Author: Alexander BurnesPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 374
Book Description
Travels Into Bokhara
Author: Alexander BurnesPublisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781535300681
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 170
Book Description
'The Great Game' (also referred to as the Tournament of Shadows) is a term used to describe the political and diplomatic confrontation that existed during most of the 19th Century between the British Empire and the Russian Empire centered around Afghanistan and its surrounding regions. The classic Great Game period is generally regarded as running approximately from the Russo-Persian Treaty of 1813 to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, in which nations like the Emirate of Bukhara fell. Alexander Burnes was a British adventurer and employee of the East India Company during this turbulent era. He spoke Hindi and Persian and was nicknamed Bokhara Burnes for his role in establishing contact with and exploring Bukhara, which made his name. He was rumored to be a spy during the first Afghan War and was knighted by Queen Victoria for his clandestine services during the conflict. Burnes kept a lively, detailed record of his trail-blazing journey across Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, the Indian sub-continent and beyond which he later published in three volumes to great acclaim, entitled Travels into Bokhara - A Voyage up the Indus to Lahore and a Journey to Cabool, Tartary & Persia.This is Volume One.
Travels in the Himalayan Provinces of Hindustan and the Panjab
Author: William MoorcroftPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Asia, Central
Languages : en
Pages : 532
Book Description
William Moorcroft (1767-1825) was a veterinary surgeon who, after maintaining a veterinary practice for a time in London, was engaged in 1807 by the East India Company to manage its breeding of horses. He arrived in India in 1808 and took charge of the company's stud operations at Pusa, Bengal. In 1811 and 1812 he undertook journeys to the northwest in search of larger and better stud horses than he was able to find in India. In July 1812 he crossed the Himalayas to become one of the first Europeans to enter Tibet by this route. By this time, his interests had expanded from the procurement of horses to include the opening of trade relations between Central Asia and Great Britain and the projection of British influence beyond the northwest of British India to counter what he saw as a growing Russian presence in the region. In May 1819 Moorcroft received permission from the East India Company to travel to Bukhara (in present-day Uzbekistan). He reached the city in February 1825 after a more than five-year journey that took him to Ladakh, Kashmir, Rawalpindi, Peshawar, into Afghanistan via the Khyber Pass, and through Kabul and Kunduz to his ultimate destination. He began his return journey to India in July 1825, but died of fever in Balkh, Afghanistan, on August 27. Travels in the Himalayan Provinces of Hindustan and the Panjab is Moorcroft's account of his journey of 1819-25. It was posthumously edited and published by Horace Wilson, professor of Sanskrit at the University of Oxford and a member of the Royal Asiatic Society, based on Moorcroft's voluminous notebooks and correspondence. Volume one is devoted entirely to Moorcroft's journey to and residence in Ladakh. Volume two completes the account of Moorcroft's time in Ladakh and recounts his journey to Kashmir, Kabul, and Bukhara. The book contains a detailed map of Central Asia compiled and drawn by the London mapmaker John Arrowsmith, based mainly on the field notes of George Trebeck, a young Englishman who accompanied Moorcroft on the journey and who recorded geographical details measured in paces combined with compass bearings.
Author: Ármin Vámbéry
Author: Alexander BurnesCabool
Author: Alexander BurnesPublisher: Book Jungle
ISBN: 9781438509020
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 436
Book Description
Alexander Burns (1805 ¿ 1841) recounts in his personal memoir his time journeying to and living in Cabool from 1836-38. Burnes was a British traveler and explorer. He is most famous for exploring Bukhara. Burnes took part in the Great Game. The Great Game was a rivalry between the British Empire and Russia for supremacy in Central Asia. The Great Game began with the Russo-Persian Treaty of 1813 and lasted until the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. Burnes left Bombay in 1836 and traveled in and around Afghanistan until 1838. Burnes¿s narrative gave Britain its first in depth study of this area. The British curiosity about exotic lands made his book immensely popular.
Author: Alexander Burnes
Author: Joseph WolffCabool
Author: Sir Alexander BurnesPublisher:
ISBN:
Category : Afghanistan
Languages : en
Pages : 444
Book Description
Cabool: A Personal Narrative of a Journey to, and Residence in that City, in the Years 1836, 7, and 8 is an account of an 18-month voyage undertaken by Sir Alexander Burnes and three companions by order of the governor-general of India. The purpose of the journey was to survey the Indus River and the territories adjoining it, with the aim of opening up the river to commerce. Following a route that took them up the Indus from its mouth in present-day Pakistan, Burnes and his party visited Shikarpur, Peshawar, Kabul, Herat, and Jalalabad, before completing their journey in Lahore. The book contains detailed information about the ethnic, linguistic, and religious groups living in Afghanistan and parts of present-day Pakistan, and observations about the war underway at that time between the Sikh Empire and the Emirate of Afghanistan. Also included is a brief account of the formal audience with the amir of Afghanistan, Dost Mohammad Khan, who cordially received the visitors as representatives of the governor-general of India. Of particular interest is the economic and demographic data compiled by Burnes and his party, which is presented in striking detail. The book notes, for example, that the bazaar at Dera Ghazee Khan (present-day Dera Ghazi Khan City, Pakistan) had 1,597 shops, of which 115 were sellers of cloth, 25 sellers of silk, 60 jewelers, 18 paper sellers, and so forth. Equally detailed information is given about the prices of grains and other commodities, the production of dates and pomegranates, and the number of Hazaras living in the region between Kabul and Herat, which is put at 66,900. Burnes was killed in Afghanistan in 1841, and this book was published posthumously, with the first edition published in London by John Murray in 1842. Presented here is the second edition, also published in London by John Murray in 1843. A one-volume, U.S. edition, which was also published in 1843, was based on this second edition. It was published in Philadelphia by Carey and Hart.
Return of a King
Author: William DalrymplePublisher: 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.
