ABSTRACT
During the ten years prior to the outbreak of its war with Japan, the Russian government was, indeed, able to carry out its policies under much more favourable conditions than was that of Great Britain. Military expansion continued in central Asia as Russian commanders pursued their search for the most advantageous frontiers in little-known and turbulent regions, but Alexander III and his ministers kept the predictable clashes with British interests under control. Whether the Great Game would remain an acceptably protracted and relatively peaceful process or whether it would acquire emergency status requiring precipitate action depended on how Russian and British leaders interpreted this dramatic sequence of events. There was little about the convention of August 1907 to suggest that it might mark the end of the Great Game. The Great Game, cardinal to British foreign policy since the 1830s and to that of Russia since the 1850s, was manifestly at an end.
