Sir Robert Warburton (1842-99) was a British army officer who served for 18 years as the political officer, or warden, of the Khyber Pass, the most important of the mountain passes connecting Afghanistan and present-day Pakistan. He was born in Afghanistan, the son of a British officer and his wife, a noble Afghan woman who was the niece of Amir Dost Mohammad Khan. Warburton was educated in England, commissioned an officer, and served at posts in British India and in Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia) before being appointed, in 1879, to his post in the Khyber. Home to the fiercely independent Pushtun Afridi people who resisted external control, the pass frequently had been blocked by the Afridis or by fighting among the hill tribes. Warburton is credited with keeping the frontier peaceful and the pass open, mainly though diplomacy rather than force. He drew upon his Afghan background and his fluent Persian and Pushto to gradually win the trust of tribesmen whose traditions made them deeply suspicious of outsiders. In August 1897, one month after Warburton's retirement, unrest broke out among the Afridis, who seized the pass and held it for several months. Warburton was called back into service and participated in the Tirah expedition of 1897-98, in which Anglo-Indian forces reopened the pass. Warburton was especially proud of the role played in the expedition by the Khyber Rifles, a paramilitary force recruited from Afridi tribesmen that he had raised and commanded. Eighteen Years in the Khyber, 1879-1898 is Warburton's account of his education and career. It touches upon virtually every individual and event that played a role in relations between Afghanistan and British India during the last quarter of the 19th century. Long in poor health, Warburton returned to England and died before the book was completed. Posthumously published, it is illustrated with a number of striking photographs and includes a detailed fold-out map of the Khyber.

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1900 edition. Excerpt: ... shelter to Kaddam, then to Gudr, villages of the Kuki Khel Afridis, but they had requested him to move on. Then he proceeded to the Mullagoris, and they had asked him to quit also. He had therefore come in to Cantonments, and made up his mind to kill the first Englishman he could lay his hands upon. He was tried under the Frontier Outrage Act by the Commissioner of the Peshawar Division and sentenced. Between 1882 and the close of 1895 there were four Ghazi outrages at Peshawar; of these two, Fulford and Stevens, were fatal, a soldier of the Devon Regiment, wounded at very close quarters, had a wonderful recovery, and the case that I have attempted to describe above was the only attack in which the unsuspecting victim escaped all injury. I am now coming to the most interesting part of my command or charge in the Khyber Range. It was the month of November 1887, and Peshawar was exceedingly full and very gay, for Lord Dufferin, Viceroy and Governor-General of India, and Lady Dufferin, with all their staff, Lord Roberts, Commander in Chief in India, with the Head Quarters Staff, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Panjab, with his secretaries, were there, and numerous visitors from all parts of India had thronged in to witness the darbar and share in whatever amusements and pleasures might be going on. The darbar took place on November 25, and, like all such functions, was an exceedingly brilliant affair, representatives from all the different tribes on the borders of Hazara, Peshawar, Kohat, being in attendance, and they were each in turn brought up and introduced to Lord Dufferin. I have often wondered what the trans-border hill-man thought of these darbars, and in what light he considered them, when the pageant was over. A darbar as we have...

With the exception of two short periods of direct British intervention during the Anglo-Afghan Wars of 1839-42 and 1878-80, the history of nineteenth-century Afghanistan has received little attention from western scholars. This study seeks to shift the focus of debate from the geostrategic concern with Afghanistan as the bone of contention between imperial Russian and British interests to a thorough investigation of the sociopolitical circumstances prevailing within the country. On the basis of unpublished British documents and works by Afghan historians, it lays the groundwork for a better understanding of the political mechanisms at work during the early Muhammadzai era by analysing them both from the viewpoint of the center and the pierphery.