Welcome back again. I apologize for taking so long with this one. It's been a long couple

of weeks and very difficult to get down in front of a camera. In any case, this week

I'm going to be talking primarily about European and Russian colonial ambitions and policies

towards Tibet and Western China in general in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Circumstantially,

that involves discussing Britain and Russia, who were the two main powers competing over

trade routes, mineral resources, and diplomatic access to Central and Inner Asia throughout

the majority of the Qing dynasty. This phenomenon, the competition between England and Russia,

and to a lesser extent other European colonial powers stretching from Persia through Afghanistan

into Western China, is often referred to as the Great Game. Let's talk a little bit about

what that term refers to, explicitly where it comes from, and the broader economic and

geopolitical forces that shaped Russian and British involvement across Inner Asia in the

19th and early 20th centuries. Throughout much of this period, Great Britain and the Russian

Empire were poised on the brink of war. Russia had for centuries been looking for a warm water port

in the West, and that ambition had been crushed by the Crimean War. So in addition to trade revenue

and the extraction of mineral resources, they were interested in the possibility of cultivating a

major port in Asia. At the same time, by the beginning of the 19th century, Britain had

consolidated its power in India and was beginning to look to China as a potential region of colonial

exploitation. And as Russia began to move east, there was a great fear in Britain that they might

attempt to invade India or work to undermine British ambitions towards China, either through

warfare or through a military alliance with the Qing. And that fear was also heightened by the

completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway, which was built between 1891 and 1903, which became

essential to the extension of Russian imperial suzerainty over Siberia and parts of Mongolia.

And these tensions brought the two empires into diplomatic and economic conflict on numerous

occasions. And that is what is called the Great Game. The term itself was coined by a British

cavalry officer named Arthur Connolly in his 1835 narrative of an overland journey to the north of

India, where he used the chess metaphor to describe the colonial competition between the

two empires. But it was really popularized at the beginning of the 20th century by Rudyard Kipling,

the British novelist and his novel Kim. So it's a term that we use now after the fact to describe

Anglo-Russian rivalries, but wasn't really used widely during the period in question. Now, the

thing is, by the beginning of the 20th century, the possibility of armed conflict between Russia

and Britain was increasingly unlikely. The Second Boer War at the end of the 19th century had dealt

a very significant blow to Britain's sense of military and economic superiority. There was a

sense that the British Empire was stretched too thin at the beginning of the 20th century,

and they began to adopt a policy basically of defending India and reaching out to neighboring

states to secure favorable diplomatic relations and trade in order to secure the borders of their

wealthiest colony. And keep in mind that as of the 1880s, India was absorbing around 270 million

pounds sterling in British overseas investment and was purchasing around 13% of Britain's exports,

which made India not only the Empire's wealthiest colony, but also the most important foreign

market for British manufacturers. So developing military and economic buffer states between India

and both the Qing and the Russian empires was seen as a very high priority and potentially a very

good investment. This is where Tibet and basically all of Western China comes into the equation.

At the same time, after the Russo-Japanese War and the Revolution of 1905, Russia's military power,

its ability to mobilize a military presence on its Eastern frontier and project its power into

Central and East Asia was badly depleted. This situation mirrored to some degree in both empires,

led to negotiations between the two powers and something we call today the Convention of

Mutual Cordiality or the Anglo-Russian Convention signed between the Russians and the British in

1907. This more or less carved up all of Asia and agreed upon which regions the Russians or British

respectively could project their influence into. In short, Russia claimed Northern Persia and the

British claimed Southern Persia and also most of Afghanistan and Tibet in exchange for offering

loans and a favorable diplomatic access to the Russians. But there's a question as to why Tibet