“Sir Pierre Louis Napoleon Cavagnari (1841–79) was a French-born army and political officer who joined the army of the East India Company in 1858 and held a variety of military and political posts in India up until the time of his death. During the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80), he negotiated the Treaty of Gandamak (signed May 26, 1879), which ended the first phase of the war. Under the terms of the agreement, the government of the new ruler of Afghanistan, Ya‘qub Khan, was obliged to receive a permanent British envoy at Kabul and Britain was given the right to exercise control over Afghan foreign policy. Lord Lytton, viceroy of India, appointed Cavagnari as the British envoy resident at Kabul. Cavagnari entered the city on July 24, 1879. His reception was at first friendly, but on September 3 several Afghan regiments mutinied and attacked the citadel where Cavagnari and other British officials were living. Cavagnari and his guards were killed. These events triggered a general uprising and a second phase of the war. The Life and Career of Major Sir Louis Cavagnari is a compilation of original documents relating to Cavagnari’s life and the diplomatic and military circumstances of the Second Anglo-Afghan War, published in Calcutta (present-day Kolkata) in 1881. The documents include dispatches about Afghanistan from the government of India to the government in London, correspondence between the British and Sher Ali Khan, ruler of Afghanistan in 1863‒66 and 1868‒79, excerpts from newspapers and official reports, and the complete text of the Treaty of Gandamack. The compiler was Kally Prosono Dey (also seen as Kaliprasanna De), who appears to have been a civil servant or clerk in the government of India”—copied from website.

The Library of Congress donated copies of the digitized material (along with extensive bibliographic records) containing more than 163,000 pages of documents to ACKU, the collections that include thousands of historical, cultural, and scholarly materials dating from the early 1300s to the 1990s includes books, manuscripts, maps, photographs, newspapers and periodicals related to Afghanistan in Pushto, Dari, as well as in English, French, German, Russian and other European languages ACKU has a PDF copy of the item.

English