Dear Editor,
As my review of Nikolai Kuleshov's Russia's Tibet File (IIAS Newsletter 13), has attracted responses both from the author (IIASN 17) and from Rene Barendse (IIASN 18), might I as briefly as possible make the following observations.
Professor Kuleshov rightly emphasises Tibetan agency. Tibet under the rule of the 13th Dalai Lama (1895-1933) attempted to develop foreign relations with a number of governments, including Russia. Their understanding of foreign policy was not necessarily identical to the European understanding but Tibet, as the British discovered, was a pawn in no-one's game. My review indicates that I also accept my Russian colleague's primary finding; that Moscow's Foreign Office was not seriously interested in Russian control of Tibet. That does not mean, however, that it was not to their advantage to include Tibet in negotiations as part of a wider agreement with the British over Central Asia. Nor does it mean that other Russian organs of government, and individuals, 'explorers and scientists', and the Tsar himself, had no such interest in Tibet.
My own work on the British imperial presence in Tibet demonstrates that (many) British officials attempted to bring Tibet into closer association with the Government of India and that an informal network of scientists, explorers, travellers, and missionaries all provided information which assisted that aim, including information on Russian activities in the region. Thus, while finding his work stimulating, I remain unconvinced by Professor Kuleshov's statement that 'explorers' and 'scientists' such as Przevalsky and Grombchevsky were not 'Great Game' players. Nineteenth and early twentieth century scientific exploration often contained an intelligence component, formal or informal, particularly when the scientists were military officers - as most of the Russian 'explorers' were. Perhaps future research in Russian military archives will throw more light on this question.
Dr Barendse takes exception to our use of the term 'Great Game', preferring to follow the usage of some historians of wider imperial policy, (not least Malcolm Yapp). They choose to apply that term to the wider Anglo-Russian strategic struggle, which resulted in the policy by which buffer-states were used to separate the Russian and British empires. But I reject that usage, which, if I may follow Dr Barendse's use of metaphor, is like defining the 'Space Race' as the 'Cold War'.
The term 'Great Game', which is incidentally, defined by the Oxford Dictionary as 'spying' (or golf!), was apparently first used by the British Political Officer, Captain Arthur Conolly. In 1837, he wrote two letters to his fellow 'Political', Lt. Henry Rawlinson, who was then in Kandahar facing a Persian army with Russian 'advisers'. In these letters Conolly wrote that, 'You've a great game, a noble one, before you' and 'If only the British Government would play the grand game'. In the latter part of the nineteenth century this typically Victorian sporting metaphor came into popular usage in imperial and military circles to describe the clandestine Anglo-Russian rivalry in Central Asia, a competition between frontiersmen of both empires for control of the regions between their empires. It was used in this context in Rudyard Kipling's famous novel, Kim, first published in 1901, and it is from this novel that the term passed into common usage.
Tibet was very much the later, and eastern front, of the 'Great Game', which was fought most fiercely in the Pamirs and the Hindu Kush, and the use of the phrase for the period after the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention should generally be qualified. But within Tibetan studies the term has never, to the best of my knowledge, meant anything but a frontiersmen's struggle. This can be confirmed by consulting the works of both populists such as Peter Fleming and Peter Hopkirk and specialists such as Alastair Lamb, Patrick French, John Snelling, Lars-Erik Nyman, and many others. Francis Younghusband in particular is universally described as a Great Game player, and his meeting in the Pamirs with Captain Grombchevsky is one of the most famous episodes of the 'Game'.
The policy of 'buffer states' was referred to in British India as the 'system of protectorates' (e.g. by Indian Foreign Secretary, Sir Alfred Lyall), a policy which, as Dr Barendse notes, drew heavily on the precedent of the Roman empire. It was also known, and best described, as the 'Forward policy', in that buffer-states implied an extension of imperial responsibilities beyond existing boundaries. Thus when historians use the term 'Great Game' in the wider context of political policy, they attempt to transform accepted contemporary, academic, and popular meaning for no great purpose. Whether the 'Great Game' was 'myth', as Malcolm Yapp describes it; (Yapp, M., Strategies of British India, 1980, p.580) or reality may be debated; its meaning, however, is clearly established and alternative meanings have found little favour.
Dr A.C. McKay
Dr Alex McKay is the author of Tibet and the British Raj: The frontier cadre 1904-1947, (Curzon Press, 1997) and of numerous articles concerning Indo-Tibetan frontier history.
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