Book Review: The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan

The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan
on amazon.com

Reader Rating: 8 of 10

Salaams! Well, I’ve been a bit out of sync on my book reviews lately, though I’ve not given up reading! This was a very interesting book about a very interesting character named Josiah Harlan. A Pennsylvania Dutch Quaker, Harlan was an incredibly colorful person who parlayed his meager educational and experiential background into some amazing opportunities to serve directly under powerful leaders and kings. His example in language acquisition is phenomenal and inspiring. Interestingly, he ended up as a northern General in the Civil War.

Check out the quite detailed reviews below, if you’re interested in more.

All for now--wes

The Man Who Would Be King: The First American in Afghanistan (Hardcover)
by Ben Macintyre "Josiah Harlan's hunt for a crown began with a letter..." (more)
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Product Details
Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 21, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN: 0374201781

From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
A lost chapter from the annals of romantic travel to the East, Josiah Harlan's exploits in 19th-century Afghanistan and modern-day Pakistan are the stuff of a rollicking boy's adventure tale. At a time when few Westerners had ever ventured into that still-troubled region of the globe, this strange Pennsylvania Quaker plotted intrigue in the court of the Afghan king in the 1830s, did a stint as governor under the Sikh Maharaja of the Punjab and found himself mixed up in the politics of the Great Game, the rivalry between czarist Russia and imperial Britain for control of Central Asia.

Harlan fancied himself a latter-day conqueror in the mold of Alexander the Great. Never a modest man, he was prone to extravagant -- if not quixotic -- gestures. In 1838, for example, high atop a mountain in the frozen vastness of the Hindu Kush, Harlan bombastically reinvented himself as an Afghan tribal chief, taking the title "Prince of Ghor, Lord of the Hazarahs." If Harlan's life sounds like something out a Kipling tale, that's partly because it is. As English writer Ben Macintyre tells us in his excellent new biography, Harlan's escapades gave Kipling the theme for one of his famous short stories (also called "The Man Who Would Be King"), a cautionary tale about two adventurers who play at being gods but suffer gruesome consequences for their hubris. Harlan's fate has been obscurity; but for Macintyre, his "unwritten half-life seemed uncannily contemporary," a prophetic counterpoint to the American campaign in Afghanistan. Macintyre's judicious portrait of this American eccentric is partly an act of redress, partly an act of recovery. A dearth of material concerning his subject hobbled his approach, although he did discover a large cache of Harlan's unpublished (and comically purple) writings. Few contemporary sources refer to Harlan; what little there are come from British documents, which, as Macintyre explains, are "conspicuously hostile." Macintyre is even-handed in his treatment of Harlan, critical of his flaws but also sympathetic and generous.

Harlan's odyssey began in romantic rejection: On an 1822 commercial mission to India on behalf of his merchant father, he got news that his fiancée had run off with another man. Devastated, Harlan vowed never to return to his home country. He passed himself off as a surgeon (he had no formal training) and worked as a doctor for the British East India Company.

But Harlan quickly grew bored with life in the British imperial service; he had wilder, more ambitious schemes for advancement. Fascinated with Alexander the Great's ancient journeys across Central Asia and reports describing Afghanistan as a mythical proving ground where one could be a prince, he set off for the western reaches of British India in 1826. Fetching up in the dusty border town of Ludiana, he found a potential means to glory in the recently deposed Afghan monarch, Shah Shujah al-Moolk. The two made a pact: Harlan would make his way to Kabul and rally the Shah's supporters against his usurper, the Dost Mohammed Khan, and make way for the Shah's triumphant return. Harlan expected a royal title for his troubles.Things, however, did not quite work out that way. Harlan spent the next several years trekking across the North West Frontier (now Pakistan) and eastern Afghanistan. Along the way, he wrote lavish descriptions of the sublime Afghan landscapes, learned fluent Persian and mastered the frightfully complex relationships between Afghan tribes. Once in Kabul, he found the Dost firmly installed, a worthy adversary who commanded respect. Harlan thought better of fomenting a revolt, and made his way back to Punjab, wherehe entered into the service of the Sikh ruler of the Punjab, Ranjit Singh, with whom he would clash.

Harlan was transformed in the course of his journeys; what began as an orientalist fantasy became something more than that. Macintyre explains: "The colonist would eventually be colonized, not merely comprehending Afghan culture more profoundly than any foreigner before him, but adopting it." At first Harlan may have been a believer in "civilized expansionism" who spoke the language of "cultural emancipation," but he eventually grew ambivalent about the price of conquest.

Ultimately, Harlan's maverick freelancing put him on a collision course with the British. After violently breaking with Ranjit Singh in 1836, Harlan became the Dost's military adviser, helping him to prepare for war against the Sikh kingdom in Punjab. Meanwhile, Britain was furiously trying to prevent the Dost from making a treaty with the Russians. But Khan's dithering only infuriated the British, who then mounted an invasion that proved disastrous both for the invader and Afghanistan.

Forced to leave his beloved Kabul in 1839, appalled by the savage tactics of the campaign, Harlan unleashed a polemical volley against Great Britain in his 1842 memoir. Far from being civilized invaders, the English brought "military despotism" and little else to the Afghans, he fumed. The book's controversial reception in Britain -- which was driven out of Afghanistan in a merciless rout that same year -- scuttled Harlan's literary career. Still, reading his potent criticisms of the heavyhanded methods of invading armies, one cannot help but think about other great powers and their entanglements in faraway places.

Reviewed by Matthew Price
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

Spotlight Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
Page After Page ... an Adventure, April 17, 2004
Reviewer:
Virgil Brown (White Oak, Texas USA) - See all my reviews
  
Ben Macintyre's biography of Josiah Harlan is an adventure page after page. Most folks who read this review will probably know the story about Harlan being the real life character behind the story by Rudyard Kipling and the movie with Sean Connery and Michael Caine.

Recently I received an email of trivia facts. One of them was that it was still legal to hunt camels in Arizona. This was supposed to be true albeit the last camel hunted in Arizona was hunted in the 1930s. In the late 1840s and 1850s Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, decided that camels might be cheaply imported in order to replace the role of horses in the Southwest desert.

Davis had taken the idea from Josiah Harlan. And it might been that the US Cavalry became the US Army Camel Corps had not Harlan misunderstood the resistance of American horses, mules, and cows to the aggressive camels. The Camel Corps was disbanded in 1863. Camels were set free in Arizona. "Harlan did not care because he had another brilliant idea." This is yet another adventure of the "man who would be king."