Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia

This is a book for someone who wants to know at least as much about the way history happens as s/he does about the specific things that happened. The authors give us the historical picture by telling us the stories of a relatively small number of characters, and they tell those stories very well indeed. Most of this is told through Western eyes depsite an occasional effort to bring in quotes from Asian sources. In the process, they do an outstanding job of placing the vignettes of individuals and specific events into the broader historical, cultural and geographic context. In that respect, the book us is an extended and updated retelling of Jan Morris' three classic books on Britain and the Victorian era, but focused specifically on central and south Asia. One caveat: It helps to know something of the history of central and south Asia in the last two or three centuries, because there are large gaps in the timeline and the action jumps from place to place. And even if you know something about Asian geography you'll be frustrated by the woefully insufficent maps. But that's a minor annoynace -- just get out your atlas and follow the action. The comparison with Jan Morris is apt because the writing is so polished, the tale so is entertaining and the authors are so good at helping us understand recent history by linking it back to the sweep of events across the 19th and 20th centuries.

Almost overwhelming in detail, but a fascinating account. The thing that I found more satisfying than most accounts I have read (including Hopkirk's) is that it does not come from an "imperialist" viewpoint; at times you really wonder what business these Europeans had in meddling there at all. The account of one of the British explorers taking a secret swim in one of Tibet's sacred lakes makes you wonder how anyone can be so pigheadedly oblivious to the legitimate sensibilities of people who aren't "us".

I'm a big fan of Peter Hopkirk's works on the Great Game, so buying this book was a no-brainer! It covers a lot of the same ground as Hopkirk did, but does go into some ancillary episodes, and comes up to date more than his. I agree with one of the other reviewers that better, and better-anotated, maps would have helped readers who became confused with exactly where some of the places mentioned are located, but I didn't let it detract from the exjoyment I received from this book. It's an excellent addition to the books on the great Game, and I welcome it.

I was surprised at the readability of this work. I was expecting a large and tediously detailed work, but my goodness what a whopping good read. The reader benefits from the fact that both authors have had experience in journalism and training in research at the graduate level. This makes for a detailed and exciting blend of prose and detail. I highly recomment this work for anyone interested in 19th Century Imperialism and background on the current woes of South Asia.

The nineteenth-century experience of the Westerner in Asia, the perspective of the humblest individual, was never better depicted than by Rudyard Kipling, novelist and poet of empire. In the case of Afghanistan, his advice to "The Young British Soldier" was short and stark:"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,And the women come out to cut up what remains,Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brainsAn' go to your Gawd like a soldier."If Kipling had been better studied in Moscow, the Soviet Union might still be around today. Its ten year losing war in Afghanistan was a large contributor to its demise.In 1839, in an earlier, and similarly ill-considered intervention, and with an eye on what they thought were Czarist Russian designs in the region, the British marched an army of over 20,000 from India, over unmapped mountain passes, into Afghanistan. Three years later, a single survivor returned to Jalalabad, on a limping horse, to tell the tale. Britain learned the lesson, and never again sought direct conquest of the country. Thenceforth, her power in the region would be projected by more indirect means.With this, Karl Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac set the stage for their masterful account, of Great Power rivalry - Victorian statesmen termed it "The Great Game" -- for political dominance of inner Asia, the land along the ancient Silk Route. Britain, its erstwhile rival, Czarist Russia, and (later, and to a lesser extent) Germany and the United States, all "played it through" as the authors note, using the language of the greatest of British (and Indian and Pakistani) games, cricket. Much of the Game revolved around maps. We are reminded - usefully, in this day of mail-order hand-held GPS devices, available to every backpacker - that maps are power, state secrets, and that until very recently, parts of Tibet were still "white", unmapped. (The next space shuttle mission is reported to involve high resolution radar mapping of 80 percent of the earth. The results will, in part, be classified, to prevent their use by "hostile" powers. The global Great Game continues.)In the end, the Great Game produced "scores but no prizes". Afghanistan from the first defied British and Russians alike; the British Raj itself faded like the Mughals it had supplanted. The Soviet Union, the heir to the empire of the Czars, is gone, and central Asia, and former Soviet territories once again divided into autonomous or semi-autonomous states. Tibet, the least penetrable area of all, was absorbed, in 1950, ironically, by the player held in lowest esteem by the others, a resurgent China."Tournament of Shadows" is not a socioeconomic or geopolitical study on the Fernand Braudel model, but a succession of narratives of the adventures (and misadventures) of a colorful series of soldiers, geographers, scientists, explorers, out and out charlatans, and others, from whom the West gained its first defini