The Man Who Would Be King

"The title is taken from the Kipling novel of the same name, in which a Westerner goes to somewhere like Afghanistan and is made king. The idea for the story came at least in part from Josiah Harlan, the first American in Afghanistan. He served as a general in the pay of the Afghan amir Dost Muhammad in the 1830s until the British invaded Afghanistan and expelled him. He was very anti the British and they later did their best to discredit his writings by labelling him a liar and braggart. What this book shows are a couple of things. Harlan claimed that he was offered the kingship of Central Afghanistan, which his critics said proved he was a fabulist. But Macintyre managed to go back to Harlan’s family home in Pennsylvania where he actually found the original Persian document that made the offer and was signed by the tribal leaders of the region. So it turned out he wasn’t lying. His papers also showed what a wild place the Afghan borderlands were in the early 19th century. The British hadn’t yet controlled the Punjab and the Sikhs were rising under Rangit Singh. Josiah Harlan was one of many Westerners who went to work for Indian rulers who used them to modernise their armies. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter He first began in the pay of the exiled Afghan ruler Shah Shuja, who gave him money and an army to go to Afghanistan and recover his throne. The army falls apart but Harlan goes to Afghanistan alone where he meets Shuja’s rival Dost Muhammad. He likes Dost better and, keeping Shuja’s money, decides to work for the Sikhs. He becomes governor of Sind and helps the Sikhs repulse an Afghan attack on Peshawar. Falling out with the Sikhs, he joins with Dost Muhammad – no hard feelings – and becomes his right-hand man. Because Harlan is living with all these cultures and serving in the palaces of their ruler, it is a wonderful picture of what it was like at the time. Expatriates of all types – French, Irish, Scottish and Italian – were working, at high wages, to thwart British ambitions in India. As the first American in Afghanistan he is very unusual. He crossed the Hindu Kush in command of an Afghan army but put up an American flag and made everyone salute it. They probably didn’t know what flag it was but they did it! Of course his American relatives must have been equally puzzled. Harlan came from an old Quaker family in Pennsylvania, so the army business did not run in the family, and they must have wondered where all this money being sent to them was coming from. This is the type of thing that if you were a novelist your editor would ask you to tone it down a bit – but it really happened. September 16, 2018. Updated: January 26, 2022 Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books (or even just what you say about them) please email us at [email protected]"