Lieutenant Henry Pottinger and 150 Years of Baloch History

Abstract

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the UK dispatched a number of envoys, agents and spies into the vast area between northern India and the Ottoman and Russian Empires. The information gathered by these adventurers provided the basis for British policy for the next hundred years, right down to the Great War of the twentieth century. Their publications have served as major sources of historical data, especially for Afghanistan, Iran and the area that later became Pakistan. But how their larger social context conditioned their work has not been examined sufficiently. In this chapter, I will focus on the adventures of Lieutenant Henry Pottinger, whose brief was one of the most challenging. However, he was well aware of being one of a number of Englishmen of different social classes who were doing similar things. What we learn about any one of them will shed additional light on the activities and significance of the work of the others, and in turn help us to understand the relationship between these countries and the West as it has evolved from the nineteenth century to the present day.