As a framework for understanding Central Asia in the nineteenth century, the Great Game occupies a strangely liminal position: criticized by most specialists, it doubles as one of the few things nonspecialists tend to know about the region. The skeptics, it must be said, have a compelling case. A focus on Anglo-Russian relations excludes other vast, diverse polities (the Qing and Ottoman Empires) with an interest in the region, while omitting less hawkish voices on either side of the imperial rivalry and according little agency to local actors. What place, then, in the historical literature for a specialist study of the Great Game?

For Evgeny Sergeev, author of The Great Game, 1856–1907 (a translation-cum-adaptation of his Bol'shaia igra, 1856–1907, published in Russia in 2012), the answer lies in the hard work of empirical research. Previous treatments of the subject, he notes, have been riddled with Cold War–era stereotyping even as their authors have not been able to access all of the relevant archives (2–3). Hence the need for a comprehensive, archivally based synthesis to correct earlier scholars' misperceptions.

This Sergeev sets out to do with admirable tenacity. His apparatus makes reference to fourteen archival collections (ten in Russia, two in Britain, and one each in Uzbekistan and India), as well as to all the relevant published document collections. What emerges is a narrative in which, first, in the late 1850s, a confluence of geopolitical and economic factors forced Russia and Britain into an international rivalry. Subsequently, British “forwardists” and Russian military men drove a mostly cold conflict further forward, as both empires sought a natural, defensible frontier in Central Asia. By the mid-1880s, in the wake of serious disagreements over the Trans-Caspian frontier and the northern approaches to Afghanistan, a “fragile equilibrium” (209) prevailed, forcing the conflict to other areas—Persia, Tibet, and East Asia. But in these areas, too, the threat of a serious and possibly unwinnable conflict began to seem particularly threatening (especially, Sergeev argues, to tsarist officials in the wake of Russia's humbling in the Russo-Japanese War). This led cooler heads to seek a more conciliatory path, resulting in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. Thus, for Sergeev, the Great Game was about not only rivalry but relationships; the twists and turns of the Game also constituted “a crucial period in the development of the Russo-British Relationship in Asia that precipitated their consequent rapprochement and military alliance in World War I” (16). Although, with this final point, Sergeev dismisses the argument of Jennifer Siegel's Endgame: Britain, Russia, and the Final Struggle for Central Asia (2002) too easily, he succeeds on the whole in providing a balanced narrative of events on a documentary base of unprecedented breadth.

Yet for all the accomplishments of his monograph, Sergeev too often is unable to transcend the limitations of his framework, committing the same errors as his predecessors. Throughout, there is a decidedly unserious attitude towards non-European actors, as befits component parts of a “chessboard” (18) or “playfield” (212). This lack of seriousness finds its expression in two principal ways. First, discussions of the culture and politics of the various “playfields” of the Great Game are at times so convoluted or inaccurate as to make the specialist reader cringe; in a discussion of Eastern Turkestan we are told, for example, that “Curiously enough, a minor ethnic group of the Chinese, the so-called Dungans, adopted Islam and later joined Muslim insurgents in their struggle against the Qings” (133). This is a serious oversimplification of both Hui ethnicity and the course of events in Eastern Turkestan in the 1860s. Second, with rare exceptions, the reader is given only a caricatured understanding of the motivations of non-Europeans (rulers and ruled) in shaping Russo-British relations, whether in periods of détente or expansion. Instead we are told, distastefully, of “traditional despotic regimes” (6) and “decadent Oriental states” (23) that were not integrated into a global system before they became objects of the Great Game. To thoroughly study this issue would have presented extraordinary linguistic demands, untenable for a broad monograph like Sergeev's; still, it would have been possible to give some understanding of non-European factors in Russo-British relations, if only through secondary sources, had the author deemed it sufficiently important.

Moreover, beginning this study through the frame of Russo-British relations means that Sergeev tends to privilege his actors' strategic motivations at times when it is not clear that the evidence supports such an interpretation. Two examples pertaining to the Russian conquest of Central Asia may suffice here. Sergeev objects to the view of D. I. Romanovskii, briefly the military governor of Turkestan oblast' (province), that the years 1854–67 were the most vital period in the conquest of Central Asia on the weak grounds that “it was in the decade of 1864–73 when the conquest really took place” (106). Romanovskii's view implies that factors internal to the Russian Empire were most important to the decision to move the lines forward—a perspective that needs to be taken seriously. Similarly, Sergeev argues that the tsarist minister of war, D. A. Miliutin, sought to occupy the Central Asian khanates of Khiva, Bukhara, and Khoqand to offer a threat to Britain's Indian territories (98). His evidence for this assertion comes not from archival documentation, but from Michael Edwardes's Playing the Great Game (1975). Following in Edwardes's footsteps, Sergeev apparently either did not seek, or did not consider important, evidence that Miliutin was primarily motivated by factors other than geopolitics, evidence available in archives where he worked. Here the more recent work of Alexander Morrison (“‘Nechto eroticheskoe,’ ‘courir après l'ombre’? Logistical Imperatives and the Fall of Tashkent, 1859–1865,” Central Asian Survey 33, no. 2 [2014]: 153–69) offers a useful comparison. Both scholars worked in the Russian State Military-Historical Archive's collection on military actions in Central Asia, but Morrison's conclusions are dramatically different.

Sergeev's monograph is useful as a comprehensive and synthetic account of some aspects of Russo-British relations in Asia. Despite the limitations of its framework, it will be a necessary reference for future scholars who wish to transcend it. Both the author and the Woodrow Wilson Center deserve praise for making his findings available to an anglophone audience. But ultimately, it is difficult for even the most dogged empirical research to escape the trap of a question badly put.