Year: The Economist, Slate, Kirkus Reviews

In 1839, nearly 20,000 British troops poured through the mountain passes into Afghanistan and installed the exiled Shah Shuja on the throne as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the Afghans exploded into rebellion. The British were forced to retreat—and were then ambushed in the mountains by simply-equipped Afghan tribesmen. Just one British man made it through. But Dalrymple takes us beyond the story of this colonial humiliation and illuminates the key connections between then and now. 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. Dalrymple explains the byzantine complexity of Afghanistan’s age-old tribal rivalries, their stranglehold on politics, and how they ensnared both the British of the nineteenth century and NATO forces today. Rich with newly discovered primary sources, this stunning narrative is the definitive account of the first battle for Afghanistan.

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592 pages
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English
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Vintage
Publication date

January 14, 2014
Dimensions

6.17 x 1.23 x 9.24 inches
ISBN-10

0307948536
ISBN-13

978-0307948533
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As so often in international affairs, hawkish paranoia about distant threats can create the very monster that is most feared.
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It was in many ways less a state than a kaleidoscope of competing tribal principalities governed through maliks or vakils, in each of which allegiance was entirely personal, to be negotiated and won over rather than taken for granted.
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‘You have brought an army into the country,’ he said. ‘But how do you propose to take it out again?’
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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for William Dalrymple’s Return of a King

“Brilliant. . . . The fullest and most powerful description of the West’s first encounter with Afghan society.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Magnificent. . . . [Dalrymple’s] histories read like novels. . . . This latest book delights and shocks.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Masterful. . . . Dalrymple makes an important contribution by including recently discovered Afghan accounts of the war.” —The Washington Post

“At once deeply researched and beautifully paced, Return of a King should win every prize for which it’s eligible.” —Bookforum

“With skill and deep humanity, Dalrymple seeks contemporary lessons in Britain’s disastrous nineteenth-century invasion.” —The New York Times Book Review (Editor’s Choice)

“A serious work of history that expands our understanding of the war of 1839-42 by drawing on sources found in Russia, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, many never before translated into English.” —Newsday

“Arguably the most important work in Dalrymple's impressive oeuvre. . . . If context is important, reading Dalrymple is paramount.” —The Sunday Guardian (London)

“A masterful history. . . . And as the latest occupying force in Afghanistan negotiates its exit, this chronicle seems all too relevant now.” —The Economist

“In Return of a King, Dalrymple has done again what he did magnificently for two other telling episodes of British imperial history in White Mughals (2002) and The Last Mughal (2006). . . . Dalrymple has a narrative gift.” —The Huffington Post

“A thrilling, amusing and educational three-track tour de force, relevant to today and even the immediate future.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Definitive. . . . Return of a King is not just a riveting account of one imperial disaster on the roof of the world; it teaches unforgettable lessons about the perils of neocolonial adventures everywhere.” —Literary Review

“A major contribution to the historiography of south-west Asia and of the British empire. . . . Return of a King will come to be seen as the definitive account of the first and most disastrous western attempt to invade Afghanistan.” —New Statesman

“Complex and remarkable. . . . As taut and richly embroidered as a great novel. . . . This book is a masterpiece of nuanced writing and research, and a thrilling account of a watershed Victorian conflict.” —The Sunday Telegraph (London)

“[Dalrymple] is a master storyteller, whose special gift lies in the use of indigenous sources, so often neglected by imperial chroniclers. . . . Almost every page of Dalrymple’s splendid narrative echoes with latter-day reverberations.” —The Sunday Times (London)

“Few writers could go wrong with a story populated with so many villains, rogues, poltroons, swashbucklers, spies, assassins and heroes. But none would make a better job of it than William Dalrymple in this thrilling, magnificently evocative Return of a King.” —Mail on Sunday (London)

“Marvelous. . . . Brilliant, exact language. . . . There is much in Dalrymple’s superb book that has contemporary resonance.” —Sunday Herald

“Shows all the elements we have come to expect from Dalrymple: the clear, fluid prose, the ability to give complex historical events shape, story and meaning, the use of new local sources to allow the voices of the people . . . to be heard alongside the much-better documented accounts of the invaders. . . . This is clear-eyed, non-judgmental, sober history, beautifully told.” —The Observer (London)

“Sensationally good. . . . Dalrymple writes the kind of history that few historians can match.” —The Scotsman

“An absorbing and beautifully written account of a doomed effort to control an apparently uncontrollably population. . . . A saga that makes for marvelous storytelling, filled with heroes, knaves, incompetent fools, and savage, bloodthirsty warriors. It has been told often before but perhaps never so well as by Dalrymple.” —Booklist (starred)

About the Author

William Dalrymple is the author of seven previous works of history and travel, including City of Djinns, which won the Young British Writer of the Year Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; From the Holy Mountain; White Mughals, which won Britain’s Wolfson History Prize; and The Last Mughal, which won the Duff Cooper Prize for History and Biography. He is a contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. He divides his time between New Delhi and London.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Excerpted from the hardcover edition.

1

No Easy Place to Rule

The year 1809 opened auspiciously for Shah Shuja ul-Mulk. It was now March, the very beginning of that brief Afghan spring, and the pulse was slowly returning to the veins of the icy landscape long clotted with drifts of waist-high snow. Now the small, sweet-smelling Istalif irises were pushing their way through the frozen ground, the frosted rime on the trunks of the deodars was running to snowmelt, and the Ghilzai nomads were unlatching their fat-tailed sheep from the winter pens, breaking down their goat-hair tents and readying the flocks for the first of the spring migrations to the new grass of the high pastures. It was just then, at that moment of thaw and sap, that Shah Shuja received two pieces of good news—something of a rarity in his troubled reign.1

The first concerned the recovery of some lost family property. The largest diamond in the world, the Koh-i-Nur, or Mountain of Light, had been missing for more than a decade, but such was the turbulence of the times that no attempt had been made to find it. Shah Zaman, Shuja’s elder brother and predecessor on the throne of Afghanistan, was said to have hidden the gem shortly before being captured and blinded by his enemies. A huge Indian ruby known as the Fakhraj, the family’s other most precious gem, had also disappeared at the same time.

So Shah Shuja summoned his blind brother and questioned him on the whereabouts of their father’s most famous jewels: was it really true that he knew where they were hidden? Shah Zaman revealed that nine years earlier he had hidden the Fakhraj under a rock in a stream near the Khyber Pass, shortly before being taken prisoner. Later, he had slipped the Koh-i-Nur into a crack in the wall of the fortress cell where he was first seized and bound. A court historian later recorded, “Shah Shuja immediately dispatched a few of his most trustworthy men to find these two gems and advised them that they should leave no stone unturned in their efforts. They found the Koh-i-Nur with a Shinwari sheikh who in his ignorance was using it as a paperweight for his official papers. As for the Fakhraj, they found it with a Talib, a student, who had uncovered it when he went to a stream to wash his clothes. They impounded both gems and brought them back in the king’s service.”2

The second piece of news, about the arrival of an embassy from a previously hostile neighbour, was potentially of more practical use to the Shah. At the age of only twenty-four, Shuja was now in the seventh year of his reign. By temperament a reader and a thinker, more interested in poetry and scholarship than in warfare or campaigning, it was his fate to have inherited, while still an adolescent, the far-flung Durrani Empire. That empire, founded by his grandfather Ahmad Shah Abdali, had been built out of the collapse of three other Asian empires: the Uzbeks to the north, the Mughals to the south and to the west the Safavids of Persia. It had originally extended from Nishapur in modern Iran through Afghanistan, Baluchistan, the Punjab and Sindh to Kashmir and the threshold of Mughal Delhi. But now, only thirty years after his grandfather’s death, the Durrani Empire was itself already well on its way to disintegration.

There was, in fact, nothing very surprising about this. Considering its very ancient history, Afghanistan—or Khurasan, as the Afghans have called the lands of this region for the two last millennia—had had but a few hours of political or administrative unity.3 Far more often it had been “the places in between”—the fractured and disputed stretch of mountains, floodplains and deserts separating its more orderly neighbours. At other times its provinces formed the warring extremities of rival, clashing empires. Only very rarely did its parts happen to come together to attain any sort of coherent state in its own right.

Everything had always conspired against its rise: the geography and topography and especially the great stony skeleton of the Hindu Kush, the black rubble of its scalloped and riven slopes standing out against the ice-etched, snow-topped ranges which divided up the country like the bones of a massive rocky ribcage.

Then there were the different tribal, ethnic and linguistic fissures fragmenting Afghan society: the rivalry between the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and the Durrani and Ghilzai Pashtuns; the schism between Sunni and Shia; the endemic factionalism within clans and tribes, and especially the blood feuds within closely related lineages. These blood feuds rolled malevolently down from generation to generation, symbols of the impotence of state-run systems of justice. In many places blood feuds became almost a national pastime—the Afghan equivalent of county cricket in the English shires—and the killings they engendered were often on a spectacular scale. Under the guise of reconciliation, one of Shah Shuja’s chiefs invited some sixty of his feuding cousins “to dine with him,” wrote one observer, “having previously laid bags of gunpowder under the apartment. During the meal, having gone out on some pretext, he blew them all up.” A country like this could be governed only with skill, strategy and a full treasure chest.

So when at the beginning of 1809 messengers arrived from the Punjab bearing news of an East India Company Embassy heading north from Delhi seeking an urgent alliance with him, Shah Shuja had good reason to be pleased. In the past the Company had been a major problem for the Durranis, for its well-disciplined sepoy armies had made impossible the lucrative raids down onto the plains of Hindustan which for centuries had been a principal source of Afghan income. Now it seemed that the Company wished to woo the Afghans; the Shah’s newswriters wrote to him that the Embassy had already crossed the Indus, en route to his winter capital of Peshawar. This not only offered some respite from the usual round of sieges, arrests and punitive expeditions, it potentially provided Shuja with a powerful ally—something he badly needed. There had never been a British Embassy to Afghanistan before, and the two peoples were almost unknown to each other, so the Embassy had the additional benefit of novelty. “We appointed servants of the royal court known for their refinement and good manners to go to meet them,” wrote Shah Shuja in his memoirs, “and ordered them to take charge of hospitality, and to treat them judiciously, with caution and politeness.”4

Reports reaching Shah Shuja indicated that the British were coming laden with gifts: “elephants with golden howdahs, a palanquin with a high parasol, gold-inlaid guns and ingenious pistols with six chambers, never seen before; expensive clocks, binoculars, fine mirrors capable of reflecting the world as it is; diamond studded lamps, porcelain vases and utensils with gold embedded work from Rome and China; tree-shaped candelabra, and other such beautiful and expensive gifts whose brilliance the imagination falls short in describing.”5 Years later Shuja remembered one present that particularly delighted him: “a large box producing noises like voices, strange sounds in a range of timbres, harmonies and melodies, most pleasing to the ear.”6 The Embassy had brought Afghanistan its first organ.

Shah Shuja’s autobiography is silent as to whether he suspected these British bearing gifts. But by the time he came to write it in late middle age, he was well aware that the alliance he was about to negotiate would change the course of his own life, and that of Afghanistan, for ever.

The real reason behind the despatch of this first British Embassy to Afghanistan lay far from both India and the passes of the Hindu Kush. Its origins had nothing to do with Shah Shuja, the Durrani Empire or even the intricate princely politics of Hindustan. Instead its causes could be traced to north-eastern Prussia, and a raft floating in the middle of the River Neman.

Here, eighteen months earlier, Napoleon, at the very peak of his power, had met the Russian Emperor, Alexander II, to negotiate a peace treaty. The meeting followed the Russian defeat at the Battle of Friedland on 14 June 1807, when Napoleon’s artillery had left 25,000 Russians dead on the battlefield. It was a severe loss, but the Russians had been able to withdraw to their frontier in good order. Now the two armies faced each other across the meandering oxbows of the Neman, with the Russian forces reinforced by two new divisions, and a further 200,000 militiamen waiting nearby on the shores of the Baltic.

The stalemate was broken when the Russians were informed that Napoleon wished not only for peace, but for an alliance. On 7 July, on a raft surmounted by a white classical pavilion emblazoned with a large monogrammed N, the two emperors met in person to negotiate a treaty later known as the Peace of Tilsit.7

Most of the clauses in the treaty concerned the question of war and peace—not for nothing was the first volume of Tolstoy’s great novel named Before Tilsit. Much of the discussion concerned the fate of French-occupied Europe, especially the future of Prussia whose king, excluded from the meeting, paced anxiously up and down the river bank waiting to discover if he would still have a kingdom after the conclave concluded. But amid all the public articles of the treaty, Napoleon included several secret clauses that were not disclosed at the time. These laid the foundations for a joint Franco-Russian attack on what Napoleon saw as the source of Britain’s wealth. This, of course, was his enemy’s richest possession, India.

The seizure of India as a means of impoverishing Britain and breaking its growing economic power had been a long-standing obsession of Napoleon’s, as of several previous French strategists. Almost exactly nine years earlier, on 1 July 1798, Napoleon had landed his troops at Alexandria and struck inland for Cairo. “Through Egypt we shall invade India,” he wrote. “We shall re-establish the old route through Suez.” From Cairo he sent a letter to Tipu Sultan of Mysore, answering the latter’s pleas for help against the English: “You have already been informed of my arrival on the borders of the Red Sea, with an invincible army, full of the desire of releasing you from the iron yoke of England. May the Almighty increase your power, and destroy your enemies!”8

At the Battle of the Nile on 1 August, however, Admiral Nelson sank almost the entire French fleet, wrecking Napoleon’s initial plan to use Egypt as a secure base from which to attack India. This forced him to change his strategy; but he never veered from his aim of weakening Britain by seizing what he believed to be the source of its economic power, much as Latin America with its Inca and Aztec gold had once been that of Spain.

So Napoleon now hatched plans to attack India through Persia and Afghanistan. A treaty with the Persian Ambassador had already been concluded: “Should it be the intention of HM the Emperor of the French to send an army by land to attack the English possessions in India,” it stated, “HM the Emperor of Persia, as his good and faithful ally, will grant him passage.”

At Tilsit, the secret clauses spelled out the plan in full: Napoleon would emulate Alexander the Great and march 50,000 French troops of the Grande Armée across Persia to invade India, while Russia would head south through Afghanistan. General Gardane was despatched to Persia to liaise with the Shah and find out which ports could provide anchorage, water and supplies for 20,000 men, and to draw up maps of possible invasion routes. Meanwhile, General Caulaincourt, Napoleon’s Ambassador to St. Petersburg, was instructed to take the idea forward with the Russians. “The more fanciful it sounds,” wrote the Emperor, “the more the attempt to do it (and what can France and Russia not do?) would frighten the English; striking terror into English India, spreading confusion in London; and, to be sure, forty thousand Frenchmen to whom Persia will have granted passage by way of Constantinople, joining forty thousand Russians who arrive by way of the Caucasus, would be enough to terrify Asia, and make its conquest.”9

But the British were not caught unawares. The secret service had hidden one of their informers, a disillusioned Russian aristocrat, beneath the barge, his ankles dangling in the river. Braving the cold, he was able to hear every word and sent an immediate express, containing the outlines of the plan, to London. It took British intelligence only a further six weeks to obtain the exact wording of the secret clauses, and these were promptly forwarded to India. With them went instructions for the Governor General, Lord Minto, to warn all the countries lying between India and Persia of the dangers in which they stood, and to negotiate alliances with them to oppose any French or Franco-Russian expedition against India. The different embassies were also instructed to collect strategic information and intelligence, so filling in the blank spaces on British maps of these regions. Meanwhile, reinforcements would be held in readiness in England for despatch to India should there be signs of an expedition being ready to sail from the French ports.10

Lord Minto did not regard Napoleon’s plan as fanciful. A French invasion of India through Persia was not “beyond the scope of that energy and perseverance which distinguish the present ruler of France,” he wrote as he finalised plans to counter the “very active French diplomacy in Persia, which is seeking with great diligence the means of extending its intrigues to the Durbars of Hindustan.”11

In the end Minto opted for four separate embassies, each of which would be sent with lavish presents in order to warn and win over the powers that stood in the way of Napoleon’s armies. One was sent to Teheran in an effort to impress upon Fatteh Ali Shah Qajar of Persia the perfidiousness of his new French ally. Another was despatched to Lahore to make an alliance with Ranjit Singh and the Sikhs. A third was despatched to the Amirs of Sindh. The job of wooing Shah Shuja and his Afghans fell to a rising young star in the Company’s service, Mountstuart Elphinstone.

Elphinstone was a Lowland Scot, who in his youth had been a notable Francophile. He had grown up alongside French prisoners of war in Edinburgh Castle, of which his father was governor, and there he had learned their revolutionary songs and had grown his curly golden hair down his back in the Jacobin style to show his sympathy with their ideals.12 Sent off to India at the unusually young age of fourteen to keep him out of trouble, he had learned good Persian, Sanskrit and Hindustani, and soon turned into an ambitious diplomat and a voracious historian and scholar.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Vintage; Illustrated edition (January 14, 2014)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 592 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0307948536
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0307948533
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.45 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.17 x 1.23 x 9.24 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #928,235 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #163 in Central Asia History
- #4,616 in Great Britain History (Books)
- #24,217 in World History (Books)

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William Dalrymple

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William Dalrymple FRSL, FRGS, FRAS (born William Hamilton-Dalrymple on 20 March 1965) is a Scottish historian and writer, art historian and curator, as well as a prominent broadcaster and critic.

His books have won numerous awards and prizes, including the Duff Cooper Memorial Prize, the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award, the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award, the Hemingway, the Kapuściński and the Wolfson Prizes. He has been four times longlisted and once shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize for non-fiction. He is also one of the co-founders and co-directors of the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.

In 2012 he was appointed a Whitney J. Oates Visiting Fellow in the Humanities by Princeton University. In the Spring of 2015 he was appointed the OP Jindal Distinguished Lecturer at Brown University.

Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Premkudva (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

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LesLein

Idiot Plot

Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2013

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In Hollywood the "idiot plot" is a story that can only progress if key characters behave like complete idiots. In this case it refers to the British invasion of Afghanistan in the 1840s, not this excellent book by William Dalrymple.

Dalrymple provides plenty of background. During the Napoleonic wars the French and Russians plotted an attempt to invade India through Central Asia. While the scheme never went too far, the British lived in needless fear that Russian involvement in Afghanistan would threaten their empire. British intrigue brought about the Russian diplomatic moves that they feared. As a result, the British invaded Afghanistan to replace Dost Mohammed, an effective though despotic ruler, with Shah Shujah, the "rightful" king of Afghanistan. Shujah wasn't a bad man, he just lacked the popularity and political skill that Dost Mohammed had. Dalrymple gives Shujah more credit than he usually gets; if the British had followed his advice they would have at least survived their invasion.

Problems started with the invasion. The British were unprepared for the Afghans' guerilla attacks, as well as the weather and geography. Once established in Kabul they managed things very ineptly. The military initially treated their time in Kabul as a holiday outing. They lived in cantonments that were very vulnerable to attack. Their ammunition, treasury, and provisions were located away from the army's main location. The British antagonized the population. They cut the subsidies to the various tribes. Their spending drove up prices. Their womanizing couldn't have been more calculated to antagonize the locals.

There are many fascinating characters, some flat out stupid. Readers of Flashman: A Novel will recognize many. The second-in-command, Brigadier Shelton, was cantankerous and stubborn. When his unit was under attack he formed it into squares. This was a sound tactic against cavalry, but made his men easy targets for the excellent Afghan shots. The commander, General William Elphinstone, was in terrible health and probable too passive, ineffective, and indecisive to begin with. British diplomats were more competent but mismanaged the situation. The envoy, William Mcnaughten, was intelligent but arrogant and determined to ignore bad news. Alexander Burnes, the political office ignored warnings and lived away from the army. Both Mcnaughten and Burns were murdered. When the situtation deteriated the British did not move into the Bala Hissar, and excellent fortress.

British sources indicate that they believed that the Afghans did not concern treachery to be a vice. There's at least some truth to this, but the British were no better. It was Mcnaughten's violation of an agreement that brought about his murder. The British abandoned the Indian sepoys to the Afghans, planting the seeds for the mutiny of 1857.

While the invasion and occupation were poorly run, the retreat was a catastrophe. The British didn't consider an alternative route where they would be completely safe. In the worst possible winter weather they retreated through the passes with insufficient clothing, food, and ammunition. The coda was a disaster, too. The British "Army of Retribution" lived up to its name. It demolished impressive architecture such as the bazaar and ruined the Afghans ability to govern themselves. Before the 1840s Afghanistan was not the seemingly hopeless case it has been since.

This is the best book I have read on the subject. Dalrymple's research includes Afghan sources, as well as private British collections that weren't previously available. The book is very readable. There are a few shortcomings that shouldn't discourage readers too much. For all its exhaustiveness, Dalrymple misses a few events. For example, Elphinstone shot himself in the buttocks. Also, Elphinstone formed a "united front" at the rear guard during the retreat.

Reviewers make much of the similarities between the British 19th century experience and today's situation in Afghanistan. Regrettably, Dalrymple lets his biases affect this short part of the book. Dalrymple doesn't mention that the Taliban causes most civilian casualties. Dalrymple ignores the fact that unlike the British, NATO forces were not defeated militarily. NATO is withdrawing for lack of political nerve and popular support. The decision to announce a withdrawal date in advance is one worhy of Mcnaughten and Elphinstone.

One slur, not typical of the rest of the book, is Dalrymple's statement that NATO's invasion was "neo-colonial." He contradicts this when he criticizes NATO for thinking it could leave after a few years and notes that it was trying to set up a democracy. Colonizers don't behave that way. Dalrymple doesn't mention that the Taliban originated in Pakistan and are alien to Afghan traditions. He questions the motivation for the invasion, ignoring the obvious:

We were attacked.

There is no mention of September 11, whose perpetrators were based in Afghanistan. NATO did not have the option to ignore al Qaeda's base. Afghanistan's status as a failed state made an attempt to establish democracy worth trying. In hindsight, it would have been better to follow the practice Dalrymple mentions earlier of winning support from individual tribes. In any case, the invasion of Afghanistan was honorable.

Unfortunately, Afghanistan has little to look forward to. Dalrymple quotes an Afghan saying that China will be the next invader. Before then, I think a civil war is likely, with factions supported by Iran and Pakistan. The misery in Afghanistan is likely to continue.

These criticisms only concern a small part of Dalrymple's story. While there is much to regret in Afghanistan's history, reading this book is a very worthwhile experience. I strongly recommend it.

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Mark H.

A brilliant work with lessons for today

Reviewed in the United States on November 25, 2023

Verified Purchase

Return of a King is an outstanding work that is exhaustively researched, beautifully written, and lays bare the manifold colonial conceits that led the British into an epic disaster.

The utter lack of risk awareness on the part of British decision makers is astounding. The principal culprits (Auckland, McNaughten, Elphinstone, others) are willfully ignorant of culture, terrain, weather and other factors, yet blunder ahead with blind arrogance against of the wise counsel of those with far more knowledge and experience. Catastrophe is inevitable, and it unfolds dramatically and inexorably in the second half of the book.

Dalrymple unearthed works by Afghan poets that colorfully describe numerous events, a wonderful highlight of this book. As with every Dalrymple work, I made a list of dozens of words that I didn’t recognize, to look up later. Dalrymple is a master of his craft.

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dmiguer

Graveyard of Empires

Reviewed in the United States on April 24, 2021

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"You have brought an army into the country, but how do you propose to take it out?" - An Afghan Tribal Chief

"I cannot understand why the rulers of so vast an empire should have gone across the Indus to deprive me of my poor and barren country." - Dost Mohammad Khan, Deposed and Restored Ruler of Afghanistan

William Dalrymple starts this account of the First Anglo-Afghan War in 1808 as the British approach Kabul offering gifts and alliance with Shah Shuja, the ruler of Afghanistan. The dynasty was founded by his grandfather who seized Delhi's plunder from the Persian warlord Nader Shah. Britain learned of a treaty between Napoleon and the Tsar of Russia to attack India over the Hindu Kush. France had planned an invasion through Suez but it's fleet was sunk by Nelson at the Nile in 1798. The embassy was sent by Lord Wellington who would go on to defeat Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815.

Shuja became a pawn in the East India Company's 'Great Game'. Persians were promised his lands by the French for passage through Iran. His rule in decline, tribal intrigues forced him to flee to British Punjab. After Napoleon's death in 1821 Russia became a concern, and spy networks were set up in central Asia. Fears of a joint Russian and Persian invasion gave a pretense to restore Shuja to the throne of Afghanistan. Britain secretly funded Shuja's army. Joined by Ranjit Singh, Maharajah of the Sikhs, he set out to retake Kabul in 1834 from Afghan usurper Dost Mohammad Khan.

Shuja's plan failed and now aware of British complicity Dost prevailed. Britain and Russia vied for influence in Persia. Russian plots prompted Persia to attack Herat in 1837 with troops armed and trained by the British. Spies like Alexander Burnes and Ivan Vitkevitch competed for alliance with Dost. Lord Auckland, the new Governor General of India guided by hawkish bureaucrats, insisted Dost be deposed and replaced by Shuja, sabotaging Burnes efforts. Vitkevitch offered men and money to reclaim Kashmir from Ranjit Singh. After the events in Herat and Kabul Auckland fell into a state of panic.

As British prepared to invade there were warnings from local leaders and old hands alike that the terrain was formidable and people fierce. Where diplomacy would have succeeded war was now chosen. Twenty thousand Indian soldiers and their British officers were on the march. Before starting out the siege of Herat was lifted and Vitkevitch recalled to Russia removing any purpose for the expedition. Regardless the plan commenced in 1839. Searing deserts, mountain passes, tribal ambushes, brigand gangs, dying animals, low rations and lack of water took their toll until Kandahar was reached.

In Kandahar Shuja was hailed as a hero by defectors from Dost. Flowers were thrown before his elephants feet and he rained British rupees upon his subjects, yet when a soldier raped a girl opinion turned. Shuja became despised as he had come with a foreign infidel army. Ranjit Singh was to have approached Kabul with Muslim troops but reneged on his pledge. In Ghazni the British were astounded to find fifty meter high fortifications. A desperate night attack was made and the Afghan army routed. Dost sued for peace but was forced to flee before the British army approach to Kabul.

Dost was imprisoned in Bukhara as Russians invaded Khiva. British alarm was raised but the Opium War of 1840 diverted troops from Afghanistan to China. Requisitions for defensive construction were denied and five thousand soldiers slept in a low cantonment with short walls. Afghans were offended by foreigners openly drinking and whoring. Seen as a figure head for British rule, the clergy excluded Shuja's name from the Friday prayers. Nobles chafed at patronage reforms and hyperinflation arose from the foreign occupation. When Dost escaped from jail he returned to raise the flag of holy war.

Dost's jihad failed and he surrendered to be exiled in India. Singh's death caused civil war in Punjab, threatening supply and communication lines to Afghanistan. Herat made allies with Persia against Britain as rebellions arose in the country. Occupation was draining the East India Company treasury. Feudal protection money was reduced and nobility left the court to prepare insurrections. British forces were recalled to India to lessen the payroll as Afghan muskets fired from the cliffs above. Their infantry and cavalry weren't suitable for the guerrilla warfare the natives were accustomed to use.

Jihad was sworn upon the Quran. A mob set fire to Burnes house in Kabul and cut him to pieces. Militia rode in from the mountains. Foreigners were attacked in their forts and homes, without reprisal, in a popular uprising. Sheltered in the cantonment, ringed by hostile hill stations, ammunition and provision depots were captured. Shuja refused to join the rebels and was declared an infidel. Akbar Khan, the son of Dost, became leader of the rebels. Freezing and famine followed, and a treaty was negotiated for the British retreat. Seventeen thousand soldiers and civilians left for India.

For a week they marched through the snow dying from cold and shot at by Akbar's rebels. Only several reached Jalalabad and two thousand survived as hostages or slaves. As Shuja manoeuvred with Kabul nobles to retain the throne, Akbar waged a political campaign claiming he was unwilling to fight the infidels. Forced to come out of his citadel he was slain in the street. Akbar laid siege to Jalalabad but was routed by the defenders. In 1842 the Army of Retribution burned and killed their way to Kabul. Dost Mohammad Khan was restored to rule by the empire that had deposed him.

All manner of military and political pitfalls are told in this tale; cold war threats, espionage, regime change, puppet rulers, leadership lapses and military quagmires. Americans and Russians would have done well to review the war before embarking on their own fiascos. Dalrymple is expansive, reflecting the deep research done. The events are clearly conveyed for the period and conflict. Afghans and English are covered well but Indian troops from Bombay and Bengal are given little notice. This is surprising as Dalrymple is a scholar, writer and long time resident of northern India.

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Stewart

Amazing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 5, 2024

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A brilliantly written account of a fascinating episode in history.

Sandy

A well written and engaging History book

Reviewed in India on August 29, 2021

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My interest in this book piqued around the time of "Taliban's return to power" in Afghanistan on 15 Aug 2021. The subsequent, withdrawal of troops from its soil by 31 Aug, remind us of the First Anglo-Afghan War, which had eerily similar outcome although with much more devastating consequences for the British in loss of lives.

William Dalrymple has written a very lucid account of the first Afghan war and you will not be disappointed to read it like a triller novel if you may so choose to do. I was able to read through the entire book in a matter of days without ever feeling bored. This is a very good book to keep in your repertoire of classical thrillers.

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Joe Blow

One of the greatest histories ever written

Reviewed in Canada on September 7, 2014

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Every ruler, officer, diplomat and civil servant should read and absorb the lessons from this remarkable scholarship.
During the Russian occupation, I was befriended by a Dari speaking Afghan who was no warrior, but he told me that "The Russians will be thrown out, they do not understand us, we fight for our independence until the last child throws the last stone".
And this was long before the USA got involved.
David S. Simclair
Canada

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Giovanni Maraini

Afganistan 1840

Reviewed in Italy on June 28, 2015

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avvincente e critica revisione storica della tragica invasione inglese dell'Afganistan del 1840. Come negli altri libri di Darlymple ritengo molto accurata e ben documentata la ricostruzione storica ed imparziale il commento. Una lettura interessante ed avvincente, da consigliare vivamente a tutti quelli interessati alla storia della dominazione inglese in India.

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UGP

Must read for politicians that advocate war in Afghanistan

Reviewed in Germany on October 2, 2013

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Better be kept on the shelf on display for ready reference. Just in case politicians of the future suggest to invade Afghanistan to establish whatever will be the reasoning for military intervention then.
Some of the reasons and justifications given by the British imperialists at the middle of the 19th century sound very similar to what was said in the 21st.

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