While waiting for the contractor to show up for some work in my basement this morning, I came up with this, based on my yearly re-reading of The Great Game and a random brainfart. Naturally, the guy called at 11 to say he won't be here today after all, but ah well. My confinement is your gain, I hope!
British Central Asia
British Central Asia (also known as British Turkestan) was an area of
Central Asia controlled by the
British from the mid 19th century through 1955, when it became the short-lived
Central Asian Federation (now the independent nations of
Bokhara,
Kokand and
Tekkestan). It was established as part of the
Great Game between Britain and
Russia for control of Central Asia.
History
British merchants and explorers first entered British Central Asia from
India (via
Afghanistan and
Persia) in the 1810s. In 1825,
William Moorcraft and his companions became the
second group of Europeans to visit the holy city of Bokhara, while
Arthur Conolly reached
Khiva late in 1829. In 1843, buoyed by their success in the
Anglo-Afghan War and driven by fears of Russian expansion towards India, the British compelled the
Khan of Khiva and the
Emir of Bokhara to accept trade agreements and British consuls in the cities of Bokhara,
Merv, Khiva and
Samarkand. This was soon followed by defensive pacts and the stationing of British troops, and in 1856, the annexation of Khiva and Bokhara. The
Khanate of Kokand followed in 1862 and British Central Asia took on its final borders.
During the
First World War, forces from British Central Asia took part in both the
occupation of Persia and the
Lake Van campaign. The heavy casualties inflicted on the Central Asian regiments stirred up nationalist sentiment, and Bolshevik propaganda spread along the
Ural'sk-Tashkent Railroad after the
September Revolution inspired numerous uprisings among the Turkic peoples of British Central Asia. The
most serious revolt was that of Bokharan imam
Ali al-Gijduvani, which lasted from 1919 through 1922 and greatly weakened British attempts to intervene in the Central Asian front of the Russian Civil War.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Khiva was a major center of anti-Soviet espionage and intrigue. There were numerous border clashes and incursions, Soviet agents continued to support Turkic resistance movements up until the
German invasion of the USSR, and British forces
nearly triggered war with the Soviet Union in February 1940. In the spring of 1942, the Ural'sk-Tashkent and
Krasnovodsk-Merv railroards became a vital method of supplying the Soviet Union with
Lend Lease material.
Weakened by the
Second World War, Britain began to withdraw from its colonial empire in the late 1940s. When India gained independence in 1948, British Central Asia was cut off and vulnerable to Soviet influence. The NKVD-backed
Young Turkic Movement grew from a student activist group to a guerilla army. Beginning in August 1950, British forces found themselves under serious pressure in the rural districts of the colony.
Howard Montague's Conservative government was determined to preserve British influence in the region as Britain's contribution to the
Cold War and greatly increased both the size of the British garrisons and training and arming of local militias as the nucleus of an independent and pro-British Central Asian state's army.
From 1950 until 1954, the
Central Asian War drew in more and more British (and Commonwealth) troops, American volunteers and Soviet advisors to the
Turkic Liberation Army. After the TLA
surrounded and defeated Britain's
Royal Samarkand Regiment and the Central Asian 1st and 5th Divisions outside Vabkent in February 1955, public pressure forced Montague to begin to withdraw British troops. The withdrawal was complete by the fall of 1955, and British Central Asia was replaced by the Central Asian Federation on October 1.
See Also
- Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War
- List of Governors-General of British Central Asia
- Central Asian Campaign (World War I)
- Central Asian Campaign (Russian Civil War)
- The King's Own Central Asian Rifles
- Operation Genie
- Soviet Invasion of Kokand
- Sir Thomas White
Further Reading
- 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
- Map of British Central Asia in 1905
- Yevgeniy Golovanov, My War Against the Bolsheviks (Paris, 1927)
- Dennis Selkirk, Red Star and British Lion: the Central Asian War in a Cold War Perspective (Oxford, 1997)
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Whaddaya think, sirs?