Travels into Bokhara: Being the Account of a Journey from India to Cabool, Tartary and Persia.; Also, Narrative of a Voyage on the Indus, from the Sea to Lahore. Performed under the Orders of the Supreme Government of India in 1831, 1832, 1833.
Philadelphia: E. L. Carey & A. Hart, 1835. Presumed First U. S. Edition, First printing thus. Hardcover. Volume I ONLY. [4], 239, [1] pages. Footnotes. Ex-Meadville Theological School library, with the usual library markings. Cover shows wear and soiling. Pages foxed. Meadville Theological School was founded in 1844 in Meadville, Pennsylvania. Most of the original funding came from Harm Jan Huidekoper, a recent convert to Christian Unitarianism and a wealthy businessman, and from the Independent Congregational Church. Meadville Theological School moved to Chicago and became affiliated with the University of Chicago in 1926. Captain Sir Alexander Burnes Kt FRS (16 May 1805 – 2 November 1841) was a Scottish explorer and diplomat associated with the Great Game. He was nicknamed Bokhara Burnes for his role in establishing contact with and exploring Bukhara, which made his name. His memoir, Travels into Bokhara, was a bestseller when it was first published in 1835. Sensing the two empires would collide in Afghanistan, the British Government needed intelligence and dispatched Burnes to get it. In 1831, traveling in disguise, Burnes surveyed the route through Kabul to Bukhara and produced the first detailed accounts of Afghan politics. In 1831 his and Henry Pottinger's surveys of the Indus river would prepare the way for a future assault on the Sindh to clear a path towards Central Asia. In the same year he arrived in Lahore with a present of horses from King William IV to Maharaja Ranjit Singh. His immense skills in diplomacy and knowledge of local customs and rites of flattery enabled him to travel through areas of the Indus previously closed to Europeans. In the following years, in company with Mohan Lal, his travels continued through Afghanistan across the Hindu Kush to Bukhara (in what is modern Uzbekistan) and Persia. The narrative which he published on his visit to England in 1834 added immensely to contemporary knowledge of these countries. He was knighted by Queen Victoria on 6 August 1838, while serving in the 21st India Native Infantry on a mission in Afghanistan, and remained there until his assassination in 1841, during an insurrection in which his younger brother, Charles, was also killed. The Great Game’ (also referred to as the Tournament of Shadows) is a term used to describe the political and diplomatic confrontation that existed during most of the 19th Century between the British Empire and the Russian Empire centered around Afghanistan and its surrounding regions. The classic Great Game period is generally regarded as running approximately from the Russo-Persian Treaty of 1813 to the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, in which nations like the Emirate of Bukhara fell. Alexander Burnes was a British adventurer and employee of the East India Company during this turbulent era. He spoke Hindi and Persian and was nicknamed Bokhara Burnes for his role in establishing contact with and exploring Bukhara, which made his name. He was rumored to be a spy during the first Afghan War and was knighted by Queen Victoria for his clandestine services during the conflict. Burnes kept a lively, detailed record of his trail-blazing journey across Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, the Indian sub-continent and beyond which he published to great acclaim, entitled Travels into Bokhara - A Voyage up the Indus to Lahore and a Journey to Cabool, Tartary & Persia. Alexander Burnes’s Travels into Bokhara (1834) is a foundational text of the British fascination with Central Asia, both in a geopolitical sense—the “Great Game” of the rivalry between Britain and Russia in Asia—and in a literary one. It is the most prominent of many travelogues of Afghanistan and Central Asia that relate experiences from the late 1820s to late 1830s, preceding the First Anglo-Afghan War (1839-42). Burnes’s Travels were immediately translated into French. For a time “Bokhara Burnes” was a literary celebrity. Yet the sensation of his Travels led him to another, less successful appointment in Kabul and finally to his third and final appointment there, as British envoy during the war. Not only was Burnes Britain’s leading Afghan expert; he also became the Afghans’ leading target. Condition: Fair.
Keywords: Afghanistan, Cabool, Kabul, Bokhara, Indus, Lahore, East India Company, Sindh, Central Asia, Ranjit Singh, Explorer, Military Intelligence
[Book #81902]
Price: $150.00