ABSTRACT
The behaviour of Englishmen in the Middle East in the nineteenth century resembled a formation dance more complicated than the Circassian Circle. As Lord Curzon would explain it, the British walked round and round, regularly returning to their starting point having done nothing on the way. The importance of India to the British and the effect of its conquest upon Great Britain’s relations with the Middle Eastern states have been examined recently in three scholarly, interesting, but, each in its own way, odd books by David Gillard, Malcolm Yapp, and Muriel Atkin. The expansion of Russia across Central Asia was so successfully carried out that by the 1870s Bukhara and Khiva had been turned into Russian protectorates, while Afghanistan, which the Russians expected the British to control to a similar degree, remained an independent state.
