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As for Pretorius, invited north to aid the Sotho king Moshoeshoe, he founded a new South African (later Transvaal) Republic, while other Voortrekkers created the Orange Free State. When Pretorius died, his son Marthinus was elected president of Transvaal – its capital named Pretoria after his father – and later of the Free State too, all the while hunting elephants for ivory, rustling and wrangling cattle and seizing African slaves. Soon the discovery of diamonds and gold would spark another tournament of power.

Further north, in Egypt, slavery was still essential to the project of Mehmed Ali, who had hired French officers to train an army of enslaved Georgians and Sudanese, conscripted Egyptian fellahin and Turkish officers and rebuilt his fleet. Infuriated that the sultan had lost him his fleet at Navarino, he demanded Syria in return. When it was not forthcoming, he seized his chance to conquer an empire.

MEHMED ALI’S GAMBIT: NAPOLEON OF THE EAST

On 31 October 1831, Mehmed Ali’s son Ibrahim invaded Syria, seizing Jerusalem and Damascus. ‘If the sultan says I can keep Damascus,’ mused Mehmed Ali, backed by Louis Philippe, ‘I’ll stop there … and if not, who knows?’ Then, in May 1832, Ibrahim crossed the Taurus Mountains into the Turkish heartland. As Mehmed Ali considered placing Ibrahim on the throne of Constantinople, Sultan Mahmud granted Egypt to him and ceded Syria. As Ibrahim moved closer to the Great City, the sultan appealed to his ancestral enemy, Tsar Nicholas, who sent an army to defend Constantinople, and in July he accepted a Russian protectorate. Nicholas claimed he wished to preserve the Ottoman empire: ‘If it falls, I don’t desire its debris. I need nothing.’ No one believed him.

In May 1838, Mehmed Ali, who now ruled Sudan, Arabia, Syria, Israel and most of Anatolia, declared independence from Constantinople. Sultan Mahmud had recently eliminated the overmighty Janissaries – massacring 5,000 of them – and hired western officers to train his own modern army.^* But now, at Nezib, Ibrahim routed the new Ottoman army and advanced on the Great City. Encouraged by his evangelical son-in-law Lord Shaftesbury, and the campaigns of Montefiore, both believers in a Jewish Return to Zion, Palmerston dispatched a British consul to Jerusalem to protect Jews, long the target of persecution. He was determined to save the Ottoman, undermine the Romanov and stop Mehmed Ali. In July 1840, Palmerston threatened Louis Philippe, Mehmed Ali’s backer, with war and rescued the Ottomans, sending in the fleet to bombard Beirut and Acre: Mehmed Ali accepted hereditary rule in Egypt and Sudan in return for withdrawing from Syria, Türkiye, Crete and Arabia.

Further east, Lord Cupid faced a crisis of Britain’s own making in Afghanistan, where the grandsons of the great king, Durrani, ruined their empire by fighting each other, allowing another Pashtun clan, the Barakzais, led by Dost Mohammad, to seize Kabul. Durrani’s deposed grandson, Shah Shuja, went into Indian exile.

Palmerston and his Indian proconsuls monitored Russian advances in central Asia. The buffer states between the two empires – the khanates of Bukhara and Khiva, Persia, Afghanistan and the Sikh kingdom – became the arena for a clandestine tournament, the so-called Great Game, in which daring Britons and Russians, often in local disguise, tried to recruit the rulers. Russia backed a Persian attack on Herat while a Russian force tried to take the khanate of Khiva (Uzbekistan). Britain backed the Sikh maharaja Ranjit Singh, inveterate enemy of the Afghans.^* The Afghan amir Dost Mohammad resisted British demands to hand over control of foreign policy. Exaggerating his defiance, manipulated by the Sikh maharaja, the Indian governor-general Lord Auckland lied to London, demanding an invasion to install Shah Shuja when he should simply have negotiated a security arrangement. Palmerston reluctantly approved.

In February 1839, the Army of the Indus – 55,000 strong, with British officers and Indian sepoys, aided by Sikh troops – marched on Kabul, where, in August, Shah Shuja Durrani was acclaimed shah. Withdrawing most of the British forces, Auckland left 8,000 to back Durrani, their number reduced further when the new British prime minister, Robert Peel, cut costs. In Kabul, the sexual liaisons of Afghan women and British troops outraged the Afghans as much as the cruelties of Shah Shuja, regarded as a puppet of the British, and of the Sikhs, hated since Durrani’s Punjab wars. Tensions were further aggravated when a British soldier raped an Afghan girl. Around Kandahar, the Ghilzai launched a jihad against the British.