Afghanistan - A. Hamilton

LORD CURZON OF KEDLESTON

AFGHANISTAN
BY

ANGUS HAMILTON

FELLOW OF THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
AUTHOR OF “KOREA,” “THE SIEGE OF
MAFEKING,” ETC.
WITH A MAP AND NUMEROUS
ILLUSTRATIONS

LONDON
WILLIAM HEINEMANN
1906

PREFACE

Since 1871, when Sir Charles MacGregor drew up a very exhaustive précis of information on Afghanistan for the use of the Government of India, no book dealing with our buffer state in a general manner has been issued. The thirty-five years which have intervened have not been without important contributions to our knowledge of Afghanistan, but those works which have appeared cannot altogether be described as presenting a single comprehensive study of contemporary conditions in the country. In 1886 Lieutenant A. C. Yate, and in 1888 Major C. E. Yate, C.S.I., C.M.G., described in two very interesting volumes the proceedings of the Afghan Boundary Commission. Ten years elapsed before anything of importance appeared, when, by a rare coincidence, two books dealing with Afghanistan saw the light in 1895: Mr. Stephen Wheeler’s admirable account of The Amir Abdur Rahman, and that most entertaining and graphic volume, My Residence at the Court of the Amir, by the late Amir’s private physician, Dr. A. J. Gray. In 1900 Sultan Mahomed Khan, Mir Munshi to Abdur Rahman, presented to the public his remarkable production, The Life of Abdur Rahman, as well as a treatise on The Constitution and Laws of Afghanistan. In the following year, 1901, Colonel Sir Thomas Holdich embodied in The Indian Borderland many graceful descriptions of scenery and various centres in Afghanistan while, in 1905, in a series of articles in the Wide World Magazine, Mrs. Kate Daly, physician to Habib Ullah’s harem and the Government of Afghanistan, illustrated with many delightful touches a sojourn of Eight Years Among the Afghans. These few works practically exhaust contemporary literature on Afghanistan, and it is in an endeavour to provide a more complete record of the subject than has hitherto existed that the author of Korea has compiled this little book. Mistakes are those of his own making; reflections and criticisms arise from his own opinions; but, in hoping that his critics may find something of value in the results of two years’ toil, the author wishes to say that if good qualities exist in it, they are attributable to the encouragement and gracious assistance which he has received and here wishes to acknowledge.