Return of a King: The Battle for Afghanistan, 1839-42

by William Dalrymple

was particularly admired by Lord Ellenborough, who liked it as it confirmed all his existing prejudices.

he could not understand why the Governor General gives himself the trouble of drinking seven or eight glasses of wine when one glass of whisky would do the same work.”

One Indian civil servant pointed out that the manifesto used “the words ‘justice’ and ‘necessity,’ and the terms ‘frontier,’ ‘security of the possessions of the British Crown’ and ‘national defence’ in a manner for which fortunately no precedent existed in the English language.”

The Army of the Indus now consisted of around a thousand Europeans and 14,000 East India Company sepoys—excluding the 6,000 irregulars hired by Shuja—accompanied by no fewer than 38,000 Indian camp followers. The baggage for these men was to be carried to war on more than 30,000 camels,

This keeps coming up. The heroic armies of yore were it seems always accompanied by masses of servants. The Boer history I learned in S. Africa emphasized the rugged pioneer spirit of the Boers, neglecting to mention that each Boer wagon was supported by dozens of man and maid servants.

Three hundred camels were earmarked to carry the military wine cellar.

Occupying Afghanistan is always a very expensive business, and by 1841 the combined expenses of the occupation were amounting to a colossal £2 million a year, many times what had initially been expected, and far more than the profits of the East India Company’s opium and tea trade could support.

If the English had been able to conquer and keep Afghanistan, would they ever have left a land where 44 different types of grapes grow, and other fruits as well—apples, pomegranates, pears, rhubarb, mulberries, sweet watermelon and musk-melon, apricots and peaches? And ice-water, that cannot be found in all the plains of India?

a quote from a contemporary Afghan writer. Who indeed would have left ?

the war of 1839 was waged on the basis of doctored intelligence about a virtually non-existent threat: information about a single Russian envoy to Kabul was exaggerated and manipulated by a group of ambitious and ideologically driven hawks to create a scare—in

We in the west may have forgotten the details of this history that did so much to mould the Afghans’ hatred of foreign rule, but the Afghans have not.