The Dark Defile: Britain’s Catastrophic Invasion of Afghanistan, 1838-1842

324 Pages·2012·3.39 MB·English

by  Diana Preston

CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Maps
Prelude
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Plate Section
Notes and Sources
Footnotes
Bibliography
A Note on the Author
By the Same Author
Imprint
To my husband, Michael

Prelude
The consequence of crossing the Indus once to settle a government in
Afghanistan will be a perennial march into that country.
—THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON, CONQUEROR OF NAPOLEON
AND FORMER BRITISH PRIME MINISTER, 1838
In the summer heat of 1839 British forces marched, flags flying, into Kabul to
replace Afghanistan’s capable ruler, Dost Mohammed, with another, Shah Shuja,
less able and less popular with his subjects but politically more acceptable in
British eyes. Two years later, against their expectations, the British army was
still mired in Afghanistan. At that time a no-nonsense major experienced an
apparition while a senior officer was inspecting his regiment—the Forty-fourth
Foot—and recorded it in his diary: “The colours of the regiment are very ragged
and when they passed in review I was suddenly startled by what I took to be a
large funeral procession. What put such a thing into my head I know not, as I
was thinking of very different subjects.”
Britain had sent an army into Afghanistan to protect its position in India, its
most important overseas possession. Britain’s involvement in the subcontinent
was of long-standing. On the last day of 1600 Queen Elizabeth I granted a
charter to “the Governor and Company of Merchants of London Trading in the
East Indies.” This became the Honourable East India Company, whose stated
purpose was to win a share of the trade with the East—not only India but also
China and what is now known as Indonesia—hitherto dominated by the
Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch. In 1608 Captain William Hawkins of the East
India Company arrived on the west coast of India. The Portuguese merchants,
established there for nearly a century, were determined to exclude rivals and
attempted to waylay and murder Hawkins. However, in April 1609, he reached
Agra, capital of the Mogul emperor Jahangir, who then ruled most of India and
whose fabulous wealth—exemplified by rubies and emeralds the size of duck
eggs—excited cupidity and admiration in equal measure throughout Europe.
Learning of Hawkins’s arrival, Jahangir summoned him. Discovering that
he spoke Turkish—“which he himself well understood”—the emperor, who was
very curious about the wider world, enjoyed learning about the West from
Hawkins. The Englishman was soon in high favor, and Jahangir even found him
a wife. Such marks of distinction further worried “the Jesuits and Portugals,”
who, Hawkins claimed, “slept not, but by all means sought my overthrow.”
Nevertheless, Jahangir granted his request for trading rights for the company,
which he permitted to establish a trading station at the port of Surat on the west
coast. Other settlements followed—at Madras (Chennai)1 and Calcutta (Kolkata)
on the east coast and Bombay (Mumbai) on the west coast. Out in the Indian
Ocean, the English navy safeguarded the company’s merchant ships, impressing
the Moguls by its ability both to defeat the fleets of European trading rivals and
to fight off the increasingly powerful bands of pirates who preyed on ships
carrying pilgrims across the Arabian Sea on the hajj to Mecca.
The company gradually prospered through a tripartite trade, bringing Indian
products, including opium, to China and importing Chinese goods—in particular
tea, not then grown in India, and silk, along with raw Indian cotton—to Britain.
In time the British faced a new European rival in India—the French, who in
1664 had formed the French East India Company and who, from their base at
Pondicherry, south of Madras, had ambitions to challenge Britain’s growing
commercial dominance. By the early eighteenth century the disintegration of the
once all-powerful and centralized Mogul empire saw the British and French
trading companies competing for allies among the Indian rulers striving to fill
the vacuum left by the Mogul collapse. Although their purpose was avowedly
commercial, the companies gradually began to control territory either directly or
through vassal rulers. Writing in 1842 of this earlier period, Josiah Harlan, an
American adventurer in India and Afghanistan, accurately observed that the
British, ever ready to avail themselves of India’s internal divisions, “stimulated
the naïve chiefs, as the princes of India strove for independence against each
other; and carrying out the maxim ‘divide et impera’ [divide and rule] they
became the umpires of conflicting governments.”
Political developments at home also affected the trading companies. In the
middle of the eighteenth century, France and Britain fought each other in the
War of the Austrian Succession and then in the Seven Years’ War, with
extensions of those conflicts in India as well as North America, making them
perhaps the first world wars. In the early days, the East India Company had
shipped modest numbers of soldiers from Britain to protect its property.
Recognizing this was no longer sufficient, the company began recruiting soldiers
in India, known as sepoys (from the Persian word for soldier, sipahi), and
founded its own army. By the nineteenth century, with a quarter of a million
men, the company’s armies would be second in size among European-led forces
only to those of Russia. Under the inspired generalship of Robert Clive and
culminating in the Battle of Plassey in 1757, company forces crushed French
ambitions, enabling the company to bring huge tracts of India, including Bengal,
under its sway. The 1763 Treaty of Paris, which concluded the Seven Years’
War, confirmed British supremacy in India as well as in North America. The
Great Mogul had once dictated who was allowed to trade in India and on what
terms; now the British would do so. Of the other European powers, only the
French and the Portuguese retained toeholds in India.
The view in British ruling political circles, however, was that the company
had become too important, too good a potential source of revenue to be allowed
to remain independent. Company imports had risen more than threefold between
the early 1700s and the 1770s. In 1773 the Regulating Act restrained the
activities of senior company officials—the buccaneering, flamboyant nabobs
who had unscrupulously amassed almost unimaginable personal fortunes
through what an official report condemned as “the abandoned lust for universal
wealth” in which “every spark and sentiment of public spirit was lost and
extinguished.” Then, in 1784, the India Act effectively subordinated the
company to the British government, placing it under the newly created Board of
Control; of the six men on the board, at least two had to be ministers of the
British Crown.
The board’s task was to monitor and, as the name implied, if necessary
control the activities of the company’s Court of Directors, which in turn
transmitted orders to its officials in India through its Secret Committee.
However, the time required for communication—dispatches took at least ten
weeks to pass between England and India—was an obstacle to effective decision
making from London. Senior officials in India were thus left with a great deal of
autonomy, and the company’s fortunes depended heavily on their individual
abilities and characters.2 The most senior British official in India was the
governor-general, appointed under the terms of the 1784 act by the London
government. He was based in Calcutta and was also head of the Bengal
presidency. The other two presidencies—in Bombay and Madras—were
subordinate to him. Each presidency maintained its own army with “native
regiments,” as they were known, of Indian sepoys commanded by British
officers and some wholly European regiments. They were supplemented by a
much smaller number of regiments of the British army posted to India for tours
of duty—“Queen’s regiments.”
If Clive’s victories had set the company upon an imperial path, the military
triumphs of the future Duke of Wellington—on behalf of his brother Lord
Wellesley, governor-general in India from 1798 to 1805—over the great Tipu
Sultan,3 ruler of the southern kingdom of Mysore, and over the once powerful
Marathas of central India, completed that journey. Although the British never
had any intention to settle in India, as they, the Spaniards and Portuguese had in
the Americas, and although there were never more than fifty thousand Britons in
the subcontinent of over 90 million people, by the early nineteenth century the
company’s writ covered, directly or indirectly, almost two thirds of the
subcontinent with a civil and military bureaucracy to match.
In barely more than two centuries India had become pivotal to Britain’s
aggressive pursuit of commerce, which, rather than a desire for territory, was the
genesis of its growing empire. Additionally, the loss of the American colonies
had enhanced India’s status as both a totem and a projection of Britain’s power
and prestige, leading the radical politician Edmund Burke to describe the
company’s rule in India as “a delegation of the whole power and sovereignty of
this kingdom sent into the East.” Emblematic of the importance of commerce
and of India to the British is that, having captured many colonies from their
European rivals during the Napoleonic wars by dint of their command of the sea,
at the end of the conflict they returned most of them. Those they retained
protected their maritime mastery and routes to India, including the Cape Colony
—the basis of South Africa—seized from the Dutch, and Mauritius and the
Seychelles, taken from France.