Tan cloth binding with gilt title on the rebacked spine.

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A very rare first edition of the first volume of the Narrative of the Campaign of the Army of the Indus, in Sindh and Kabul, in 1838-9. It is an important source for Afghanistan at the start of the Great Game.This eyewitness account is based on “a very voluminous correspondence which the author maintained with two near relatives and is carefully preserved”. This volume is in good order (see enclosed photographs) as to its content, illustration, and original binding. If the second volume was present in similar condition, the two volumes would be priced at over £850 British pounds, lacking the second volume, this first volume is priced as above.

“His memoirs and travel narrative describe the passage of the army through the Bolan Pass to Kandahar, the attack at Ghazni, the march to Kabul and the return to India. The journey, from November 1838 to December 1839, was uneventful for Kennedy except for the medical aid needed after the battle at Ghazni. Accordingly, much of his narrative is devoted to the Afghan landscape, daily events, and portraits of key figures involved in Afghan affairs” (Riddick). Kennedy rose to physician-general in 1842, but was later disgraced and imprisoned for bank fraud. The inscription, although spelling the name as “Chinery”, may be to Marianne Chinnery, née Vigne, wife of the great portraitist George Chinnery (1774-1852), who had based himself in India before his debts forced him to flee to China, where his work formed the most important western visual record of life in China in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Great Game was a rivalry between the 19th-century British and Russian empires over influence in Central Asia, primarily in Afghanistan, Persia, and Tibet. The two colonial empires used military interventions and diplomatic negotiations to acquire and redefine territories in Central and South Asia. Russia conquered Turkestan, and Britain expanded and set the borders of British India. By the early 20th century, a line of independent states, tribes, and monarchies from the shore of the Caspian Sea to the Eastern Himalayas were made into protectorates and territories of the two empires.

Though the Great Game was marked by distrust, diplomatic intrigue, and regional wars, it never erupted into a full-scale war directly between Russian and British colonial forces. However, the two nations battled in the Crimean War from 1853 to 1856, which affected the Great Game. The Russian and British Empires also cooperated numerous times during the Great Game, including many treaties and the Afghan Boundary Commission.