{"product_id":"return-of-a-king-isbn-9780307948533","title":"Return of a King","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eA Best Book of the Year: \u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eSlate\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn 1839, nearly 20,000 British troops poured through the mountain passes into Afghanistan and installed the exiled Shah Shuja on the throne as their puppet. But after little more than two years, the Afghans exploded into rebellion. The British were forced to retreat—and were then ambushed in the mountains by simply-equipped Afghan tribesmen. Just one British man made it through. But Dalrymple takes us beyond the story of this colonial humiliation and illuminates the key connections between then and now. Shah Shuja and President Hamid Karzai share the same tribal heritage; the Shah’s principal opponents were the Ghilzai tribe, who today make up the bulk of the Taliban’s foot soldiers. Dalrymple explains the byzantine complexity of Afghanistan’s age-old tribal rivalries, their stranglehold on politics, and how they ensnared both the British of the nineteenth century and NATO forces today. Rich with newly discovered primary sources, this stunning narrative is the definitive account of the first battle for Afghanistan.\u003c\/p\u003ePraise for William Dalrymple’s \u003ci\u003eReturn of a King\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e“Brilliant. . . . The fullest and most powerful description of the West’s first encounter with Afghan society.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Magnificent. . . . [Dalrymple’s] histories read like novels. . . . This latest book delights and shocks.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Wall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Masterful. . . . Dalrymple makes an important contribution by including recently discovered Afghan accounts of the war.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “At once deeply researched and beautifully paced, \u003ci\u003eReturn of a King\u003c\/i\u003e should win every prize for which it’s eligible.” —\u003ci\u003eBookforum\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“With skill and deep humanity, Dalrymple seeks contemporary lessons in Britain’s disastrous nineteenth-century invasion.” —\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e (Editor’s Choice)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A serious work of history that expands our understanding of the war of 1839-42 by drawing on sources found in Russia, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, many never before translated into English.” —\u003ci\u003eNewsday \u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Arguably the most important work in Dalrymple's impressive oeuvre. . . . If context is important, reading Dalrymple is paramount.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Guardian\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A masterful history. . . . And as the latest occupying force in Afghanistan negotiates its exit, this chronicle seems all too relevant now.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Economist\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “In \u003ci\u003eReturn of a King\u003c\/i\u003e, Dalrymple has done again what he did magnificently for two other telling episodes of British imperial history in \u003ci\u003eWhite Mughals\u003c\/i\u003e (2002) and \u003ci\u003eThe Last Mughal\u003c\/i\u003e (2006). . . . Dalrymple has a narrative gift.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Huffington Post\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A thrilling, amusing and educational three-track tour de force, relevant to today and even the immediate future.” —\u003ci\u003ePittsburgh Post-Gazette\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Definitive. . . . \u003ci\u003eReturn of a King \u003c\/i\u003eis not just a riveting account of one imperial disaster on the roof of the world; it teaches unforgettable lessons about the perils of neocolonial adventures everywhere.” —\u003ci\u003eLiterary Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “A major contribution to the historiography of south-west Asia and of the British empire. . . . \u003ci\u003eReturn of a King\u003c\/i\u003e will come to be seen as the definitive account of the first and most disastrous western attempt to invade Afghanistan.” —\u003ci\u003eNew Statesman\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Complex and remarkable. . . . As taut and richly embroidered as a great novel. . . . This book is a masterpiece of nuanced writing and research, and a thrilling account of a watershed Victorian conflict.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Telegraph\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “[Dalrymple] is a master storyteller, whose special gift lies in the use of indigenous sources, so often neglected by imperial chroniclers. . . . Almost every page of Dalrymple’s splendid narrative echoes with latter-day reverberations.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Times\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Few writers could go wrong with a story populated with so many villains, rogues, poltroons, swashbucklers, spies, assassins and heroes. But none would make a better job of it than William Dalrymple in this thrilling, magnificently evocative \u003ci\u003eReturn of a King\u003c\/i\u003e.” —\u003ci\u003eMail on Sunday\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Marvelous. . . . Brilliant, exact language. . . . There is much in Dalrymple’s superb book that has contemporary resonance.” —\u003ci\u003eSunday Herald\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Shows all the elements we have come to expect from Dalrymple: the clear, fluid prose, the ability to give complex historical events shape, story and meaning, the use of new local sources to allow the voices of the people . . . to be heard alongside the much-better documented accounts of the invaders. . . . This is clear-eyed, non-judgmental, sober history, beautifully told.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Observer\u003c\/i\u003e (London)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Sensationally good. . . . Dalrymple writes the kind of history that few historians can match.” —\u003ci\u003eThe Scotsman\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “An absorbing and beautifully written account of a doomed effort to control an apparently uncontrollably population. . . . A saga that makes for marvelous storytelling, filled with heroes, knaves, incompetent fools, and savage, bloodthirsty warriors. It has been told often before but perhaps never so well as by Dalrymple.” —\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e (starred)\u003cp\u003eWilliam Dalrymple is the author of seven previous works of history and travel, including \u003ci\u003eCity of Djinns,\u003c\/i\u003e which won the Young British Writer of the Year Prize and the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award; \u003ci\u003eFrom the Holy Mountain;\u003c\/i\u003e \u003ci\u003eWhite Mughals,\u003c\/i\u003e which won Britain’s Wolfson History Prize; and \u003ci\u003eThe Last Mughal,\u003c\/i\u003e which won the Duff Cooper Prize for History and Biography. He is a contributor to \u003ci\u003eThe New York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker. \u003c\/i\u003eHe divides his time between New Delhi and London.\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003ci\u003eExcerpted from the hardcover edition.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNo Easy Place to Rule\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe year 1809 opened auspiciously  for Shah Shuja ul-Mulk. It was now March, the very beginning of that  brief Afghan spring, and the pulse was slowly returning to the veins of  the icy landscape long clotted with drifts of waist-high snow. Now the  small, sweet-smelling Istalif irises were pushing their way through the  frozen ground, the frosted rime on the trunks of the deodars was running  to snowmelt, and the Ghilzai nomads were unlatching their fat-tailed  sheep from the winter pens, breaking down their goat-hair tents and  readying the flocks for the first of the spring migrations to the new  grass of the high pastures. It was just then, at that moment of thaw and  sap, that Shah Shuja received two pieces of good news—something of a  rarity in his troubled reign.1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe first concerned the recovery  of some lost family property. The largest diamond in the world, the  Koh-i-Nur, or Mountain of Light, had been missing for more than a  decade, but such was the turbulence of the times that no attempt had  been made to find it. Shah Zaman, Shuja’s elder brother and predecessor  on the throne of Afghanistan, was said to have hidden the gem shortly  before being captured and blinded by his enemies. A huge Indian ruby  known as the Fakhraj, the family’s other most precious gem, had also  disappeared at the same time.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo Shah Shuja summoned his blind  brother and questioned him on the whereabouts of their father’s most  famous jewels: was it really true that he knew where they were hidden?  Shah Zaman revealed that nine years earlier he had hidden the Fakhraj  under a rock in a stream near the Khyber Pass, shortly before being  taken prisoner. Later, he had slipped the Koh-i-Nur into a crack in the  wall of the fortress cell where he was first seized and bound. A court  historian later recorded, “Shah Shuja immediately dispatched a few of  his most trustworthy men to find these two gems and advised them that  they should leave no stone unturned in their efforts. They found the  Koh-i-Nur with a Shinwari sheikh who in his ignorance was using it as a  paperweight for his official papers. As for the Fakhraj, they found it  with a Talib, a student, who had uncovered it when he went to a stream  to wash his clothes. They impounded both gems and brought them back in  the king’s service.”2\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe second piece of news, about the arrival  of an embassy from a previously hostile neighbour, was potentially of  more practical use to the Shah. At the age of only twenty-four, Shuja  was now in the seventh year of his reign. By temperament a reader and a  thinker, more interested in poetry and scholarship than in warfare or  campaigning, it was his fate to have inherited, while still an  adolescent, the far-flung Durrani Empire. That empire, founded by his  grandfather Ahmad Shah Abdali, had been built out of the collapse of  three other Asian empires: the Uzbeks to the north, the Mughals to the  south and to the west the Safavids of Persia. It had originally extended  from Nishapur in modern Iran through Afghanistan, Baluchistan, the  Punjab and Sindh to Kashmir and the threshold of Mughal Delhi. But now,  only thirty years after his grandfather’s death, the Durrani Empire was  itself already well on its way to disintegration.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere was, in  fact, nothing very surprising about this. Considering its very ancient  history, Afghanistan—or Khurasan, as the Afghans have called the lands  of this region for the two last millennia—had had but a few hours of  political or administrative unity.3 Far more often it had been “the  places in between”—the fractured and disputed stretch of mountains,  floodplains and deserts separating its more orderly neighbours. At other  times its provinces formed the warring extremities of rival, clashing  empires. Only very rarely did its parts happen to come together to  attain any sort of coherent state in its own right.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEverything  had always conspired against its rise: the geography and topography and  especially the great stony skeleton of the Hindu Kush, the black rubble  of its scalloped and riven slopes standing out against the ice-etched,  snow-topped ranges which divided up the country like the bones of a  massive rocky ribcage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThen there were the different tribal,  ethnic and linguistic fissures fragmenting Afghan society: the rivalry  between the Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras and the Durrani and Ghilzai  Pashtuns; the schism between Sunni and Shia; the endemic factionalism  within clans and tribes, and especially the blood feuds within closely  related lineages. These blood feuds rolled malevolently down from  generation to generation, symbols of the impotence of state-run systems  of justice. In many places blood feuds became almost a national  pastime—the Afghan equivalent of county cricket in the English  shires—and the killings they engendered were often on a spectacular  scale. Under the guise of reconciliation, one of Shah Shuja’s chiefs  invited some sixty of his feuding cousins “to dine with him,” wrote one  observer, “having previously laid bags of gunpowder under the apartment.  During the meal, having gone out on some pretext, he blew them all up.”  A country like this could be governed only with skill, strategy and a  full treasure chest.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo when at the beginning of 1809 messengers  arrived from the Punjab bearing news of an East India Company Embassy  heading north from Delhi seeking an urgent alliance with him, Shah Shuja  had good reason to be pleased. In the past the Company had been a major  problem for the Durranis, for its well-disciplined sepoy armies had  made impossible the lucrative raids down onto the plains of Hindustan  which for centuries had been a principal source of Afghan income. Now it  seemed that the Company wished to woo the Afghans; the Shah’s  newswriters wrote to him that the Embassy had already crossed the Indus,  en route to his winter capital of Peshawar. This not only offered some  respite from the usual round of sieges, arrests and punitive  expeditions, it potentially provided Shuja with a powerful  ally—something he badly needed. There had never been a British Embassy  to Afghanistan before, and the two peoples were almost unknown to each  other, so the Embassy had the additional benefit of novelty. “We  appointed servants of the royal court known for their refinement and  good manners to go to meet them,” wrote Shah Shuja in his memoirs, “and  ordered them to take charge of hospitality, and to treat them  judiciously, with caution and politeness.”4\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eReports reaching Shah  Shuja indicated that the British were coming laden with gifts:  “elephants with golden howdahs, a palanquin with a high parasol,  gold-inlaid guns and ingenious pistols with six chambers, never seen  before; expensive clocks, binoculars, fine mirrors capable of reflecting  the world as it is; diamond studded lamps, porcelain vases and utensils  with gold embedded work from Rome and China; tree-shaped candelabra,  and other such beautiful and expensive gifts whose brilliance the  imagination falls short in describing.”5 Years later Shuja remembered  one present that particularly delighted him: “a large box producing  noises like voices, strange sounds in a range of timbres, harmonies and  melodies, most pleasing to the ear.”6 The Embassy had brought  Afghanistan its first organ.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShah Shuja’s autobiography is silent  as to whether he suspected these British bearing gifts. But by the time  he came to write it in late middle age, he was well aware that the  alliance he was about to negotiate would change the course of his own  life, and that of Afghanistan, for ever.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe real reason behind  the despatch of this first British Embassy to Afghanistan lay far from  both India and the passes of the Hindu Kush. Its origins had nothing to  do with Shah Shuja, the Durrani Empire or even the intricate princely  politics of Hindustan. Instead its causes could be traced to  north-eastern Prussia, and a raft floating in the middle of the River  Neman.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHere, eighteen months earlier, Napoleon, at the very peak  of his power, had met the Russian Emperor, Alexander II, to negotiate a  peace treaty. The meeting followed the Russian defeat at the Battle of  Friedland on 14 June 1807, when Napoleon’s artillery had left 25,000  Russians dead on the battlefield. It was a severe loss, but the Russians  had been able to withdraw to their frontier in good order. Now the two  armies faced each other across the meandering oxbows of the Neman, with  the Russian forces reinforced by two new divisions, and a further  200,000 militiamen waiting nearby on the shores of the Baltic.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  stalemate was broken when the Russians were informed that Napoleon  wished not only for peace, but for an alliance. On 7 July, on a raft  surmounted by a white classical pavilion emblazoned with a large  monogrammed N, the two emperors met in person to negotiate a treaty  later known as the Peace of Tilsit.7\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMost of the clauses in the  treaty concerned the question of war and peace—not for nothing was the  first volume of Tolstoy’s great novel named Before Tilsit. Much of the  discussion concerned the fate of French-occupied Europe, especially the  future of Prussia whose king, excluded from the meeting, paced anxiously  up and down the river bank waiting to discover if he would still have a  kingdom after the conclave concluded. But amid all the public articles  of the treaty, Napoleon included several secret clauses that were not  disclosed at the time. These laid the foundations for a joint  Franco-Russian attack on what Napoleon saw as the source of Britain’s  wealth. This, of course, was his enemy’s richest possession, India.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe  seizure of India as a means of impoverishing Britain and breaking its  growing economic power had been a long-standing obsession of Napoleon’s,  as of several previous French strategists. Almost exactly nine years  earlier, on 1 July 1798, Napoleon had landed his troops at Alexandria  and struck inland for Cairo. “Through Egypt we shall invade India,” he  wrote. “We shall re-establish the old route through Suez.” From Cairo he  sent a letter to Tipu Sultan of Mysore, answering the latter’s pleas  for help against the English: “You have already been informed of my  arrival on the borders of the Red Sea, with an invincible army, full of  the desire of releasing you from the iron yoke of England. May the  Almighty increase your power, and destroy your enemies!”8\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt the  Battle of the Nile on 1 August, however, Admiral Nelson sank almost the  entire French fleet, wrecking Napoleon’s initial plan to use Egypt as a  secure base from which to attack India. This forced him to change his  strategy; but he never veered from his aim of weakening Britain by  seizing what he believed to be the source of its economic power, much as  Latin America with its Inca and Aztec gold had once been that of Spain.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSo  Napoleon now hatched plans to attack India through Persia and  Afghanistan. A treaty with the Persian Ambassador had already been  concluded: “Should it be the intention of HM the Emperor of the French  to send an army by land to attack the English possessions in India,” it  stated, “HM the Emperor of Persia, as his good and faithful ally, will  grant him passage.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAt Tilsit, the secret clauses spelled out the  plan in full: Napoleon would emulate Alexander the Great and march  50,000 French troops of the Grande Armée across Persia to invade India,  while Russia would head south through Afghanistan. General Gardane was  despatched to Persia to liaise with the Shah and find out which ports  could provide anchorage, water and supplies for 20,000 men, and to draw  up maps of possible invasion routes. Meanwhile, General Caulaincourt,  Napoleon’s Ambassador to St. Petersburg, was instructed to take the idea  forward with the Russians. “The more fanciful it sounds,” wrote the  Emperor, “the more the attempt to do it (and what can France and Russia  not do?) would frighten the English; striking terror into English India,  spreading confusion in London; and, to be sure, forty thousand  Frenchmen to whom Persia will have granted passage by way of  Constantinople, joining forty thousand Russians who arrive by way of the  Caucasus, would be enough to terrify Asia, and make its conquest.”9\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut  the British were not caught unawares. The secret service had hidden one  of their informers, a disillusioned Russian aristocrat, beneath the  barge, his ankles dangling in the river. Braving the cold, he was able  to hear every word and sent an immediate express, containing the  outlines of the plan, to London. It took British intelligence only a  further six weeks to obtain the exact wording of the secret clauses, and  these were promptly forwarded to India. With them went instructions for  the Governor General, Lord Minto, to warn all the countries lying  between India and Persia of the dangers in which they stood, and to  negotiate alliances with them to oppose any French or Franco-Russian  expedition against India. The different embassies were also instructed  to collect strategic information and intelligence, so filling in the  blank spaces on British maps of these regions. Meanwhile, reinforcements  would be held in readiness in England for despatch to India should  there be signs of an expedition being ready to sail from the French  ports.10\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLord Minto did not regard Napoleon’s plan as fanciful. A  French invasion of India through Persia was not “beyond the scope of  that energy and perseverance which distinguish the present ruler of  France,” he wrote as he finalised plans to counter the “very active  French diplomacy in Persia, which is seeking with great diligence the  means of extending its intrigues to the Durbars of Hindustan.”11\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn  the end Minto opted for four separate embassies, each of which would be  sent with lavish presents in order to warn and win over the powers that  stood in the way of Napoleon’s armies. One was sent to Teheran in an  effort to impress upon Fatteh Ali Shah Qajar of Persia the  perfidiousness of his new French ally. Another was despatched to Lahore  to make an alliance with Ranjit Singh and the Sikhs. A third was  despatched to the Amirs of Sindh. The job of wooing Shah Shuja and his  Afghans fell to a rising young star in the Company’s service,  Mountstuart Elphinstone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eElphinstone was a Lowland Scot, who in  his youth had been a notable Francophile. He had grown up alongside  French prisoners of war in Edinburgh Castle, of which his father was  governor, and there he had learned their revolutionary songs and had  grown his curly golden hair down his back in the Jacobin style to show  his sympathy with their ideals.12 Sent off to India at the unusually  young age of fourteen to keep him out of trouble, he had learned good  Persian, Sanskrit and Hindustani, and soon turned into an ambitious  diplomat and a voracious historian and scholar.","brand":"Vintage","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302697095397,"sku":"NP9780307948533","price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780307948533.jpg?v=1767735692","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/return-of-a-king-isbn-9780307948533","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}