ABSTRACT
Great Britain in the early years of the nineteenth century suffered from a complaint Imperial Germany suffered from less seriously a century later: her political and economic interests were difficult to bring into line. Germany was more fortunate, however, than Great Britain. The possession of India symbolized the pretensions of Great Britain to be a world power while failing to turn into an economic asset, becoming instead an increasingly burdensome strategic liability. The strategies devised by the British to forestall and later to counter the expansion of European empires into the Middle East are known as the Great Game in Asia, which began in 1798 in response to the French invasion of Egypt. The plans for empires drawn up for the board of control and the foreign office by all the men who played the Great Game in Asia were not necessarily meant to be carried out.
