The Russian Threat to India
MARVIN, Charles.
The Russians at Merv and Herat and their power of invading India … London, W.H. Allen & Co., 1883.
8vo, pp. xvi, [4], 470, [10]; with 25 plates and maps including a large folding map (‘General Annenkoff’s map of the projected Russo-Indian railway’); plate facing p. 208 loose and foxed, closed tear (without loss) to folding map; a very good copy, with a few unopened quires, in original pictorial green cloth, spine and upper cover lettered in gilt and with gilt and coloured vignettes, dark brown endpapers; small tear with loss to foot of spine, some wear to head of spine and to edges and corners, slight discolouration to lower cover; ‘Thos Firth 1885’ inscribed in ink to blank recto of frontispiece.
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The Russians at Merv and Herat and their power of invading India …
First edition of this work on the Russian threat to India by Charles Marvin (1854-1890), ‘the most widely read writer on Anglo-Russian matters of his day’ (Hopkirk).
‘A former correspondent in St Petersburg for the London Globe, he had the advantage over his rivals of being fluent in Russian, and knowing a number of the Tsar’s leading generals personally … he also turned out countless newspaper articles on Russian aims in Central Asia, and how best these could be thwarted … In general, Marvin’s line was that successive British governments, especially Liberal ones, had brought the problem upon themselves by their spineless and vacillating policies towards St Petersburg’ (idem). The illustrations here include several of Russia’s growing Trans-Caspian Railway, and a remarkable map of the ‘projected Russo-Indian railway, to join the European and Indian railway systems’.
See Peter Hopkirk, The Great Game (1990), pp. 418-419.