The Mulberry Empire

by Philip Hensher


The Mulberry Empire tells in lingering detail a story of how the 1839 British occupation of Afghanistan came to happen, and then with chilling expeditiousness, how it met disaster. This novel about the First Afghan War is more a political than a military story, and more a story of men and women at high society's margins than of generals, statesmen and royalty.

Perhaps the most direct inference in the novel about the debacle's origin occurs in the wake of a social evening attended by Alexander Burnes, explorer and author of a book abut Kabul. "In the Duchesse de Neaud, the infection represented by Burnes's book had found a fertile carrier, one might say, since she passed on the main features of the contagion without proving profoundly susceptible to the virus itself. Like those wealthy invalids who complain bitterly of an influenza while all the time suffering far less than those to whom they will pass on the illness, she made a great deal of noise for a season on the subject of the central Asian principalities, and, having stirred up a great deal of pained opposition and concern, was satisfied to forget the subject..." 2002, 476 pages.

More info on The Mulberry Empire from Powell's Books


Other historical novels about invasions of Afghanistan:

Flashman by George MacDonald Fraser; in which Flashman participates in the First Afghan War More info

Kim by Rudyard Kipling; Kipling's classic about British and Russian rivalry in Central Asia: the "Great Game" More info

The Afghan Campaign by Steven Pressfield; about Alexander the Great's central Asian campaign More info

Nonfiction about the British in Afghanistan:

Beyond the Khyber Pass: The Road to British Disaster in the First Afghan War by John H. Waller

The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk More info

A Journal of the First Afghan War by Florentia Sale, a diary kept by a British officer's wife who appears as a major character in The Mulberry Empire More info


Back to Novels of Nineteenth Century Europe

Back to Directory of Book Reviews




Enjoy this page? Please pay it forward. Here's how...

Would you prefer to share this page with others by linking to it?

  1. Click on the HTML link code below.
  2. Copy and paste it, adding a note of your own, into your blog, a Web page, forums, a blog comment, your Facebook account, or anywhere that someone would find this page valuable.