The Great Game was the rivalry between the British and Russian empires over Central Asia and Afghanistan, conventionally dated from about 1830 to 1907, though historians dispute its dates and whether it was ever a single coherent contest. Britain feared Russia's absorption of the Central Asian khanates would open a path toward British India, and both competed through invasions, espionage, secret surveying, and buffer-state diplomacy. The 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention formalized spheres of influence and eased the acute rivalry rather than permanently settling it. The name is a Eurocentric frame that pushes the Afghan and Central Asian peoples, whose lands were the board, to the margins of their history.
In January 1842, a British and Indian column of some sixteen thousand people marched out of Kabul under a promise of safe passage back to India. Almost none arrived. Afghan fighters cut them down in the snowbound passes of the Hindu Kush, and the story soon settled on a single exhausted survivor riding into the British lines at Jalalabad. In truth he was only the first European from the main column to reach the fort; sepoys, captives, and hostages survived too, some released months later. It was one loud disaster in a rivalry that both empires usually preferred to fight in the shadows: through mapmakers in disguise, bribed border chiefs, and treaties signed thousands of miles from the mountains they carved up.