Balochi nationalism has been an organised force for ninety years and in some versions threatens the integrity of Iran, Afghanistan as well as Pakistan. The Pakistani province of Balochistan, about the same size as Germany, comprises only five percent of the country's population but 43% of its land area, most of its mineral resources and 75% of its sea board where, in recent decades, Chinese investment has transformed the port of Gwadur. Thus, any work which throws fresh light on the history of Balochistan is to be welcomed. This detailed military history is primarily concerned with British India's western borderland in the nineteenth century, and especially with Kalat, the largest of the khanates whose memory still animates some contemporary nationalists. Baloch and Brahui notables people Heathcote's pages but they are seen through the records of the East India Company and the Government of India and the private papers of the leading British army officers and politicians. Appended to the text are the four treaties which chronicle the stages by which Kalat lost its external sovereignty: the Treaties of Kalat, 1839 and 1841; of Mastung, 1854; and of Jacobabad, 1876. There are interesting photographs, but a book that pays such meticulous attention to local detail deserves better than the two single-page maps.

The Great Game is here understood in longer perspective than the central Asian competition that grew with Russian expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century. Heathcote begins in the 1790s. He might have begun in the previous decade with the British fear that a French and Dutch combination in the India Ocean would replicate the challenge in the Atlantic which had ended Britain's Atlantic empire. However, he is concerned with the implications for the land empires of Russia and Persia of French ambitions in the east after 1798. These implications reached to the border of India since Nadir Shah had drawn Balochistan from Mughal India into the ambit of Persia. To protect the northern part of this border, the Company was trying to reconstitute the Durrani empire of Afghanistan. It was hoped that commerce would develop the region in ways profitable to the Company and efforts were made to open a trade route up the Indus river past the khanate of Kalat which from its rise in the seventeenth century had become the leading polity in Balochistan.

The Company maintained a substantial cadre of officials beyond the frontier, more in the 1840s, as Lord Ellenborough discovered, than all British diplomats in Europe. Their personalities luxuriated in the freedom and responsibility granted to them in this Wild West of British India. There are memorable minor figures: the herculean Lieutenant Walpole Clarke alone accorded burial by his Baloch victors, his grave marked by his tartan trousers; or Lieutenant Loveday who set his bulldogs on a local opponent and died in the revenge killing. The major players, however, decided the terms of the British settlement and, no doubt, their experience in Balochistan left its mark on influential later careers elsewhere. John Jacob – called by Napier “the Seydlitz of the Indian Army”- pacified Upper Sind by burning the gates of his own forts, dismantling their defences and relying on his light cavalry to establish a Pax Britannica. Napier himself went on to play a significant role in the Abyssinian War, Outram to Avadh on the eve of the great rebellion, Phayre to Baroda and the important Gaekwar poisoning case, Bartle Frere to responsibility for the Zulu War. Eschewing Orientalist stereotypes, Heathcote thinks that the mind-set that they brought to their work derived from the pacification of the Scottish clans and from their knowledge of Shakespeare's history plays about the English Wars of the Roses. Such discussion is rare: the author prefers to stick to the military details. It would have been interesting to see these through the prism of contemporary historiography and hagiography, since books written by or about some of these officials made them well-known figures in Victorian Britain.

It was the struggles among these men, more than their struggles with the local population, which played out many policy issues of British India. Should the middle-eastern agencies and the western princely states be under the Bombay Presidency or under Calcutta? Should the Panjab policy of encouraging frontier tribes to defend themselves be preferred to the disarming of the civil population on the Sind frontier? In the outcome we see the difference between the situations on the Khyber and Bolan passes. We see, too, how the assassination of Lord Mayo frustrated a project for a new province for the entire frontier which thirty years later in 1901 resurfaced as Curzon's North-West Frontier Province for the Panjab border alone. The latter part of the book chronicles the local conflict between colonels Merewether and Sandeman to the victory of the latter with the arrival in 1876 of Lord Lytton as viceroy. The argument, which also had a wider relevance for princely state policy, was between a closed border and a forward policy. The latter triumphed and after Quetta had been taken it became the second biggest British military base in South Asia.

This detailed narrative is not greatly concerned with ideas and will appear to many readers as old fashioned history. It is layered with reference to the policy makers in Calcutta and Europe. But the focus is on events on the frontier and not with their evaluation in the wider imperial scheme of things. The work, however, has two very obvious merits. Those interested in the history of the British Indian Army will find the author – especially if they have their own map to hand - a meticulous and reliable guide, as have readers of his The Military in British India: the Development of British Land Forces in South Asia, 1600–1947 (1995). The other attraction is that it offers a Baloch perspective on familiar and more studied problems, for example, the Afghan and Panjab Wars and 1857.