Propaganda through Travel Writing: Frederick Burnaby’s Contribution to the Russophobic-Turcophilic Tone in British Politics during the Great Game

Sinan Akilli

In the second half of the ninteenth century, British-Russian relations were defined by war and conflict, due to the former’s desire to check and balance the latter’s increasingly strong ambitions in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. In what has come to be known as the Great Game, the British tried to prevent essentially a possible Russian invasion of India. Such an invasion could be attained by the Russians either by the occupation of territory in Central Asia, thereby taking the land route to India, or by expansion into the Mediterranean Sea and from there to the Indian Ocean via the Suez Canal. The British response to the threat on the land route was to try and create spheres of influence in the region before the Russians did, and, at the Mediterranean front, to support the territorial integrity of the weakened Ottoman Empire against Russian expansionism. Concurrent to these political developments, the genre of imperial adventure/travel writing was gaining popularity in Britain. Especially the adventure/travel accounts by pro-imperialist writers were highly popular among a reading audience which was expanding beyond class boundaries. Therefore, in effect, this vein of travel writing also functioned as a channel of propaganda for pro-imperialist political views, especially those of Disrealite Tories in the 1870’s. Frederic Burnaby, who was an officer of the British imperial army, a traveller-adventurer and a writer, was foremost among the pro-imperialist figures who propagated a Russophobic and Turcophilic tone in British popular politics at that time by his two accounts of travel: A Ride to Khiva: Travels and Adventures in Central Asia (1876) and On Horseback through Asia Minor (1877). In this paper I will briefly explore and illustrate the discursive startegies deployed by Burnaby to create a Russophobic-Turcophilic effect in these two works and show how they may have contributed to popular political propaganda during the Great Game.