| The Great Game
originally described Britain’s efforts to maintain India as a
base from which to defend the Persian Gulf and southeast Asia against
rival empires. As British India’s leading geostrategist
during
the end of imperial rule, as well as the last British governor on the
Afghan frontier, Sir Olaf Caroe saw the future of the Great Game. He
predicted with remarkable acuity how the struggle for mastery in South
Asia’s borderlands would play out beyond the end of the Raj.
In the aftermath of
9/11, much as Caroe foretold, flashpoints continue to light up from
Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf to Nepal and Burma; threats range from
terrorism and insurgency to naval expansion and nuclear rivalry. India
commands the vital center, its power key to the overall stability and
defense of Asia.
This book examines
Caroe’s thinking to illuminate both the geopolitics behind
India’s independence in 1947 and the historical precedents of
contemporary South Asian strategy.
"The Great Game is
usually thought of as the nineteenth-century quest for the mastery of
Asia and the dramatic confrontation between Britain and Russia on the
frontiers of India. Peter John Brobst relates how the Great
Game
reached a climax in the twentieth century with India's
partition
in 1947—and progressed to another when the geopolitical
struggle
shifted to the 'Wells of Power' in the Middle East. This is a
superb book that will be of interest to historians of Britain and India
as well as general readers wanting to know how the Great Game continues
today in the Middle East."
—Wm. Roger Louis, University
of Texas
"[Peter John Brobst's The Future of the
Great Game
is] finely written, clearly and cogently argued, and substantively
important. . . . British Indian official Sir Olaf Caroe is the
central figure in Brobst's exploration of the ideology of British
imperial geopolitics and "official mind of the Great Game," and of
particular interest is Caroe's concern with China—dismissed
at
the time by his colleagues in London."
—Robert Hardgrave, Temple
Professor of the Humanities in Government and Asian Studies at the
University of Texas
"This work marks a
timely and original contribution to recent work on decolonization and
the making of the modern world and does so with a commendable level of
clarity."
—Douglas M. Peers, University
of Calgary
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