Some questions in a country’s history refuse to be settled; they return in each generation dressed in new clothes. For Afghanistan, one of the oldest is the question of recognition: whether the outside world will deal with an Afghan government on Afghan terms, or only on its own. It is a strikingly present question. Five years after a twenty-year foreign military intervention ended, the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate holds power in Kabul, having outlasted the coalition arrayed against it and governing the country on its own terms, yet it remains, in the reckoning of most capitals, formally unrecognised. Much of that isolation is self-inflicted, and much of the outrage behind it is justified, above all over the Emirate’s restrictions on the education and public life of women and girls. But beneath the argument over particular policies runs an older and more stubborn one: the recurring question of how, and on what terms, the wider world deals with whoever holds power in Kabul. The impasse can seem unprecedented. It is not. The first time an Afghan ruler asked a great power to receive him as a sovereign equal, the answer was also no. That was in the summer of 1895, and the great power was Britain.

In the late nineteenth century, Afghanistan was less a country left to itself than a square on a board that other people were playing. Wedged between British India to the southeast and Tsarist Russia to the north, it was cast in the role of “buffer state”, a status that was at once a shield and a shackle. It bought the Afghan ruler a measure of sovereignty while binding him to coordinates drawn in London, Calcutta, and St. Petersburg.

For the British, whose imperial lifeline ran through India, Afghanistan’s nearness to the vulnerable northwest frontier was a standing anxiety. Twice they had invaded, in 1839 and again in 1878, and twice they had learned the limits of force. The mountains offered no easy victory, the tribes no submission, the terrain no stable occupation. So the empire changed its method rather than its aim. Where administration had failed, courtship might succeed: alliance by subsidy, influence by ceremony, and the careful management of a proud neighbor who could not be conquered but might be kept friendly.

It is against this backdrop that one of the more remarkable episodes of Anglo-Afghan relations unfolded in the summer of 1895 and the first time a member of the Afghan ruling house travelled to Britain, and the first serious attempt by an Afghan ruler to open direct diplomatic channels with the Crown.

Men gathered in the grand palace of Shah Shuja ul-Mulk, in Kabul's Bala Hissar.

A journey the Amir could not make

Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, the “Iron Amir” who had unified Afghanistan under a famously ruthless central rule, had been invited to England for a state visit, an idea floated after the Durand Agreement of November 1893 fixed the frontier between British India and Afghanistan. A visit by the Amir himself would have set a seal on that settlement. But Abdur Rahman was around fifty, ailing with gout, and wary of leaving a kingdom he governed by sheer will. His eldest son and designated successor, Habibullah, was needed in Kabul. So the Amir sent his second son, Sardar Nasrullah Khan.

Amir Abdur Rahman Khan, also known as the Iron Amir

The choice was pointed. Sending a son rather than coming himself was, in the reading of later historians, something between a courtesy and a calculated snub: an assertion that the Amir dealt with the British as an equal, not as a summoned vassal. The delegation that left India in April 1895 numbered more than ninety people: Afghan nobles, physicians, religious scholars for the observance of prayers, and a British-Indian escort that was itself strikingly multi-ethnic. They sailed from Bombay on the Indian government steamer Clive.

Who was Nasrullah Khan?

Nasrullah was about twenty, born in Samarkand in 1874 during his father’s years of exile in Russian Turkestan. He was tenacious, deeply pious, and closely tied to the clerical establishment — the ulema — and he would remain, throughout his life, an anchor for the conservative, Islamic current in Afghan politics, in contrast to the more reform-minded reign his brother Habibullah would later lead.

To British observers he was a study in contrasts. One correspondent described him as of “decidedly Eastern” appearance yet handsome and earnest, adding, in a line that says as much about the observer as the observed, that in full English uniform he might pass for an Englishman. The Shahzada was reported to have confided that he wished to be like an Englishman in everything but his religion. Not every notice was flattering: a Cumberland reporter dismissed him as a bored and impassive youth. The press, in other words, could not decide whether it was watching an ally, a curiosity, or a mirror.

His Highness Crown Prince Nasrullah Khan

Arrival and the first receptions

The party reached Spithead aboard the Clive on 23 May and landed at Portsmouth the following day to a royal welcome: a twenty-one-gun salute from HMS Gibraltar, a guard of honour, and the assembled dignitaries of the port. From there a special train carried the visitors to London, where Lord Carrington, the Lord Chamberlain, received them on the Queen’s behalf; also present was George Curzon, the future viceroy.

On 27 May, Nasrullah was received privately by Queen Victoria at Windsor, where he reportedly made a favourable impression with his bearing and his well-chosen words. He confined himself to thanking Her Majesty for the kindness shown him; conspicuously, he did not raise the true business of his mission. A round of set-piece events followed in quick succession: a state ball at Buckingham Palace on 30 May, the Royal Military Tournament on 1 June, and a review of troops at Aldershot on 5 June.

Woking, then the Guildhall

On 4 June the Shahzada and a large retinue travelled to Woking, where they were received by Dr. Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner at the Oriental Institute before proceeding to the mosque for the Eid (Beiram) prayers. Nasrullah donated £500 in his father’s name. The scene struck at least one correspondent, who contrasted the devotion on display with what he took to be the hurried, half-embarrassed religiosity of his own countrymen, before recording, with some astonishment, the Cockney crowd’s conviction that the visitors were “worshipping the sun.”

Two days later, on 6 June, came one of the visit’s high points: the Shahzada’s formal entry into the Guildhall as guest of the City of London. He left Dorchester House, rented for the delegation at considerable expense, in state carriages drawn by four horses, with an escort of the Horse Guards Blue and his own mounted bodyguard, and passed cheering crowds at Trafalgar Square. Inside, some eight hundred guests awaited. Among the British-Indian dignitaries present was Sir Lepel Griffin, the official who had negotiated the recognition of Abdur Rahman after the Second Anglo-Afghan War.

The speeches ran to form, extolling Anglo-Afghan friendship. The Chief Magistrate stressed that Afghanistan’s goodwill mattered because India was, in the imperial idiom of the day, the most valued gem in the British crown, a possession loyal subjects would make any sacrifice to keep. Nasrullah answered with poise. Mutual friendship, he said, now rested on two firm foundations: past misunderstandings had been converted into goodwill, and the frontier between England and Afghanistan had been demarcated “so that neither party can transgress his own frontier, except in friendly interchange of visits.” The City presented him a gold casket containing its address of welcome.

The industrial tour

From 8 to 19 June, the mission toured Britain’s industrial heartland (Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Newcastle, and Leeds), and here the visit’s underlying purpose showed most plainly. The British hoped that exposure to their factories and arsenals would translate into Afghan orders for British goods.

Nasrullah’s own interest ran overwhelmingly to weapons. In Birmingham he toured the Small Arms Factory, Kynoch’s Ammunition Works, and a cotton mill, and bought a number of military and sporting rifles; when the schedule threatened to bury him in ceremony, he was quoted as saying he had not come all the way from Kabul for a luncheon. At Newcastle he watched the stages of gun-making at Elswick and observed the firing of a torpedo; near Silloth he studied artillery practice on the Armstrong range and was reported especially taken with howitzers and mountain guns.

His piety travelled with him. In Liverpool he visited the Muslim Institute founded by Sheikh Abdullah Quilliam, gave £2,500 in gold on the spot, and recommended that Afghan students be sent there. When the Sheikh knelt to kiss his hand, Nasrullah is said to have stopped him: “Nay; it is for me to kiss the hand of the sheik. Religion is before all dignities.”

The royal audience and the exchange of gifts

On 2 July, Nasrullah paid his official visit to Queen Victoria and presented the letter from his father, encased in a solid-gold casket emblazoned with lapis lazuli and set with diamond stars and crescents so arranged that they could be detached and worn as ornaments. The Afghan gifts (woven shawls, furs, and large pieces of lapis lazuli from the mountains of Badakhshan) were valued at some twenty thousand pounds. In return the Queen and the British government furnished, among much else, a silver tea service, a chronometer watch, celestial and terrestrial globes, a silver-gilt sabre, sporting rifles, and such marvels of the age as a microscope, a camera, and a barometer.

The next evening, 3 July, the Shahzada attended a grand ball at the Imperial Institute, where Eduard Strauss conducted his orchestra in a newly billed “Shahzada March” composed in the prince’s honour, a moment in which the machinery of Victorian high culture briefly rearranged itself around an Afghan guest. Further honours followed through July: a visit to the House of Lords, an outing to the Greenwich Observatory on 8 July, a second state ball at Buckingham on 15 July, and the Shahzada’s own reception at Dorchester House on 18 July for some seventeen hundred guests. Both Nasrullah and his brother Habibullah were later made Knights Grand Cross of St Michael and St George.

The Shahzadah at the State Ball, Buckingham Palace

The real purpose and the refusal

Beneath the banquets lay a concrete objective. The Amir wanted permission to establish a permanent Afghan legation in London: a “trustworthy person who would always see with his own eyes” and carry the Amir’s letters directly to the Crown, rather than routing Afghan business through the Viceroy in India. For Abdur Rahman this was a question of standing: recognition as a sovereign state dealing with London on its own terms, not as a dependency filtered through Calcutta.

At the farewell audience on 20 July, Nasrullah conveyed this “small request.” The Queen deferred it to her ministers, and the answer, when it came, was no. Lord George Hamilton, the Secretary of State for India, replied that the existing arrangement, Afghan affairs handled through the better-informed Government of India, was the more convenient one. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, was blunter still in a later letter: until a British officer could safely live and travel in Afghanistan, it would be impossible to receive an Afghan envoy in England. In short, the asymmetry cut only one way. The mission had failed in its central aim, and the Amir took the polite refusal as a personal affront: a guest, he complained, should never be sent home in despair.

Afghan agency behind the ceremony

It would be easy to read Nasrullah as a decorative guest carried along by an imperial pageant. The evidence suggests otherwise. His conduct was governed by the same hard realism that defined his father’s reign: he accepted gifts and observed protocol while giving nothing away politically. Modern scholarship drawing on an Afghan member’s own journal goes further, suggesting that although Nasrullah was privately impressed by British military power, he deliberately instructed his companions to remain impassive, to withhold the awe the whole spectacle was designed to produce. The receptions and reviews were a British performance; the Afghan reticence was a performance too, and a purposeful one.

Afterlives

Nasrullah’s story did not end with the voyage home. He left England on 3 September 1895 and returned to Afghanistan via Paris, Rome, and Naples, reaching Karachi in October, a circuit reckoned at the time to be the longest journey ever made by an Afghan.

In the decades that followed he became a leading figure in the conservative, clerical, and anti-British current at court. During the First World War he pressed, against his brother Habibullah’s policy of neutrality, for Afghanistan to make common cause with the Ottoman-German camp and to exploit tribal unrest along the frontier against British India. When Habibullah was assassinated in 1919, Nasrullah was briefly proclaimed Amir, only to be swept aside within days by his nephew Amanullah, who went on to win full Afghan independence in the Third Anglo-Afghan War. Imprisoned and accused of complicity in his brother’s death, the prince who had once been fêted at Queen Victoria’s court died in captivity.

More Than a Footnote

Nasrullah Khan’s mission was not a footnote but a hinge. It was the first time Afghanistan sent a member of its ruling house to Britain, and the first sustained attempt to convert the buffer-state relationship into something like normal diplomacy: an embassy, a direct line, recognition as a sovereign equal. That attempt failed, and the manner of its failure is itself instructive: Britain was glad to spend fifty thousand pounds entertaining an Afghan prince, but would not concede the one thing the Amir actually wanted.

What the episode captures, better than any battle, is the texture of imperial relations in the age of the Great Game. Power was exercised not only through soldiers and frontiers, but through receptions, gifts, waltzes, and the choreography of prestige. Notably, it also captures the other side of that encounter: a small state and its envoy navigating the pageant with open eyes, accepting the hospitality without surrendering the sovereignty. The guns stayed silent, but the contest over Afghanistan’s independence went on, waged, for one summer, in ballrooms and palaces rather than mountain passes.

It would be too neat to fold that summer into the present. The recognition withheld from Kabul today is withheld for different reasons: Nasrullah and his father were refused by an empire guarding its own strategic advantage, whereas the Islamic Emirate’s isolation is bound up with its own conduct and the terms on which it took power, above all its treatment of women. The questions are not the same, and the legitimacy the current rulers seek rests on foundations Abdur Rahman never claimed. Nevertheless 1895 is a reminder that the predicament itself is not new. Long before the Taliban, an Afghan government stood before the dominant power of its day, asked to be dealt with on its own terms, and was sent home with a courteous refusal. The costumes change; the question of recognition, and of who sets its price, keeps returning.

Acknowledgments and Sources

This essay draws primarily on Ludwig W. Adamec’s documentary study of the visit and its press coverage, supplemented by more recent scholarship and reference works.

Primary study

Ludwig W. Adamec, Mission of an Afghan Prince to London: Nasrullah Khan’s Visit to Britain as Reflected in the Press, Occasional Paper No. 33 (New York: The Afghanistan Forum, University of Arizona, 1994). ISSN 0889-7883.

Further readings:

R. D. McChesney, An Afghan Prince in Victorian England: Race, Class, and Gender in an Afghan-Anglo Imperial Encounter (London: I.B. Tauris, 2024) — the fullest modern account, drawing on both British and Afghan sources, including a journal kept by a senior member of the Afghan delegation.
Ludwig W. Adamec, Afghanistan, 1900–1923: A Diplomatic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967).
Vartan Gregorian, The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan: Politics of Reform and Modernization, 1880–1946 (Stanford University Press, 1969).
Sir Percy Sykes, A History of Afghanistan, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1940).
Stephen Wheeler, The Ameer Abdur Rahman (London, 1895).

Contemporary memoirs by Britons at the Afghan court (cited in Adamec)

John Alfred Gray, At the Court of the Amir (London, 1895/1901).
Lillias Hamilton, A Vizier’s Daughter: A Tale of the Hazara War (London, 1900).
Frank Martin, Under the Absolute Amir (London, 1907).

Kabul's First Diplomatic Mission to the UK