Tibet: A History by Sam van Schaik

Author:Sam van Schaik
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Asia, Religion, Buddhism, China, Central Asia, Tibetan, History
ISBN: 9780300154047
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2011-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

WHOSE GAME?

By the close of the nineteenth century, British India was very different from what it had been in the days of Warren Hastings and George Bogle. The gentleman merchants of the eighteenth century had been replaced by the government bureaucrats of the nineteenth. India was no longer merely a source of income for the East India Company; it was the jewel in the crown of the British empire. Of course, British rule in India was still about profit, but this fact was hidden under the pompous ceremonies of colonial rule and the self-justifying rhetoric of British imperialism. The belief that British rule was for the good of the ‘natives’ had been drummed into the young men who were sent out to administer British India.

George Nathaniel Curzon (or, to give him his proper title at the time, His Excellency the Right Honourable the Lord Curzon of Kedleston) had received a traditional upper-class British education at the hands of a sadistic governess, Eton and Balliol College, Oxford. He was an accomplished politician, and a keen analyst of Britain's role in the East, on which he had already written several books including Persia and the Persian Question and Problems of the Far East. The latter was dedicated ‘to those who believe that the British Empire is, under Providence, the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen and who hold, with the writer, that its work in the Far East is not yet accomplished’.34

Whether or not he really believed that the British empire was ordained by divine providence, Curzon was certain that its greatest enemy was Russia, which had expanded its empire throughout the nineteenth century, annexing most of Central Asia in the process. This struggle between the British and Russian empires in the nineteenth century (which the British liked to refer to as ‘the Great Game’) had already caused two wars in Afghanistan. In another of his books, Russia in Central Asia in 1889 and the Anglo-Russian Question, Curzon had declared his intention to protect British India from Russian expansionism: ‘Whatever be Russia's designs upon India, whether they be serious and inimical or imaginary and fantastic, I hold that the first duty of English statesmen is to render any hostile intentions futile, to see that our own position is secure, and our frontier impregnable, and so to guard what is without doubt the noblest trophy of British genius, and the most splendid appendage of the Imperial Crown.’35

By the time Curzon was appointed viceroy of India in 1898, a role he had long coveted, he was pretty certain that the Russian threat was neither imaginary nor fantastic. Keeping the Russians a safe distance from India was very much on his agenda. Afghanistan had become a useful buffer state between India and the Russian empire; Curzon saw Tibet in very much the same role. The British had been edging closer to Tibet throughout the nineteenth century. Bhutan and Nepal had fought futile wars before succumbing to British treaties, though they remained independent states.

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