Launching a New Historical Lecture Series

1. Introduction: A New Platform for the History of Afghanistan

Afghanistan’s recent history has understandably drawn sustained international attention. War, political instability, foreign intervention and the consequences of more than four decades of conflict have dominated much of the public discussion of the country. These concerns represent only one period in a much longer history, and not the one this series is about.

Modern Afghanistan emerged within a regional order shaped by imperial expansion, diplomatic rivalry, territorial contestation and changing ideas of sovereignty. Its relations with British India, Russia, Persia and Central Asia developed inside that wider setting. Few questions illustrate the lasting consequences of this history as clearly as the Durand Line.

This article opens a series of publications accompanying recorded lectures on Afghanistan’s modern history, Anglo-Afghan relations, the nineteenth-century Great Game in Asia, the Anglo-Afghan Wars, and Afghanistan’s historical relations with the powers and regions around it. The approach is historical and documentary. Treaties, diplomatic correspondence, archival records, maps and official reports form the core of the discussion.

2. From Journalism to Historical Research

My interest in the Durand Line developed before I began researching its diplomatic and archival history. I started my professional career as a BBC journalist, reporting from Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan during the first period of Taliban rule. During those years I travelled extensively inside Afghanistan and repeatedly between Afghanistan and Pakistan, crossing the Durand Line through Torkham in the Khyber Pass, through Parachinar in the Kurram Valley, and through Spin Boldak on the Kandahar–Chaman route.

I later studied Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University and Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Queensland, where my master’s studies were supported by a Rotary Foundation Peace Fellowship. I subsequently undertook doctoral research in War Studies at King’s College London, funded by the US–UK Fulbright Commission.

3. The Historical Problem: What Was the Durand Line Meant to Be?

The Durand Line remains one of the most persistent disputes inherited from British imperial rule in the region. Its legal status, political meaning and consequences have produced sharply different interpretations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond. The debate is frequently approached from the standpoint of the present, with later understandings of borders and state sovereignty projected backwards onto the late nineteenth century.

Before asking what the Durand Line subsequently became, it is necessary to establish what the arrangement of 1893 was originally intended to accomplish. Was it conceived as provisional, as a short-term sphere of British influence, as a geopolitical frontier, as an administrative boundary, or as the permanent international border it was later taken to be? These historical questions require close attention to the Durand Mission, the surviving documents and the geopolitical conditions in which the negotiations took place.

4. Converging Empires

During the nineteenth century, British power advanced north and north-west across the Indian subcontinent. Delhi came under British control in 1803; the First Anglo-Afghan War began in 1839; Sindh was annexed in 1843; and the Punjab followed in 1849. After the Indian Uprising of 1857, authority passed from the East India Company to the British Crown. The Second Anglo-Afghan War of 1878–1880 then brought British power to important parts of Afghanistan’s southern and eastern periphery.

Russian expansion followed a parallel path from the north. Tashkent fell in 1865, Samarkand in 1868, Khiva in 1873, Kokand in 1876, Gökdepe in 1881 and Merv in 1884. The defeat of Afghan forces at Panjdeh in 1885 brought Britain and Russia dangerously close to war. By the early 1890s, Russian expeditions were operating in the Pamirs near Afghanistan’s north-eastern frontier. This was the geopolitical setting in which the Government of India sent Sir Mortimer Durand to Kabul in 1893.

5. Reconsidering the Purpose of the Durand Mission

The conventional chronology often moves directly from Durand’s arrival in Kabul to the agreement of 12 November 1893. That chronology obscures an important question: why was Durand sent to Kabul at that particular moment?

The documentary record places the mission within a broader diplomatic problem involving Afghanistan’s northern frontiers, Russian expansion in Central Asia and the unresolved situation in the Pamirs. It raises questions that have received limited attention: where is the original Persian text of the 1893 agreement; why does the surviving English version lack the Amir’s signature and royal seal; and what does the contemporary record reveal about the immediate purpose that brought Durand to Kabul?

The absence of a document is not, by itself, proof of any particular conclusion. Gaps in the archive must nevertheless be identified, weighed against the evidence that survives and read within the documentary practices of the period.

6. The Agreement and the Demarcation, 1893–1947

The negotiations of November 1893 were only one stage in the making of this frontier. Demarcation between 1894 and 1896 moved the arrangement from diplomatic correspondence onto the ground, where boundary commissions encountered difficult terrain, competing territorial claims and resistance. In 1897, a major uprising spread across the Pashtun frontier.

The question continued after Abdur Rahman Khan’s death in 1901 and the creation of the North-West Frontier Province. It developed through the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907, the First World War, Afghan independence in 1919, the Rawalpindi Agreement, the Mussoorie Conference, the Anglo-Afghan Treaty of 1921, the Trade Convention of 1923, the exchange of notes in 1930, and finally the partition of British India in 1947.

7. The Lecture Series: A Companion to This Research

The first substantive lecture examines the Granville–Gorchakov Agreement of 1873 and the chain of events leading to the Second Anglo-Afghan War. The lectures then proceed chronologically through the war and Abdur Rahman Khan’s accession, Russian expansion towards Merv and Panjdeh, the Afghan Boundary Commission, and the Pamir incidents of 1891–1893.

Later lectures address the Durand Mission, the primary documents concerning its objectives, the demarcation process, the frontier uprising of 1897, Abdur Rahman Khan’s death, the creation of the North-West Frontier Province, Afghan independence, the agreements of 1919 and 1921, and the partition of British India.

8. Why the Investigation Begins in 1873

Britain and Russia reached the Granville–Gorchakov Agreement in 1873 as part of a longer diplomatic effort to define Afghanistan’s northern limits while Russian power expanded through Central Asia. Amir Shir Ali Khan was not a party to the agreement. Its significance lies in the diplomatic problem it reveals: Afghanistan’s northern frontier was already being considered within the Anglo-Russian contest two decades before Durand travelled to Kabul.

The Durand Mission belongs to a history that preceded the agreement carrying Durand’s name. Recovering that history is necessary if the events of 1893 are to be understood within the circumstances that produced them. That is where this series begins.