"The Great Game" refers to the European colonial expansion into one of the last unvisited places on earth: Central Asia. In the guises of explorers and archaeologists, Great Britain's spies were dispatched into the wide area from China to the Caucasus. Meanwhile, the sleeping bear of Tsarist Russia made its slow expansion east in its own version of Manifest Destiny. The expression itself was coined by Captain Arthur Connolly of the East India Company, just before he was beheaded in Bokhara for spying. Britain was anxious to sell its cheap manufactured goods, but above all nervous about India, its only profitmaking colony, a nervousness that was to grow as the distance between the powers shrunk from 2,000 miles to a mere 20. Eventually Britain was essentially to become suckered into the conquest of Afghanistan, getting stuck there without an exit plan to its ultimate regret.

• Bailey, Frederick, Mission to Tashkent (2002)
  [UK]
  In the afterglow of the Great Game, Col. Bailey was sent to Central Asia to overthrow the Bolsheviks there. Or was he?
• Blanch, Lesley, The Sabres of Paradise (1995)
  [UK]
  Story of the Russian conquests east, often fought in impossible circumstances.
• Burnaby, Frederick, A Ride to Khiva: Travels and Adventures in Central Asia (2002)
  [UK]
  In the winter of 1875, Burnaby, a young British officer set out across forbidding Central Asia on an unofficial mission to investigate the latest secret Russian moves in the Great Game. His goal was the mysterious caravan city of Khiva, closed to all European travelers by the Russians following their seizure of it two years earlier. His aim was to discover whether, as many British strategists feared, this remote and dangerous oasis was about to be used as a springboard for an invasion of India.
• Fredericks, Pierce G., The Sepoy and the Cossack (1973)
  [UK]
  Detailing the Afghan Wars.
• Hopkirk, Peter, Foreign Devils on the Silk Road (1980) [Notes]
• Hopkirk, Peter, The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia (1994)
  [UK] [paperback] [audio]
  Hopkirk is constitutionally unable to write a bad sentence. Not just a great author, but an authorial pioneer since with this book he really opened up a whole new field for the many other writers listed here.
• Hopkirk, Peter, On Secret Service East of Constantinople: The Great Game and the Great War (1994 UK edition)
  Like Hidden Fire: The Plot to Bring Down the British Empire (1997 US edition)
  Imperial Germany enters the Great Game, making strenuous efforts, before and during World War I, to raise the Islamic populations of India and the Middle East against the British.
• Hopkirk, Peter, Setting the East Ablaze: Lenin's Dream of an Empire in Asia (1995)
  [UK]
  When the Bolsheviks came to power in 1917, Lenin continued to press Russian claims to faraway, fabled places such as Samarkand and Hotan. The intrigues of his agents and their British counterparts, swashbucklers all, could come from a modern spy novel.
• Keay, John, The Gilgit Game: The Explorers of the Western Himalayas, 1865-95 (1990)
  [UK]
• Kleveman, Lutz, The New Great Game: Blood and Oil in Central Asia (2003)
  It seems that there is a new version of the Great Game...
• You know the movie The Man Who Would Be King. Now read the true story of the colonial American who actually did it. ★★★★★
• Meyer, Karl E. and Shareen Brysac,
  • The Dust of Empire: The Race for Mastery in the Asian Heartland (2003)
  • Tournament of Shadows (1999)
    [UK] [ paperback ]
• Miller, Charles, Khyber, British India's North West Frontier: The Story of an Imperial Migraine (1977)
  [UK]
• Nazaroff, Paul, Hunted Through Central Asia (1991)
  [UK]
  In the post World War I continuation of the Great Game, Paul Nazaroff was the ringleader of a desperate plot to overthrow the Bolsheviks in Central Asia.
• Skrine, C. P., Pamela Nightingale Macartney at Kashgar: new light on British, Chinese and Russian activities in Sinkiang, 1890-1918 (1987)
  [UK]
• Teague-Jones, Reginald, The Spy Who Disappeared: Diary of a Secret Mission to Russian Central Asia in 1918 (1991)
  [UK]
• Waller, John H., Beyond the Khyber Pass: The Road to British Disaster in the First Afghan War (1990)
  [UK]

• Fraser, George MacDonald, Flashman in the Great Game
  [UK]
• Fraser, George MacDonald, Flashman at the Charge
  [UK]
• Hensher, Philip, The Mulberry Empire (2002)
  [UK] [ Review]
  The story of the disastrous British occupation of Afghanistan. The mulberries of the title refer to branches left at the quarters of the British leaders before the revolt in an unread signal of intention by the Afghans.
• Hopkirk, Peter, Quest for Kim: In Search of Kipling's Great Game (1999)
  [UK]
  Exploring the realities behind the Kipling classic.
• Kipling, Rudyard, Kim
  [UK]

• Kim (1950)
  [1984]
• The Man Who Would Be King (1975)
  [UK] [Widescreen] [DVD] [Music]