The ‘Great Game’: The History of an Evocative Phrase

Frontier rule and conflict

“…The north-west frontier of British India has historically acted as a strategic frontier nestled between Afghanistan, Central Asia, China, and present-day Pakistan (formerly British India). The frontier areas effectively represented a buffer zone for the British Empire against possible external threats from Tsarist Russia in the context of the geo-political competition between great powers, often referred to as the 'Great Game' (Becker 2012;Davis 1926;Hopkirk 2001). 20 However, the possibility of a Russian over-stretch became less likely over time, thereby reducing the seriousness of the Russian threat.…”

Frontier governmentality

“…For administrative purposes the British Empire bifurcated the erstwhile North-West Frontier Province (now known as KPK) into settled plains and non-settled areas with tribal populations. 8 The latter represented a buffer zone for the British imperial administration against possible external threats from Tsarist Russia in the context of the geo-political competition between great powers, often referred to as the 'Great Game' (Becker 2012;Davis 1926;Hopkirk 2001). 9 From the colonizer's 7 Our paper complements Callen et al (2020) who use the FCR as a case study to explain why states leave their territories ungoverned.…”

The geocultural heritage of the Silk Roads

“…Researchers and explorers from Britain, France, Germany, Japan, Russia and Sweden travelled to the region as part of the Great Game in search of manuscripts, artefacts and artworks (see Figure 1). Unlike other parts of Asia and Africa researched by foreign scholars in the late nineteenth century, the work of these men was not directly incorporated into colonial efforts to construct nations and their peoples by tying local populations back into previous kingdoms or civilisations (see for example Becker 2012;Meyer and Brysac 1999). In India, Cambodia, Greece and Egypt artefacts and structures of antiquity were used to map ancient polities in ways that corresponded with the cartography of both modern nations as 'imagined communities', and with orientalist readings of ancient civilisations, East and West (see for example Edwards 2007;Guha-Thakurta 2004).…”