HIST 137
Victorian Britain and the Anglo-Afghan Wars Fall 2015
Division II Writing Skills
This is not the current course catalog

Long before the US and its allies fought the recent war in Afghanistan (2001-14), Britain fought three Afghan Wars. Now almost forgotten, dusty reminders of Britain’s imperial past, they were crucial moments in the “Great Game”, the rivalry between the British and Russian empires for supremacy in Central Asia and control of land routes to British India. Largely disastrous for the British, the First Afghan War (1839-1842) resulted in the massacre of some 16,000 individuals, the second (1878-81) generated considerable domestic discord, and the third (1919) basically ended British influence in Afghan affairs. Nevertheless, they exercised the Victorian imagination and led to numerous cultural productions that will be dissected in our class: illustrated tales of British military exploits proliferated in the new mass circulation press; the children’s writer G.A. Henty turned the conflicts into the stuff of imperial adventure; Rudyard Kipling made the Great Game the backdrop for his novel, Kim; military officers, government officials, “lady travellers”, and amateur scholars all mapped the landscape and people of Afghanistan, an endless source of fascination for the Victorians. By interpreting these various forms of documentary evidence, we will not only reconstruct the history of Britain’s Afghan wars but dissect the stories Britons told themselves about their Empire and about Afghanistan and its people.