nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47live up to Shah Shuja‘ al-Mulk’s expectations. The king agreed not to allow
any Frenchman or Russian to pass through his territory and, in return,
Britain made a vague pledge of military aid and cash in the event of a
joint Franco-Persian attack on Herat. By the time the treaty was ratified
by the Governor General, however, it counted for nothing: a few weeks
after the mission left Shah Shuja‘ was defeated and Shah Mahmud was
once more king.
The real achievement of the Elphinstone Mission was its detailed survey
of the ethnology, politics, geography and trade of the region between the
Indus and the Amu Darya. This was effectively terra incognita since only
a handful of Europeans had travelled through the region or published
accounts of their journeys since the days of Marco Polo. In an attempt to
fill this gap in intelligence, the mission’s large entourage included a military
surveyor and cartographer, a specialist on trade and commerce as well as
a library of classical histories and geographies, European translations of
Persian works and travel journals.
While the members of the mission waited for an audience with the king,
they met and entertained officials, interviewed travellers and merchants,
and made detailed enquiries about trade and invasion routes, the history
of the Durranis, as well as Pushtu tribal organization and customs. In
1815 Elphinstone published a heavily edited account of his mission’s work
under the title of An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul, but a considerable
amount of data, including Elphinstone’s personal journal, notes and official
correspondence, as well as the uncensored reports of other members of
the mission, remain unpublished. Together this corpus of material was the
first and most systematic study of the Durrani kingdom and remained so
until the surveys of the Afghan Boundary Commission (1884–6).
Elphinstone included information derived from Persian and Arabic
texts, mostly in poor English or French translations, and standard Greek
and Latin accounts of the geography and history of the region. Written
some two millennia earlier, these classical works had as much relevance
to the contemporary ethnology, history and politics of Afghanistan and
Central Asia as the histories of the Roman conquests of Gaul and Britannia
had to early nineteenth-century France and England. Yet this classical
and Hellenistic heritage exerted a profound influence on Europeans’
perceptions of Afghanistan and Central Asia, including presumptions
about the geopolitics of the region and the frontiers of India and Central
Asia. Elphinstone’s Account of the Kingdom of Caubul became a standard
reference work for colonial officials and travellers, with a revised edition
being printed in 1839 and 1842; it was a cornerstone of British colonial