Abdur Rahman Khan GCSI was Amir of Afghanistan from 1880 to his death in 1901. He is known for uniting the country after years of internal fighting and negotiation of the Durand Line Agreement with British India.
European influence in Afghanistan has been present in the country since the Victorian era, when the competing imperial powers of Britain and Russia contested for control over Afghanistan as part of the Great Game.
Major-General Sir William Nott was a British military officer of the Bengal Army, East India Company in British India.
Sir William Hay Macnaghten, 1st Baronet, was a British civil servant in India, who played a major part in the First Anglo-Afghan War.
Emir Dost Mohammad Khan Barakzai, nicknamed the Amir-i Kabir, was the founder of the Barakzai dynasty and one of the prominent rulers of Afghanistan during the First Anglo-Afghan War. With the decline of the Durrani dynasty, he became the Emir of Afghanistan in 1826. He was the 11th son of Payendah Khan, chief of the Barakzai Pashtuns, who was killed in 1799 by King Zaman Shah Durrani.
The Second Anglo-Afghan War was a military conflict fought between the British Raj and the Emirate of Afghanistan from 1878 to 1880, when the latter was ruled by Sher Ali Khan of the Barakzai dynasty, the son of former Emir Dost Mohammad Khan. The war was part of the Great Game between the British and Russian empires.
Colonel Sir Robert Warburton was an Anglo-Afghan soldier and administrator. Half-Afghan and proficient in Pashtu, he served for many years as British political officer in charge of the Khyber Pass, a region of strategic importance to British India. He helped maintain peace with the Afridis who rose in revolt eighteen years after his retirement.
The Treaty of Gandamak officially ended the first phase of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Mohammad Yaqub Khan ceded various frontier areas as well as Afghanistan's control of its foreign affairs to Britain.
Field Marshal Sir Donald Martin Stewart, 1st Baronet, was a senior Indian Army officer. He fought on the Aka Khel Expedition to the North-West Frontier in 1854, took part in the response to the Indian Rebellion in 1857 and, after serving as commandant of the penal settlement of the Andaman Islands, fought in the Second Anglo-Afghan War as Commander of the Quetta Army. In that role, he advanced through the Bolan Pass to Quetta, and then on to Kandahar in January 1879. In March 1880, he made a difficult march from Kandahar to Kabul, fighting on the way the Battle of Ahmed Khel and Battle of Arzu, and then holding supreme military and civil command in northern Afghanistan. He became Commander-in-Chief, India in April 1881 and a member of the Council of the Secretary of State for India in 1893.
Mohammad Yaqub Khan was Emir of Afghanistan from February 21 to October 12, 1879. He was the son of the previous ruler, Sher Ali Khan.
Eldred Pottinger was an Anglo-Indian army officer and diplomat. In 1837 he happened to be in Herat in Afghanistan to gather intelligence on the area when the Persian army, supported by Russians, laid siege to the city. He helped the Afghan commander repulse the Persians, and was subsequently dubbed the "Hero of Herat" by British historians.
Gandamak is a village of Afghanistan located between Kabul and Jalalabad, 35 miles (56 km) from Jalalabad on the old road to Kabul.
Field Marshal Sir Neville Bowles Chamberlain was a distinguished British military officer in British India. He served in the Bengal Army and saw action in the First Anglo-Afghan War, Gwalior campaign, Second Anglo-Sikh War, Indian Rebellion and Second Anglo-Afghan War. He later became Commander-in-chief of the Madras Army.
Bala Hissar is an ancient fortress located in the south of the old city of Kabul, Afghanistan. The estimated date of construction is around the 5th century AD. Bala Hissar sits to the south of the modern city centre at the tail end of the Kuh-e-Sherdarwaza Mountain. The Walls of Kabul, which are 20 feet (6.1 m) high and 12 feet (3.7 m) thick, start at the fortress and follow the mountain ridge in a sweeping curve down to the river. It sports a set of gates for access to the fortress. The Kōh-e Shēr Darwāzah mountain is behind the fort.
The Emirate of Afghanistan, known as the Emirate of Kabul until 1855, was an emirate in Central Asia and South Asia that encompassed present-day Afghanistan and parts of present-day Pakistan. The emirate emerged from the Durrani Empire, when Dost Mohammad Khan, the founder of the Barakzai dynasty in Kabul, prevailed.
The Kabul Field Force was a field force created in September 1879 during the Second Anglo-Afghan War, under the command of General Frederick Roberts. It combined British Army and British Indian Army regiments, and initially numbered around 7,500 men, but later reached about 14,000.
The following lists events from 1879 in Afghanistan.
The siege of the British Residency in Kabul was a military engagement of the Second Anglo-Afghan War. The British resident, Sir Louis Cavagnari and his escort were massacred after an 8-hour siege by mutinous Afghan troops inside their Residency in Kabul. This event triggered the second phase of the war, during which an Anglo-Indian army invaded Afghanistan and captured Kabul.
Bilateral relations between Afghanistan and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland span a long and eventful history, dating back to the United Kingdom's Company rule in India, the British-Russian rivalry in Central Asia, and the border between modern Afghanistan and British India. There has been an Afghan embassy in London since 1922 though there was no accredited Afghan ambassador from 1981 to 2001.
