“The Afghan Question from 1841 to 1878 consists of five chapters extracted and reprinted from a larger work, The Eastern Question, also published in 1879. The author, George Douglas Campbell, eighth duke of Argyll (1823–1900), was secretary of state for India in the first government of Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone (1868–74). Argyll believed that the security of India did not require territorial expansion into Persia or the northwest, and he was critical of British politicians and officials who in his view worried excessively about Russian advances in Central Asia. He became a fierce critic of British policy toward India and Afghanistan under the Conservative government of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, and of British policies leading up to and in the conduct of the Second Anglo-Afghan War (1878–80). In the preface to the book Argyll writes: “We have yet to see the final results of the Afghan war. We have indeed hunted our victim, Shere Ali, to the death. We have overrun, with the most perfect ease, a great portion of his country. But our ‘scientific frontier’ is not yet defined. The wild tribes of Afghanistan have not yet been reconciled to our dominion. The cost and waste of our operations are enormous.” Argyll was one of the two largest landowners in Scotland, possessing estates comprising more than 175,000 acres (70,000 hectares), and the head of clan Campbell. His interests included politics, science (especially ornithology and geology), and the improvement of education and agriculture in Scotland”—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.

includes bibliographical references.

English