AFGHANISTAN - SECOND ANGLO-AFGHAN WAR.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Substantial dossier of government papers from the archive of Reginald Baliol Brett, private secretary to the secretary of state for India, including the manuscript draft of General Gordon's suppressed letter on the withdrawal from Kandahar. An exceptional archive of confidential India Office and Government of India papers, this collection offers an unusually detailed view of the diplomatic and bureaucratic manoeuvring that accompanied the final stages of the Second Anglo-Afghan War and the negotiation of Britain's withdrawal. Bringing together Foreign Department memoranda from Simla, Cabinet papers printed at the Foreign Office, and India Office material that seldom survives outside official files, it reconstructs policy formation across two administrations and two continents.Running through the papers is the early career of Reginald Baliol Brett (later 2nd Viscount Esher), who became private secretary to Lord Hartington in 1878. As Hartington and the new Liberal government sought to reverse Lord Lytton's "forward" policy and disengage from Afghanistan, the India Office and the Government of India frequently disagreed over strategy, intelligence, and the limits of influence. The archive captures these tensions vividly, and shows Brett learning to operate as an assertive intermediary whose probing questionnaires, marginalia, and attempts to synthesize rival views already marked him out as a rising - and at times unsettling - force within the department.The documentary foundati

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