In years to come, this process of imperial competition would turn into something far more serious than any game and lead to deaths, wars, invasions and colonisation on a massive scale, profoundly changing the lives of hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of Afghanistan and Central Asia. More immediately, it radically changed the importance of Shah Shuja to the British: no longer was he an ex-monarch with over-grand ideas being maintained out of a sense of duty to a fallen ally; suddenly he was a major strategic asset against Russian encroachment and a key to British hopes of having an ally as
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